How the French Saved America Read online

  There were then in America about a dozen French officers, none of them graduates of the French Royal Engineering School and most of them similar to Bonvouloir and Kermorvan in having had peripatetic careers. Washington’s continued suspicion of the ones who appeared at his headquarters seeking to serve with the army was edging into antagonism. In a letter to a French resident who had recommended several soldiers of fortune, Washington cited an unnamed French officer who, after being given a command by Congress, engaged in “Treachery and Ingratitude … in Deserting and in Taking Command of a Party of the Enemy in Canada.” The French officers’ near universal ignorance of the English language, Washington added, “makes them rather unwilling and Impatient under the command” of those who did not speak French. Still more French officers arrived, unbidden yet able to persuade Congress to give them commissions. “You cannot conceive what a weight these kind of people are upon the Service, and upon me in particular,” Washington wrote to Congress’s president, John Hancock. “Few of them have any knowledge of the Branches which they profess to understand, and those that have, are intirely useless as Officers from their ignorance of the English Language.”

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  That spring John Adams had been trying to get Congress to recognize three pending matters as so intertwined as to be incapable of separate consideration: independence, the administration of the thirteen colonies as a single unit, and negotiations with other countries:

  Foreign powers could not be expected to acknowledge Us, till we had acknowledged ourselves and taken our Station, among them as a sovereign Power, and Independent Nation. That now We were distressed for Want of Artillery, Arms, Ammunition, Cloathing and even for Flynts. That the people had no Marketts for their Produce, wanted Cloathing and many other things, which foreign Commerce alone could fully supply, and We could not expect Commerce till We were independent.

  Adams was insistent that any treaties signed with foreign nations be restricted to commercial matters. America should pursue perfect neutrality, eschewing military or political alliances that would obligate the country’s support for its partners in future European conflicts.

  Congress agreed, and in the same time period in which Beaumarchais was establishing Hortalez & Cie to aid the American cause, the Committee of Secret Correspondence sent Silas Deane, thirty-eight, to France to obtain a commercial alliance. A Yale graduate, lawyer, and international trader, Deane had been a Connecticut delegate to Congress until turned out in an election in the fall of 1775. He had won the admiration of Franklin, Jay, and others as a thoughtful partisan; he had helped plan the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and had written the first draft of regulations for the Continental navy. He was also close to the colonies’ leading trader, Robert Morris, who joined the Committee of Secret Correspondence in December. Deane and Morris had been the major suppliers of munitions through their contacts in Europe and the Caribbean. Knowing the committee’s business, trusted by its members, and having previously traded with Europe, Deane was a logical choice for agent, although his knowledge of French was sketchy.

  “It is probable that the court of France may not like it should be known publickly that any agent from the Colonies is in that country,” the committee’s instructions to Deane began, going on to assure him that Franklin’s friend Dubourg would obtain an audience for him with Vergennes. Should Deane find Vergennes to be overly “reserved,” he should repair to Paris, give the minister time to come to him, and then convey America’s need for “clothing and arms for 25,000 men with a suitable quantity of ammunition and 100 field pieces,” along with large amounts of linens, woolens, and other articles, ostensibly “for the Indian trade.” Deane was also to have assistance in his endeavors from his former student and another Franklin friend, Dr. Edward Bancroft, as well as from Arthur Lee. Deane also carried a second commission, from a separate congressional committee headed by Morris, to be America’s purchasing agent in Europe working for a commission on all goods handled. Such commission contracts were common in Congress. Morris had several of these, as did another Committee of Secret Correspondence member and some of Deane’s former fellow Connecticut delegates, for matters that included the building and outfitting of ships and the purchase of provisions for the army.

  While Deane was being dispatched to do the work of two congressional committees, two other committees were at work on related matters. One was assigning Thomas Jefferson to write a draft of a declaration of independence, and a second was assigning John Adams to write a draft of a “model treaty” that an independent America could use in dealing with other nations.

  Great Britain was aware of these undertakings, and tried to avoid both a declaring of independence and a possible alliance between its rebellious colonies and France by floating a rumor that America’s suitor was two-timing the rebels: that France was about to sign a “partition treaty” with Great Britain that would cede part of the American continent to France in exchange for France helping Great Britain to quell the rebellion. The rumor contended that the model for such a carving up had already been used in Europe—Poland, partitioned among several European nations. That reasoning convinced the Pennsylvania Evening Post, which fretted, like a protective aunt, “Do not the tyrants of Europe think they have a right to dispose of their subjects in the same manner that a farmer in this country disposes of his livestock?”

  Deane left for France carrying a May 15 congressional resolution that was just short of an actual declaration of independence. It stated that because the colonies had had no response from Great Britain to their petitions for redress, and because no effective British government entity then functioned in the colonies, Congress “therefore resolved that it be recommended to the respective Assemblies & Conventions of the United Colonies, (where no Government sufficient to the exigencies of their Affairs has been hitherto established,) to adopt such Government as shall in the Opinion of the Representatives of the People best conduce to the happiness & safety of their Constituents in particular & of America in general.”

  After Deane sailed the two committees appointed an agent for the Caribbean who would report to Deane as well as to them. William Bingham, twenty-four, was Morris’s junior business partner and secretary of the Committee of Secret Correspondence. To replace him as secretary Franklin and Morris chose Tom Paine, whose pamphlet, Common Sense, had become required reading by Congress and a bestseller among the American public. Bingham was to go to Martinique, ostensibly as a private trader with his own and Morris’s money at risk. But he was also to act as an intelligence agent with a brief to learn whether a French fleet headed to the islands was for their defense or to aid the British against the American insurgents. He was also to act as an agent provocateur, for which purpose he carried blank letters of marque and reprisal, to be given to privateers. His instructions were quite detailed: Purchase 10,000 French muskets with bayonets, then dispatch 2,500 to America on the ship that had brought him to Martinique, and divide the rest into parcels of 1,000, distributed among “swift sailing well escorted vessels” to ensure that they stayed out of British hands.

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  The Deane and Bingham missions were congruent with the culminating lines of the Declaration of Independence, as adopted by the committee that had assigned Jefferson to write its first draft and that was ratified by the full Congress and published on July 4, 1776. The former colonies resolved that, as “Free and Independent States [we] have the full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

  * * *

  The proclamation of the Declaration of Independence was still unknown in Europe as Beaumarchais and Dubourg ramped up efforts to buy and forward war matériel to America. In London the playwright and Arthur Lee hatched plans; henceforth Lee would sign his letters to Beaumarchais as “Mary Johnston.” In one “Mary” hastened to tell “Mr. Hortalez” to skip the niceties and get on with the task—to ship goods to America without first
obtaining the promised tobacco, since that commodity was not easy to transport. In France, Dubourg furthered the cause by coming to terms with the French army’s chief artillery officer, who was eager to sell cannons to the Americans, viewing the sale as a marvelous opportunity to get rid of outmoded stock and hasten the army’s purchase of new cannons—of his design. To make an inventory, the artillery chief dispatched his subordinate, Colonel du Coudray. All that had to be done to conceal the old cannons’ point of origin, Dubourg reported to Vergennes, was file off the fleurs-de-lis and the engraved Latin motto, Ultima ratio regis (the last argument of the king). Vergennes thought that concealing three hundred big pieces from British spies was unlikely, and that their transport to America would be construed by London as a casus belli. But he did not stand in the way. On July 5, 1776, Dubourg wrote excitedly to Franklin in Philadelphia that he was happy to report that France was arming more grandly and rapidly than he had previously thought possible, and that he was “bien content quand ma chère patrie aura cause commune avec la votre” (very pleased that my dear country will make common cause with yours).

  The next day, when Silas Deane finally arrived in Paris, many weeks before the Declaration of Independence became known there, the French had already decided on and funded aid to the American cause, had readied several avenues to providing it, and were rearming so that they could eventually fight a war against Great Britain. Helping the American rebels, now the citizens of the newly declared independent country, the United States of America, was a strategic decision on the part of the government of Louis XVI, and did not reflect any agreement with the American tenets of liberty, equality, and justice for all.

  A week later, when William Bingham arrived in Martinique, France’s American-friendly martial preparations were even more in evidence than when Deane had arrived in Paris. On July 11, during a battle near that port, the ship in which Bingham had sailed, the Reprisal, traded salvos with a British sloop, Shark, until the action was ended by the French fort firing shots across the bow of the Shark. This forced the British to veer off, permitting the Reprisal to reach the inner harbor and moor. This and other evidence of Bingham’s welcome in Martinique reflected the extent to which the Versailles directive to accommodate the Americans was being carried out. The French governor of Martinique soon teamed with Bingham and the local French naval forces’ commander to encourage American privateers to seize in the nearby waters British ships and cargoes worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. With their permission, these prizes were either brought into port for sale or had French warships escort them through the dangerous parts of the Caribbean to a point where they could most easily make a run for America. During Bingham’s first six months in Martinique, 250 British vessels were intercepted and brought to ports for sale.

  The commander of the British fleet in the Leeward Islands protested these seizures and sales to his French counterpart there, but received no satisfaction. He glumly wrote home, “Their Lordships will perceive that all kinds of Protection, and Countenance, is given to the American Rebels, at the French Islands.”

  PART TWO

  Approaches and Retreats

  1776 –1777

  4

  “Dukes, marqueses, comtes and chevaliers without number” —Silas Deane

  Silas Deane’s small-town-America honesty, industry, and forthrightness availed him little at Versailles, a court beset by shifting allegiances and favor trading, or with Vergennes, who did not want the British to know that he was dealing with the Americans. Still, Deane kept conjuring for Vergennes, in his beautiful hand, fantastical dual adventures—a Franco-American toppling of a British island in the Caribbean, and of one off Newfoundland, and a hindering of British trade by forcing up ship insurance rates in London. These were beyond naïve. The basic idea that Deane was selling in these letters—that a commercial pact with America would be good for both countries—demonstrated his lack of understanding, for what he so highly esteemed, an increase in trade, was of no importance to a cabinet whose disdain for Great Britain was based on a belief that its government was too in thrall to its merchants.

  Aiding Deane’s efforts was a better written, much more persuasive argument for the importance of America, the Declaration of Independence, which became known in France in the late summer. While to Americans the Declaration was an unequivocal statement of their right to sovereignty and to control their destiny, to Europeans it was the quintessential expression of a passionate people willing to fight for their inalienable rights, a quest worthy of admiration in a monarchist France undertaking a modest loosening of the strictures binding its people’s lives.

  As a dedicated royalist Vergennes was no fan of the Declaration. But as an astute foreign minister he recognized it as certifying that no rapprochement of Great Britain and its colonies would take place in the near future, and as evidence of London’s ineptitude in having allowed matters to reach such an impasse as to compel America’s issuance of the Declaration and to propel the new nation in France’s direction.

  On August 31, 1776, a year after asserting that preventive war was almost always a mistake and six months since contending that France was not ready for war, Vergennes made a new presentation to king and council, arguing that the propitious moment had now arrived for a preventive war against “the incontestable, hereditary enemy of France, jealous of her grandeur, natural advantages, and situation,” on which revenge must be taken for past “injustices, outrages, and perfidies.” Maurepas and the other ministers did not bother raising objections to this war cry, because the decision was moot: Spain had no intention of joining in a war against Great Britain, and Louis was unwilling to fight without his Bourbon ally. “If we are forced to make war on England,” Louis would shortly write to Vergennes, “it must be for the defense of our possessions and the abasement of her power, not with any idea of territorial aggrandizement on our part, aiming solely to ruin their commerce and sap their strength by supporting the revolt and secession of her colonies.”

  Vergennes did what he could, short of war, to further that objective. He encouraged French merchants’ efforts to ship gunpowder through Caribbean ports. He provided havens for privateers. He directed Deane to work with Dubourg and Beaumarchais to obtain supplies. He fed positive American battlefield reports to the gazettes that his ministry supervised and subsidized; Les Affairs de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique printed translated excerpts of Paine’s Common Sense, state constitutions, bills of rights, and other legislative acts. Finally Vergennes encouraged French officers to approach Deane to seek commissions in the Continental army.

  And they did. Hundreds of them, in the summer and fall of 1776, importuned Deane to serve in the American military. Chief among their reasons for doing so was uncertainty regarding their futures in a French military roiled by Saint-Germain’s reforms, which had already retired their elders and was still engaged in cutting back their numbers. In America, they hoped, a French colonel could prove himself in battle, earn a field upgrade to general, and return home in triumph. In America, the officers believed, promotions would be based on merit rather than—as they continued to be in France despite Saint-Germain’s efforts—on one’s nobility.

  Absent from their motivations, however, was any desire to be commanded by George Washington. For decades in France he had been regarded as the “assassin” of Jumonville. In 1754 in Pennsylvania, at the beginning of the French and Indian War, Washington’s troops, which included the Native American Tanarcharison, known as Half King, had ambushed those of the commander of Fort Duquesne, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, and killed the French diplomat. For the next twenty years Washington’s reputation in France was mud. However, once he had forced the British to vacate Boston, French officers began to revise their estimate of him, since any man who bested the British was a hero to Anglophobes.

  In evaluating French supplicants for American army positions Deane operated at a double disadvantage: He was deficient in French and unable to discern truth
from embellishment in military résumés. He pleaded for congressional guidance, beset every morning, he wrote, by “a levee of officers … as numerous, if not as splendid, as a prime minister,” featuring “dukes, generals, and marqueses and even bishops, and comtes and chevaliers without number, all of whom are jealous, being out of employ here, or having friends they wish to advance in the cause of liberty.”

  Some of these men appeared to be spectacularly qualified, among them the authors of respected texts on artillery and cavalry, holders of the Croix de Saint-Louis, veterans whose military service dated back to the 1740s and 1750s, and men with recommendations from literary luminaries. Perhaps the most relevantly credentialed applicant was Philippe-Jean-Charles Tronson du Coudray, thirty-eight, scion of an old family, second in command of France’s artillery, the author of L’ordre profond et l’ordre mince, considérés par rapport aux effets de l’artillerie, an expert on the iron chemistry central to forging cannon—and, most critically, the man who had conducted the inventory of France’s excess munitions. To Deane it made sense to send to America, along with the cannons, commanders and technicians who knew how to position, operate, and repair them. As he wrote to Congress:

  Considering the importance of having two hundred pieces of brass cannon with every necessary article for twenty-five thousand men provide[d] with an able and experienced general at the head warranted by the Minister of the Court, with a number of fine and spirited young officers in his train and all without advancing one shilling, is too tempting an offer for me to hesitate about.