Unlikely Allies Read online

  That is not to say that the Ohio Company had no historical significance other than building a few forts and settlements. In 1753, Virginia governor Dinwiddie, who had also invested in Lee’s Ohio Company, was concerned by reports of French forces occupying land that Parliament had granted to the company. He dispatched a twenty-one-year-old surveyor named George Washington with six men to find the French military camp and ask them to leave. When the French refused, the Virginia House of Burgesses sent Washington, who had no military experience, and a force of 300 men to confront the French. Washington established a make-shift stockade, which he named “Fort Necessity.” The French dispatched a small patrol of 32 men to negotiate with Washington, but the young commander could not speak French, and his Indian allies, who understood French but did not care about diplomatic niceties, proceeded to massacre and scalp the French commander and his men. French forces from Fort Duquesne retaliated against Washington and killed more than one-third of his force before compelling him to surrender. Ironically, Washington’s first retreat occurred on July 4, 1754. Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity became the opening battle of the Seven Years’ War, which was waged in Europe and the Americas and which Americans call the “French and Indian War.”

  At the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British wanted to avoid future tensions with the Indian tribes. King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that annulled all of the colonies’ western land claims, reserved all the land west of the Allegheny Mountains for the Indian tribes, and prohibited colonial settlements or land purchases. The king’s proclamation called a halt to westward expansion. It appeared to put an end to the Lee family’s dream of settling the Ohio Valley. But almost immediately, the Board of Trade agreed to grant some limited licenses for western settlements.

  By then, Virginian planter John Mercer and his family had wrested control of the Ohio Company from the Lees. The Mercers submitted a new petition for a land grant. The Lees and the Mercers agreed to send the eldest Mercer son, George, to London to petition the crown for an exception from the king’s ban on settling western lands. For two years George Mercer sought audiences with the British government to obtain a new land grant, but he was unsuccessful. Without the land grant, the Ohio Company and the Lee family faced a dim financial future, and the Lee brothers bitterly blamed the Mercers for this failure. They were determined to regain control of the company and obtain the land grant at all costs.

  In 1765, the British Parliament issued the Stamp Act requiring colonists to purchase stamps from British agents to authenticate certain kinds of documents. The stamps were essentially a tax on transactions. As a concession to the colonists, the prime minister appointed a number of Americans as stamp distributors, effectively granting them the power to earn sizable commissions on the sale of stamps. Both Franklin and Richard Henry Lee sought to be appointed stamp distributors, but both were denied. George Mercer, still in London representing the Ohio Company, was appointed as the stamp distributor for Virginia, and in this new official capacity he returned to Virginia in October 1765.

  This was an opportunity for the Lees to humiliate the Mercers and eliminate them as competitors for the land. Richard Henry Lee, who was still smarting over being rejected for the position himself, now denounced Mercer as “an execrable monster, who with parricidal heart and hands, hath concern in the ruin of his native country.” No doubt his commission as stamp distributor for Virginia would have significantly contributed to his family’s income, and he was especially disappointed to lose the position to a member of the Mercer family. Richard Henry, untroubled by his own hypocrisy, led a demonstration against Mercer as an agent of British taxation in which the crowd, composed largely of Lee’s own slaves, pulled a hangman’s cart carrying an effigy of Mercer with signs reading, “Money is our God” and “Slavery I love!” The slaves were dressed up like the radical supporters of Lord Mayor John Wilkes and carried menacing clubs. At the end of the parade the effigy of Mercer was hung and burned. When that did not suffice to intimidate Mercer into resigning, Lee instigated a mob that confronted Mercer on his arrival in Williamsburg. Shaken by the angry demonstration and the threat of further violence, Mercer decided to quit and returned to England at once. Richard Henry had made it appear that his attack on Mercer was based on the principle of no taxation without representation. But later, when the Virginia Gazette disclosed that Lee had acted from self-interest, he was forced to admit that he had wanted the job as stamp distributor himself. The incident left a toxic rivalry between the Lees and the Mercers, and at one point, the young Arthur Lee even challenged John Mercer’s brother James to a duel. (Happily for Arthur, who was nearsighted and a poor athlete, James arrived late for the duel, and Arthur declared himself the victor.)

  By now the Lee family had abandoned any hope of regaining control of the Ohio Company and instead organized a new competing land company called the Mississippi Company. The Lees hoped to use their political influence to carve out an exception from the Royal Proclamation for the Mississippi Company. They petitioned the British Board of Trade for an even more ambitious plan: 2.5 million acres between the Wabash, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers, including parts of what now includes Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. When it became obvious that the British stood firm on their policy against westward expansion, the Lee family’s ceaseless appetite for western land brought them into irreconcilable conflict with Britain.

  The Lee brothers appointed Arthur Lee as agent and lobbyist for the Mississippi Company with discretion to distribute shares of the company to buy support for the land grant from members of Parliament. This placed Arthur in the unique position of trying to curry favor with Lord Hillsborough, the president of the Board of Trade and later the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, while at the same time he was anonymously scribbling articles as Junius Americanus attacking Hillsborough’s colonial policy. The Lees were happy to offer Hillsborough a financial stake in the Mississippi Company, if that is what it took to build their family’s western empire.

  By then there were several other rival land syndicates competing with the Mississippi Company for land grants from the Board of Trade. There was still the Loyal Land Company, which was now led by Thomas Walker, a physician, explorer, and, coincidentally, legal guardian of Thomas Jefferson and close relative of Meriwether Lewis. And in Connecticut there was the Susquehanna Company, which included among its influential boosters Silas Deane, who had negotiated on behalf of the company to avoid a war between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over competing land claims.

  The most significant rival was the Indiana Company, based in Philadelphia. The Indiana Company’s shareholders included Benjamin Franklin and his illegitimate son, William, who was royal governor of New Jersey; the wealthy Philadelphia merchant Samuel Wharton; and Edward Bancroft, Deane’s assistant. The Indiana Company eventually merged into the Illinois-Wabash Company, which in turn merged with the remnants of the Ohio Company to form the Grand Ohio Company. The Grand Ohio Company laid claim to an area that stretched from what is now Pittsburgh south to what is now Boonesborough, Kentucky. It was bounded by the Potomac on the east and the Ohio River on the west and it occupied much of what is now West Virginia and healthy slices of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio. In a naked effort to curry favor with George III, the Grand Ohio Company named this wilderness empire “Vandalia” after Queen Charlotte, who claimed that her ancestors were Vandals.

  Throughout the 1770s, while Franklin and Arthur Lee were representing the Massachusetts colonial Assembly to the British Parliament, they were also representing rival land syndicates competing for a grant to the same western land. Though Franklin’s reputation and access gave him great influence, and though his son was royal governor of New Jersey, Lee had cultivated relationships with well-connected men like Lord Mayor John Wilkes and Paul Wentworth. The Lee family would not yield, and each time the Privy Council rejected their petition, the Lee family increased the size of their request. But the Earl of Hillsb
orough, Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, opposed land speculation in principle and shrewdly played the demands of the Mississippi Company off against Franklin’s Grand Ohio Company.

  The two competing bids between Franklin and the Lees ultimately canceled each other out, and neither grant was ever made. The embittered Lees blamed Franklin and Wharton for their financial difficulties. The Mississippi Company’s loss could not have come at a worse time for the Lees. By 1772, the price of tobacco had collapsed, losing half of its value and plunging the Virginia Tidewater into a deep recession. The financial panic over tobacco prices was the worst experienced since the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Planters like the Lees could no longer service their debts, and many debtors faced foreclosures and imprisonment.

  The Lee family regarded the Ohio Valley as their birthright. It was not merely a land deal. In the face of a declining tobacco fortune, their wealth and status as one of Virginia’s leading families depended on their ability to realize the dream of Thomas Lee. For the Lees, this competition was nothing less than a tribal struggle to survive. Their animosity was not just reserved for Franklin and his land syndicate. Silas Deane’s professional relationship with Franklin, his personal interest in the Susquehanna Company, and his financial relationship with Wharton made him suspect as well. Indeed, while Deane was serving as commissioner he allegedly was negotiating with Wharton to invest in the Grand Ohio project. The Lees would continue their bitter rivalry with Franklin and Deane until it erupted into a full-scale war in Congress.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TURTLE’S PROGRESS

  Paris, January-July 1777

  Arthur Lee’s feud with his diplomatic colleagues was further fueled by his brother William and their associate Ralph Izard, who had been appointed by Congress to the courts at Berlin and Tuscany, respectively. William Lee found nothing inconsistent in serving both as a London alderman and as the American commissioner to Berlin. Izard was the spoiled son of a rich southern plantation owner. He constantly found fault with Deane and Franklin. Though he nominally served as commissioner to Tuscany for nearly two years, he never actually visited Tuscany and instead supped daily at Franklin’s table. Bored and cynical, William Lee and Ralph Izard had nothing better to do than to languish in Paris, stirring the pot of Arthur Lee’s paranoia.

  Lee went behind his colleagues to complain to members of Congress about Franklin and Deane. He accused them of conspiring to destroy him. He believed that Deane, Bancroft, and Deane’s personal secretary, William Carmichael, were spies. He complained that Franklin and Deane spent public funds, made contracts for the delivery of arms, and reached decisions without involving him. Lee suspected both Deane and Franklin of profiting at the expense of the public. He urged Congress to move Franklin to Vienna and Deane to Holland, leaving Lee alone in Paris. Although he had accused both Deane and Franklin of cronyism and nepotism, he proposed that Congress put his brother William in charge of all commercial affairs in Europe and name his cousin Edmund Jennings as emissary to Madrid.

  For his part, Deane struggled to understand Lee and hold his temper. After a particularly nasty series of exchanges, Deane wrote to Lee that he was not “insensible to the manner in which he has been treated in Mr. Lee’s two last Billets, or to the insinuations which have been for many months since made by Mr. Lee, respecting his conduct.” But Deane had no wish to “resent” Lee and expressed instead his wish that Lee “have the Candor to Communicate to him in Person the grounds of his Jealousies & uneasiness; in which Case Mr. Deane pledges his Honor that Nothing on his Part shall be wanting to remove them.” Despite Deane’s efforts, Lee’s hostility and suspicions continued to fester.

  While Lee complained that he had too little to do, Deane and Beaumarchais were racing around, trying to persuade France to allow Beaumarchais’s ships—the Amphitrite, the Amélie (formerly the Romain ), the Seine, and now the Mercure—to leave for North America. Moreover, Deane now feared that the supplies aboard the ships were either in poor condition or badly stored and insisted on reinspecting all the cargo. Beaumarchais resented Deane’s insistence on checking the cargo of each of the ships. He felt that Deane’s suspicion was unwarranted and served only to delay the mission. “Sir, by what right have you become so difficult regarding my engagements when you have so far failed to fulfill any of yours toward me?” Beaumarchais quickly apologized for his foul mood, but explained that “I have exhausted myself in money and in work, without being able to know by now if anyone but you appreciates it at all.” Beaumarchais’s efforts certainly were not appreciated by Lee or Franklin “who deny the most simple civilities to their country’s most useful friend.” Beaumarchais was especially cross that Franklin had never invited him to dine at the American headquarters at Valentinois.

  While all this was going on, General du Coudray decided to take an excursion to Paris, abandoning the Amphitrite and his officers, to denounce Beaumarchais to the commissioners. Du Coudray accused Beaumarchais of being responsible for delaying the Amphitrite and not supplying the ships properly. He hinted that Beaumarchais had skimmed profits from the shipment. Du Coudray’s slanders aroused Lee’s suspicion that Beaumarchais and Deane were somehow profiting, though Lee knew perfectly well that the Americans had not paid for any of the supplies. Lee’s suspicion was of course absurd. Beaumarchais had not received any payment for his expenses, travel, or time since the operation had begun eighteen months earlier, and his trading company, Rodriguez and Hortalez, was teetering on insolvency. Deane was so angered by du Coudray that he tried, but failed, to stop him from departing for America.

  Beaumarchais wrote to Vergennes, asking why the shipments were so delayed and confused. Vergennes claimed that he had no idea and that the ministry had done nothing to delay the delivery of arms. This was patently false. Vergennes did not want to admit that he was afraid of Stormont’s reaction. Neither did he want to discourage Beaumarchais. He hoped that Beaumarchais and Deane would find a way to outwit the French government so that he could plausibly deny to Stormont any responsibility for the delivery of arms. But Vergennes’s denial was too much for Beaumarchais, who exploded with anger: “[A]fter swallowing one disgusting thing after the other without complaining, this one sticks in my throat and strangles me.” He complained to Vergennes that “while evil advances with giant steps, good drags on like a turtle.”

  Soon after, the embargo was suddenly and inexplicably lifted, and by the end of February all four vessels had departed. By April 1777, three more ships, the Thérèse, the Concorde, and the Marquis de la Chalotais, had set out from Paimboeuf, a small harbor just south of Nantes. Beaumarchais hoped that the British would be less likely to keep an eye on such a small harbor. Together these seven ships carried enough muskets, lead, powder, flints, cannons, bombs, uniforms, caps, boots, stockings, buttons, buckles, tents, blankets, spades, carriages, and matches to equip an army of 30,000. These were the first of approximately forty ships that Beaumarchais sent to the Americans during the Revolution.

  Even before the ships weighed anchor the British ambassador appeared at Versailles with a precise list of the cargo and crew of the Amphitrite. He told Vergennes that he knew of five ships that Beaumarchais and Deane were readying to carry supplies to the American rebels. Vergennes feigned surprise, but Stormont knew he was lying. Humiliated at being caught, Vergennes blamed the commissioners and Beaumarchais for being indiscreet. Clearly, the British ambassador must have had sources inside Valentinois who could provide such reliable information.

  Deane and Beaumarchais had labored for nine months to launch these ships for America, but now Deane had a new worry: The British knew the ships were carrying guns and ammunition and would be looking to intercept them. The safest way to avoid capture at sea was to sail far south, which would take longer. But then the ships would reach the American shore just as the days were lengthening and the number of British ships cruising in the Atlantic coast would be increasing. If the ships were lost or captured, the commissioners would not know for month
s. The commissioners did not know whether Congress had received their communications about when and where the ships would arrive. If they were intercepted or sunk, the commissioners would not find out until it was too late to send more ships to supply Washington’s desperate troops.

  IN THE THREE MONTHS since Franklin’s arrival in France, in December 1776, the commissioners had heard nothing from Congress. Deane was all too familiar with this situation, but Franklin found it unacceptable. The commissioners had to rely mostly on newspapers to follow the progress of the war. The Secret Committee, now with the more dignified name the “Committee for Foreign Affairs,” wrote only sparingly. “Though it must be agreeable to you to hear frequently from us,” the committee warned the commissioners, “when you hear not so often as you wish, remember our silence means our safety.”

  From newspapers and occasional letters from friends in America, the commissioners knew that the Revolution was going poorly. Most of the American navy had been damaged or destroyed by the British on Lake Champlain in October. During the month that followed, General Howe’s massive army drove Washington from New York after a string of defeats and thousands of casualties at White Plains, at Fort Washington on Manhattan, and at Fort Lee in New Jersey. More than 2,600 American soldiers were taken prisoner at Fort Washington, where General Cornwallis chased Washington’s terrified troops from the battleground, leaving hundreds of scarce muskets, cannons, and barrels of gunpowder behind. In December, the British captured the naval base at Newport, Rhode Island. Washington continued his retreat across Delaware and Pennsylvania. By mid-December, British forces controlled most of New Jersey and were poised to march on Philadelphia. Anticipating the fall of the city, Congress evacuated in panic to Baltimore.