How the French Saved America Read online

  Vergennes’ reputation for farsightedness grew in February 1776 as news ratified his judgment that France should stay out of the Spain-Portugal conflict. Portugal successfully invaded Spain’s holdings in South America, spurring Spain to send a fleet and troops to the rescue, a move that effectively shelved Spain’s scheme to take over Portugal’s portion of the Iberian Peninsula with French assistance.

  Into this charged atmosphere at Versailles came Bonvouloir’s letter of December 28, 1775, which Guines had forwarded—but not before the now-former ambassador, who had expected the letter to be written in milk, had partially charred it in a misguided attempt to render the supposedly invisible message visible.

  Two days after the arrival of the Bonvouloir letter, another Beaumarchais screed reached the king. “Sire,” it began, “the famous quarrel between America and England, soon to divide the world and effect a change in the European system, imposes on each power the necessity of carefully examining how the event of their separation will … serve its ends or thwart them.” Also supporting these letters’ inflated estimates of American strength were Vergennes’s sources in London and at The Hague. The French press was all for an embrace of the Americans: The Gazette de France helpfully dubbed them “les Insurgents,” a term, the paper explained, underscoring the notion that the colonists were neither rebels nor traitors but something much more heroic and admirable.

  On March 12, 1776, Vergennes submitted a mémoire for the king, Maurepas, Turgot, Sartine, and Saint-Germain. It was a dramatic volte-face from his one-year-earlier judgment of the American Revolution as a dangerous example whose spread must be feared. Now Vergennes was in favor of limited intervention in the American uprising to disrupt Great Britain’s trade with the colonies, on which it depended so heavily, a loss that he predicted would weaken Great Britain for years to come. While rejecting the idea of a “pact with the insurgents,” Vergennes set out four reasons why France could not now avoid taking some action:

  While … the continuation of the war [in the American colonies] can be regarded as infinitely advantageous to the [Bourbon] Crowns … it can also be feared: 1st That the English Ministry … may extend its hands in reconciliation; 2nd that the King of England, by conquering English America, may make [of his armed forces] an instrument for also subjugating Europe…; 3rd that the English Ministry, beaten on the continent of America, may seek compensation at the expense of France and Spain … 4th that the Colonies, having become independent … may become conquerors by necessity [of] the Sugar Islands and in Spanish America.

  All four scenarios, Vergennes insisted, would lead to war between France and the English-speakers.

  If Beaumarchais in his letters had written a three-act play leading Louis to the inescapable conclusion that France must intervene in America, Vergennes offered in his memorandum a dystopian novel of a future from which there was no escape but intervention. The present moment was the most opportune for France and Spain to attack Great Britain, he asserted; however, since the Bourbon kingdoms were not at full military strength, any attack must wait a year until that peak of preparation had been reached. But France could not simply do nothing until then, since the absence of a response from France to American overtures would arouse British suspicion. Therefore France and Spain must actively delude the British into thinking that the Bourbons wanted peace between Great Britain and its insurgents and use the next year to aid the Americans clandestinely and to rebuild French and Spanish forces.

  The vehicle for aid to the Americans would be a new private company that France and Spain would covertly fund. The memorandum concealed from the ministers the name of the man who would form and lead that company: Beaumarchais.

  Louis XVI postponed a decision until all the ministers could submit position papers on it and until Carlos III had an opportunity to weigh in, for such a dangerous and expensive course of action ought not to be precipitously begun.

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  “The want of experience to move upon a larger scale.” —George Washington

  In March 1776, Fort Ticonderoga’s cannons suddenly appeared on the heights above Boston, having been hauled three hundred miles overland in secret. Seeing the cannon, the British fled the city with their troops and a thousand Tories, aboard seventy-eight ships.

  Evicting the British from Boston was an important victory for Washington, the Continental army, and the rebelling British colonies. Yet the general understood that such a victory also reflected the army’s dearth of artillery, mortars, and other war matériel; he wrote to his brother that it was astonishing for his army to have taken Boston with less than thirty rounds per soldier. Fortunately the British left behind one hundred artillery pieces, and arms and ammunition were continuing to trickle in for the Continental forces, as was enough gunpowder—1.5 million pounds amassed from various sources—to provide for the next several years.

  Washington had an equally important and still unrequited need: for engineers. “I can hardly express the Disappointment I have experienced on this Subject,” he had told Congress upon taking command the previous July. “The Skill of those [engineers] we have, being very imperfect & confined to the mere manual Exercise of Cannon. Whereas—the War in which we are engaged requires a Knowledge comprehending the Duties of the Field and Fortification.”

  During the long siege of Boston, no such engineers had been sent to him. And so after chasing out the British Washington renewed his plea for better-trained engineers to properly design and construct works to prevent Boston from being retaken from the sea. Months later, when the overage chief engineer, foisted on Washington by the Massachusetts delegation to Congress, had failed to complete works designed for Boston, Washington let his temper show:

  Who am I to blame for this shamefull neglect, but you Sir, who was to have them executed. it is not an agreable task to be under the necessity of putting any Gentleman in mind of his duty, but it is what I owe to the public, I expect and desire Sir that you will exert yourself in Completing the works, with all possible dispatch, & do not lay me under the disagreable necessity of writing to you again upon this Subject.

  Washington had a third, more amorphous deficit to fill, and it required a carefully phrased plea to Congress from him lest his request be deemed a confession of unpreparedness for top command: He needed strategic counsel. For as he observed to Congress in regard to a top subordinate: “His wants are common to us all: the want of experience to move upon a larger scale; for the limited and contracted knowledge which any of us has in Military Matters stands in very little stead.” Washington included in that “limited” group his two most experienced generals, Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, both Virginia planters and British army veterans whom he had recommended for their posts. Of the two, Lee had been tested on the most battlefields—far more than Washington—but neither Gates nor Lee had ever commanded more than a few thousand men nor had the fate of a country at stake in his battlefield decisions.

  Waiting for strategic counsel to appear, Washington filled the gap by readings, regularly perusing books that he brought from his home library, notably tracts on the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, along with Frederick the Great’s Military Instructions. He also recommended these works to his military protégés, Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene; discussing these books strengthened the trio’s bonds.

  They assumed, as did Gates, Lee, and America’s civilian leaders, that after regrouping the British would try to take New York. En route from Great Britain were eight additional regiments of regulars, others from Ireland and Scotland, and the first contingent of what would eventually total seventeen thousand German mercenaries, along with more British warships. London’s willingness to incur the added expense of these forces signaled a firmer resolve. In 1775 the British general John Burgoyne had declared that America “must be subdued or relinquished,” and nothing that had happened since, even the loss of Boston, gave the British any reason to alter that calculus.

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  Often a presumpt
ion that an affair is taking place, even when it is not, provides impetus to its onset. In early 1776, while Boston was still in British hands, King George’s government presumed that Paris and Madrid were already aiding the Americans and were preparing for outright war. Signs of ramping up of the French military were apparent. One was Saint-Germain’s published order of March 25, Ordonnance du roi, portant règlement sur l’administration de tous les corps (Ordinance of the king, for regulating the administration of all [of the army’s] corps). It instituted a schedule of promotion for the middle ranks—fourteen years of service to earn a colonelcy, even if a candidate was of “the most distinguished birth”—a system to be administered by serving officers newly able to veto fast-track promotions of nobles. The ordinance also required officers to remain with their units at all times, a slap at nobles who absented themselves from their military posts to tend their estates.

  One of the new Saint-Germain regulations almost caused the overturning of them all: Punishment for even minor offenses would henceforth be administered by blows with the flat of the sword, rather than, as in the past, with a whip. To the French military this was obnoxious on two counts; first, flat-of-the-sword was the standard only in the Prussian army and was therefore not French; and second, as an outraged song contended, “L’instrument de leur gloire est celui du supplice” (the instrument of their glory is that of [their] torture). Whispers against Saint-Germain from his opponents in the military and in the nobility of the sword grew louder.

  While Saint-Germain’s Ordonnance was innovative, his memo in support of Vergennes’s March 12 memo on possible aid to America was merely dutiful, as were Maurepas’s and Sartine’s.

  Then there was Turgot’s. In a council of ministers, the worth of a member’s recommendation depends more on his current political capital than on the brilliance of his ideas. Turgot’s memo raised substantive objections to aiding the Americans; however, by the time he offered them his clout had been compromised. In January, at his behest, the king had proposed fundamental changes to the economic heart of the postfeudal way of life, in the form of Six Edicts. These sought to do away with the corvée, which obligated the peasantry to repair roads and take on other onerous tasks for fifteen days a year as slaves to the local lord, as well as the jurandes and maîtrises, arrangements through which hereditary guilds controlled who was permitted to do carpentry, stonemasonry, baking, and other crafts. The opposition to the Six Edicts crystallized in a manifesto by the king’s brother Charles-Phillipe, known as Monsieur: Les machines du gouvernement français (the mechanisms of the French government). He wrote that the British, “persuaded that the surest way to degrade a people was to alter their societal structures and change their character,” had conspired to install Turgot on the council, and that Turgot’s proposed reforms were actually a British plot to undermine France’s stability. The Parlement rejected the Six Edicts. Then Louis convened a lit de justice (literally, bed of justice, a formal review body) that overruled Parlement and enacted the reforms. He wrote to Turgot, “I am grieved that an edict so well founded in reason and in equity has raised up so much opposition. But there are so many private interests opposed to the general interest. The more I think of it, my dear Turgot, the more I repeat to myself that there are only you and myself who really love the people.”

  By April, when aid to the Americans reached the council of ministers’ agenda, Turgot’s grip on the position of finance minister had become tenuous. Nonetheless, his memo in reply to Vergennes’s was remarkable in its challenges to basic foreign policy assumptions. Citing Vergennes’s line that the outcome of the American rebellion was “not within human foresight to prevent or to divert the danger,” Turgot charged that since “nothing can hinder the course of events which must certainly lead, sooner or later, to the absolute independence” of those colonies, there was no reason for France to become involved. The gravest danger to France was not from a potential loss of its sugar islands, he charged, but from the inadequacy of its finances. Turgot contended that the expense of administering and defending those Caribbean colonies was so high that the islands were as much a liability as an asset. He would not say that France should refuse to rearm—of course it must do so!—but he painted Vergennes’s proposal as a budget buster that would accelerate France’s slide into debt. War could bankrupt the state, Turgot asserted, and war on behalf of American independence was also an inherently bad idea, for when American independence inevitably occurred, “I firmly believe that every other mother country will be forced to abandon all empire over her colonies, permit an entire freedom of commerce with all nations, and content herself with sharing this freedom with others, and with preserving the ties of friendship and fraternity with her [former] colonies.”

  Vergennes did not so much answer Turgot’s critique as dismiss it, in a memo, Réflexions sur la situation actuelle des colonies Anglaises et sur la conduit qu’il convenient à la France de tenir à leur égard (Reflections on the actual situation in the English Colonies and the conduct that it is appropriate for France to take in regard to them). There was no need to fear a future united American colonies, the memo argued, because upon their achieving independence “there is every reason to believe … they will give their new Government a republican form, and … republics rarely have the spirit of conquest.” Rather, an independent America would be wholly aimed at what Americans best understood, “the pleasures and advantages of commerce.” Vergennes argued that the opportunity to aid the Americans presented the king with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to diminish Great Britain’s power. And he had an ingenious, low-cost, low-risk solution for that aid: renting French ships of war to businessmen to convey war supplies to Saint-Domingue, where they would be exchanged for American tobacco, rice, and indigo; then non-French ships would transport the war matériel to America. No paper trail connecting the insurgents to the French government would be found even if the ships were captured, as the entire matter would consist of transactions between commercial enterprises. In this endeavor, Réflexions suggested, the Spanish should join.

  When Madrid hesitated, Vergennes exhorted Spain to keep France’s aid plan secret, because—just nine months after Louis had told Carlos III that war with Britain was less likely than ever—“Our [joint] peace with England is nothing but precarious, it is a smoldering, banked fire that could explode at any moment.” Spain agreed to contribute a million livres but was reluctant to do more.

  Louis’s decision to accept the Réflexions plan for France to back the rebels clandestinely was ratified by the news, in May 1776, of the Americans’ victory at Boston. Dancing in the streets of Paris and popular joy comforted the king: The Americans were winners and were beating back the British, and were therefore worthy of further assistance and wooing. Also helping this cause were the exits from his cabinet of the naysayers, Turgot and a second philosophe, orchestrated by Maurepas. Although Louis liked Turgot and had agreed with him, the king did not possess enough self-confidence to fight on behalf of his favorite against the combined weight of the privileged. Shortly the corvée, the jurande, and the maîtrises were restored, and the onerous tax system continued without check.

  Louis’s commitment to aid the Americans that spring took the form of two definitive steps—one high, moral, and public, and the other concealed and deniable. The first was a May 12 directive to all French ships to actively “defend the principle of liberty of the seas and the right of asylum,” which was to be extended to any foreign vessel that sought French protection from Great Britain’s navy, or from privateers or any other assailant. The second was to arrange to pay one million livres to Beaumarchais to underwrite the activities of the company he had established and given a false Spanish name, Roderigue Hortalez & Cie., and to send an equivalent amount to a trading house in Nantes that could readily put the money into a credit account there for American use.

  * * *

  That spring New York needed fortifying against a potential British invasion, and Washington gave that task to Ch
arles Lee. While the fortifications erected there at Lee’s direction were judged adequate by both leaders, Washington sensed that they were not of the caliber that might have been designed by graduates of France’s vaunted engineering school. Similar problems arose with the fortifications built north of New York on the North River (as the Hudson was then known), and along Philadelphia’s Delaware River frontage. The latter site drew the attention of the leaders of Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety, Franklin among them. He had in hand a recommendation of a man “well instructed in the Military Art of which our Foibbles hardly know the Name.” That engineer, the Chevalier Gilles-Jean Barazer de Kermorvan, recommended by Franklin’s Parisian translator and disciple, Dubourg, had crossed to America specifically to help with engineering projects. The committee commissioned Kermorvan to design and supervise the building of Philadelphia’s defenses. His designs were reasonable, but his poor supervision of workers and his limited ability to get along with the committee left the defenses unfinished.

  The task of completing them fell to a newer arrival, Tadeusz Kościuszko, thirty, a Polish officer who had spent five years in Paris taking private lessons in engineering, since as a foreigner he could not matriculate at the Royal Engineering School at Mèzieres. Kosciuszko impressed Franklin, who had him design the defenses at Billingsport, on the south side of the Delaware, and at the new Fort Mercer, and redo those at the fort on the north side of the Delaware River, which would become known as Fort Mifflin. The Pole also ordered sunk in the river bottom several dozen, iron-tipped chevaux-de-frise (literally, “Frisian horses”) that would rip the bottoms from large ships, and so effectively prevent warships from completing the journey from the Atlantic into the port of Philadelphia. When General Horatio Gates took over supervision of Philadelphia’s defenses, the Pole, more comfortable in French than English, was delighted to converse with Gates in French, and they became friends.