How the French Saved America Read online

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  For Harriet, who helped me through.

  In Memoriam

  John L. Tishman, 1926 –2016

  Donald Oresman, 1925 –2016

  Prologue

  “Matters so delicate that I tremble as I walk.” —Achard De Bonvouloir

  DECEMBER 18–28, 1775

  On December 18, 1775, as the winter solstice approached, darkness arrived early to Philadelphia, capital of the British colony of Pennsylvania, giving cover to the men individually making their ways through the streets to Carpenters’ Hall for a rendezvous with a visitor from France touted as bearing an important message for Americans.

  Their encounter would take place at a moment of high military and political peril for America. Nine months earlier, hostilities had begun at Lexington and Concord, and since the summer the struggle between the British and Continental troops had become a standoff at Boston. The Continental army was so bereft of cannons, ammunition, and gunpowder that General George Washington was unable to lay a proper siege or launch assaults on British positions. “Our want of powder is inconceivable,” Washington wrote that week in December. “A daily waste and no supply administers a gloomy prospect.” Washington had sent Colonel Henry Knox to the recently seized former British stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga in upper New York to haul their cannons overland to Boston in order that their eventual presence on the heights above the city might force the British to abandon the metropolis. But at year’s end, well before those cannons could possibly arrive in Boston, the enlistment periods of many Continental soldiers would end, and Washington worried that soldiers would then just go home, leaving him too shorthanded to continue the fight.

  There was equal political peril, for sentiment in the Second Continental Congress was seriously divided over whether to declare independence. The First Continental Congress, convened in 1774, had avoided any attempt to do so, and in July 1775 the Second had issued the so-called Olive Branch Petition, a plea to King George III to calm the fraternal conflict and find a way to allow the colonies to remain within the Empire. That petition had been answered on August 23, 1775, by A Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, in which the king declared the colonies to be in open rebellion and their leaders to be “Traitors,” and which was followed by an order to close American ports to any would-be suppliers of the rebels. In the fall Congress had sent a second conciliatory petition to the king. By late December 1775 it had received no response, and Congress feared that George III’s next message to Parliament would specifically reject it.

  Tendrils from the past and imaginings of the future are integral to all clandestine assignations. While Congress awaited the king’s likely rejection of their pacific overtures, it had established a Committee of Correspondence to explore with Americans abroad and “friends … in other parts of the world” the possibilities of foreign assistance to the rebelling colonies. Immediately after the committee’s chartering, its members had renamed it the Committee of Secret Correspondence and closed its records to other congressmen. They did so to protect the overseas agents whom the committee might employ, and to conceal those agents’ identities from that fraction of the delegates who continued to resist declaring independence. For the same reason the committee was being very circumspect about this evening’s clandestine meeting, convened at their behest.

  The walkers’ destination was the headquarters of the Library Company, a subscription club founded by Benjamin Franklin and friends in 1731 and moved to Carpenters’ Hall in 1773. Franklin, a member of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, was one of the walkers; the most famous American in the world, now sixty-nine and in poor health, he had returned home after fifteen years in London, where he represented the interests of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He and the other walkers had arranged for each to arrive at the assignation at slightly different times and by roundabout routes. Their purpose was to avoid alerting the suspicions of the city’s British and Tory spies, who might judge treasonous the walkers’ participation in the business of this meeting: assessing a potential connection between France and the American colonies that were on the verge of severing their existing connection with Great Britain.

  Like Congress as a whole, the Committee of Secret Correspondence was a mix of radicals, centrists, and conservatives; none of the members qualified as a die-hard Loyalist to the Crown, for King George had already branded all those in Congress as traitors for daring to meet without his permission. Franklin, although the oldest of the committee members, was perhaps the most independence-minded; the relative moderate was John Dickinson, the author of the popular Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which argued that forcible resistance to British tyranny was justifiable, but also the author of that Olive Branch Petition to George III. The members also included a rockbound conservative—the ascetic, patrician New York lawyer John Jay, thirty, who was being dragged by events from favoring reconciliation to accepting the need for rebellion.

  An inherent difficulty for Americans in seeking a foreign liaison was that they were reluctant suitors. Raised from childhood to be self-reliant, they were also distrustful of even tangential involvement with the shifting alignments and resulting perfidies of the European balance-of-powers system, which over the past century had amply demonstrated its inability to produce peace for more than a dozen years at a time. Congress had concluded only very recently, and with some distaste, that to further resist British subjugation they must seek arms, powder, ammunition, and funds from abroad. Still, few congressmen of any stripe, even the most radical, desired an outright alliance with any foreign nation.

  Nor did the European powers have much interest in alliance with the rebelling British colonies, despite a correspondent having told Franklin that “toute l’Europe nous souhaite le plus heureux succès pour le maintien de nos libertés” (all Europe wishes you the happiest success in the maintaining of your liberties). It was becoming increasingly clear to the committee, as well as to most of the other congressional delegates and knowledgeable observers, that as the magazine editor Tom Paine was writing, just then, “While we [continue to] profess ourselves the subjects of Britain, we must, in the eyes of foreign nations, be considered as rebels.” In a room just a few blocks from Carpenters’ Hall, Paine was putting the finishing touches on his pamphlet, Common Sense. “Under our present denomination of British subjects we can neither be received nor heard abroad … until, by an independence, we take rank with other nations.”

  Even France and Spain, the countries whose wealth and power were the closest to Great Britain’s, worried about reprisals should they openly ally with George III’s rebellious subjects. Given the dominance of the Royal Navy their fear was reasonable, and was made more palpable by France and Spain’s knowing the relative weakness of their own land forces, which had deteriorated since the end of the Seven Years’ War.

  Each of the even
ing walkers to Carpenters’ Hall ascended in turn the broad exterior marble steps, strode through large double doors into the building, and mounted the narrow, spiraling staircase to the second floor, where they joined the French émigré Francis Daymon, whose presence there after hours would not be suspect since he was the Library Company’s paid librarian. Daymon, Franklin’s personal translator, would interpret for the visitor. Candles were lit and shades drawn in the Library Company’s book-lined smaller room, the other being unusable because it was crammed with scientific apparatus.

  Only Jay, among Franklin’s colleagues on the Committee of Secret Correspondence, would later acknowledge having met the French visitor. Franklin had already become an admirer of Jay, perhaps glimpsing hints of the strength that underlay Jay’s cultured and considered persona. Devoted like Franklin to furthering the cause of American freedom, Jay also like Franklin had a close relative who was a Tory, had made his mark in the world primarily with his pen, and did not want the colonies to break with Great Britain unless there was no viable alternative.

  Jay remembered the French visitor as an “elderly, lame gentleman, having the appearance of an old, wounded French officer,” although the visitor was then only twenty-six and his apparent wounds consisted of a limp and other congenital physical malformations. The visitor had previously been coy, only presenting letters from European merchants indicating that he was an Antwerp-based trader. But in this first meeting with the committee members, recognizing their worry that he might be a British spy or double agent, he announced his true identity—the Chevalier Julien Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir et Loyauté—and he probably displayed his commission as a brevetted lieutenant, signed by Louis XVI, and expected that the Americans would not know that such brevetted commissions were mostly honorific.

  To reach this Philadelphia assignation Bonvouloir had made quite an effort. The idea had come to him during a tour of the colonies earlier that year, when he had met Daymon, who boasted of ties to Franklin. The chevalier had then gone to Boston, where his attempt to volunteer for the Continental forces was rebuffed. That did not deter him, on reaching London, from touting his access to Franklin to the Comte de Guines, France’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Bonvouloir’s timing was fortuitous: Guines desperately needed a success to vault him over a troubling lawsuit and to counter the distrust of his boss, the French foreign minister Vergennes. Guines owed his diplomatic career to Queen Marie Antoinette, who liked the way that Guines made her laugh; but of late her protecting hand had faltered.

  Guines recommended Bonvouloir to Vergennes as an emissary to sound out America as to its intentions and to present France’s own. The foreign minister, ever practical even with his enemies (among them Guines), saw little downside and some potential gain in dispatching to America a low-status, unofficial messenger whose cost to the French crown was trifling. And since Bonvouloir was the black sheep of a noble family, he would be easy to disavow should that become necessary.

  Unable due to his birth defects to perform properly in his cavalry regiment, as his forefathers had done with their military assignments and as his brothers were currently doing, Bonvouloir had become so dissolute and indebted that he had accepted a posting to Saint-Domingue, the Haitian haunt of many similarly indebted French officers. In Haiti he had disgraced himself further. Vergennes, seeking more information on the potential messenger, could verify only that Bonvouloir had been a volunteer in Haiti’s Régiment du Cap. Nonetheless he allowed Bonvouloir to be dispatched to America after providing strict guidelines for his conduct, including instructions to be memorized, not carried on paper, and on how to communicate using invisible ink.

  Meeting with American representatives at the Library Company, Bonvouloir could truthfully say he was there as a private person who was not unconnected at Versailles. As such he conveyed three simple, seemingly straightforward messages: He assured the Americans that France wished them well, had no interest in regaining Canada, and would welcome American vessels in French ports.

  France not want Canada?! Most Americans thought that the northernmost Atlantic colony had been viciously wrested from France by Great Britain in the Peace of Paris, signed in 1763. In fact it had actually been traded away by France as too expensive to maintain, but still, Americans in 1775 were incredulous that a European colonial power would neither covet more colonies nor desire the return of an old one as the spoils of a forthcoming war. Franklin in particular had presumed that regaining Canada would be a part of France’s price for helping America. And the ideas that France wished the colonists well and that French ports would be open to American vessels? Jay or any other American lawyer would have been stunned by these notions, for they signaled a sharp departure from the strict neutrality toward America and resigned deference to British wishes that France had displayed since 1763. Open ports would mean, for example, that Tidewater tobacco farmers would have a market for their goods other than in London—say Martinique or Saint-Domingue.

  Bonvouloir embellished these points by flattering language specifically suggested by Vergennes: “We admire … the grandeur and nobleness of their efforts,” he said, and “having no interest in injuring them, should we see with pleasure such a happy conjunction of circumstances as would set them at liberty to frequent our port facilities … their commerce would soon prove to them all that we feel for them.”

  Asked whether he had the authority to convey these messages concerning what the government of Louis XVI would do, Bonvouloir drew his hand across his throat and said, “Gentlemen, I shall take care of my head.”

  Franklin judged the Bonvouloir messages to be of such great importance that he scheduled two additional evening sessions to hash over every facet of the chevalier’s information, and to impart some of his own in regard to American battlefield strengths, the predicted outcomes of current campaigns, and the colonists’ needs for guns, ammunition, and trained engineers. To those meetings Franklin likely brought fellow Committee of Secret Correspondence members, one or two at a time, so that all would gain a sense of Bonvouloir and his messages.

  From prior meetings with Washington, Franklin knew of the commander’s often-repeated plea for professionally trained French engineers. Washington had been disappointed in American ones, whose craft had been learned in the field from British engineers whose own knowledge was based on translated French texts. Since the seventeenth-century heyday of Vauban, whose name was synonymous with effective field cannons and sieges, France had been at the forefront of military engineering. Washington craved people with that expertise.

  As Franklin began a final session with Bonvouloir, he set up a chessboard and invited the chevalier to play. But before Bonvouloir could advance a pawn, Franklin removed both kings from the board and announced, “In America we have no need of kings.” A startling coup de théâtre, this was a clear warning that while the colonists were eager for French aid they would not accept substituting Louis XVI for their current ruler, George III. The relationship they sought was not a subservient one.

  After the last session, Bonvouloir repaired to his room to write to Guines, summing up the discussions like a man breathlessly recounting a courtship’s opening moves and shared intimacies. He was so excited that instead of writing in milk to veil the contents, he inscribed the letter in ink. And he folded within it a note that he had received from the committee, containing three sets of questions:

  Monsieur de Bonvouloir is begged to examine the following proposition, under the understanding that we are speaking as private individuals to each other:

  1. Can he tell us what the views of the Court of France are in regard to the North American colonies? Are they favorable, and if so, how can we obtain official confirmation of this?

  2. Could we find in France two competent engineer officers, well recommended and reliable? What steps should we take to obtain them?

  3. May we obtain from France arms and other necessary munitions of war in exchange for the products of our country? And may
we have free entry into the French ports?

  Bonvouloir reported that he had given qualified affirmative responses to all the questions save for official recognition, which request he had rebuffed as “premature, even dangerous,” volunteering that the presence of an American plenipotentiary at Versailles would be taken by London as a “tugging of the British beard,” a deliberate provocation that could trigger dire consequences.

  The Americans believed, Bonvouloir wrote, “that they won’t be able to hold [the colonies] without a nation that protects them by sea,” and understood that France was in the best position to provide that help. Afraid to carry this message to Guines personally, “for the matters are so delicate that with all the good will possible, I tremble as I walk,” he sent the missive in care of a trusted messenger.

  Information providers such as Bonvouloir often neglect at their peril the fact that information can flow in two directions. Bonvouloir did not know that his message from America to France contained a highly inaccurate rebel assessment of the Continental forces—as about to seize Boston, Montreal, and Quebec, and as consisting of fifty thousand well-dressed paid soldiers and an even larger number of unpaid volunteers. The reality was far more pallid: Washington’s army numbered at most twenty thousand; Montreal’s small British force had voluntarily vacated the town, but the Americans could not hold it; and the Continental army was on the verge of being definitively repulsed at Quebec. Moreover, Bonvouloir asserted, the Americans were potent and highly motivated. “They are more powerful than we could have thought, beyond imagination powerful; you will be astonished by it. Nothing shocks or frightens them, you can count on that. Independency is a certainty for 1776; there will be no drawing back.”

  Despite American and French efforts to maintain the secrecy of the assignations with Bonvouloir, the British government—whose spies were indeed everywhere—knew of the chevalier’s mission before he landed in Philadelphia, including details of his ship and its captain’s political stripe. In London this news heightened officials’ concerns regarding a potential alliance between France and the American colonies. For the Americans to be meeting with Bonvouloir meant to the British that what they had feared, a mutual courtship of France and America, had begun.