London was in a state of nervous, raucous combustibility, a seething hive protest, riot, and disorder. Benjamin Franklin, who had left London just before Dana arrived, described the metropolis as “a scene of lawless riot and confusion, mobs patrolling the streets at midday, some knocking down all who will not shout for ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ . . . a great black cloud ready to burst in a universal tempest.” With so much anger and animosity choking the narrow, twisting streets, Dana felt the city was alive with possibility. Dana and his Massachusetts comrades had long connections with London radicals, and had every reason to believe that Londoners, perhaps the British populace in general, was sympathetic to the American cause that was just then bursting forth in the no longer tranquil fields of Lexington. Dana swiftly made a variety of important contacts, meeting among others the celebrated radical Dr. Richard Price and his fellow future diplomats Arthur and William Lee of Virginia and Stephen Sayre of New York. Much to his disappointment, Dana found that, contrary to American expectations, the tide was turning slowly but irrevocably against the Wilkes faction and the American cause. With little hope of his presence averting all-out war, Dana returned to America in May 1776, bringing with him to Congress news that peace was an increasingly unlikely prospect.9
After the frustrating failures of his London mission, the galloping action of the revolution must have been a welcome relief. Dana threw himself fully into the fray, helping to draft the new Massachusetts constitution as a member of the General Court before traveling to the Continental Congress as one of his state’s delegates in 1776. In Congress, Dana’s bluff honesty, upright character, and radical bona fides meant that he was trusted by all sides of the increasingly factional legislature. He was appointed to the committee that inquired into the military failures that resulted in the loss of Ticonderoga in July of 1777, and to the Committee of Inquiry charged with investigating General Washington’s army at Valley Forge. A faction within the army, headed by Horatio Gates and Thomas Conway, and supported by a sympathetic faction within Congress, hoped to remove Washington from his position of command or at least bring the all-powerful general to heel, subordinating him to the appropriate congressional committee. Many in Congress and army were impatient with Washington’s cautious Fabian strategy, while others thought his almost mythic status among his soldiers held all the harbingers of a military dictatorship. The Committee of Inquiry then was intended to “rap a demi-God over the knuckles” and bring Washington into line.10
Dana’s inclusion, indeed his role as principal negotiator, was primarily a result of a misapprehension by the radical faction within Congress. Largely comprised of Virginians and fellow New Englanders, this faction assumed that Dana was sympathetic to their position, “a thorough republican and an able supporter of our great cause,” in the words of Samuel Adams. Dana might well have been of their opinion at the outset, but he was never a man to jump to hasty conclusions before seeing the situation for himself. After spending weeks in the miserably cold camp, the committee ultimately vindicated Washington, strengthening his position with Congress and fatally undermining what has come to be known as the Conway Cabal. Despite the committee’s findings, Dana remained relatively popular on both sides of the factional divide, though he only narrowly avoided a duel with the ever-hotheaded Alexander Hamilton over a perceived affront in the aftermath of the Conway affair.11
At the outset of the revolution, the American diplomatic corps was largely an ad hoc outfit, cobbled together from whoever happened to be at hand in Europe when the war began. This “militia diplomacy” had served its purpose well enough in the early years of the conflict, but by 1778 it was becoming increasingly clear to many in Congress that more formal, more closely managed foreign missions were required to handle the vital and delicate negotiations with Britain and the European powers. To make matters worse, the dearth of formal representatives in Europe also meant that in the early years of the war, much of America’s diplomacy, and thus a substantial portion of her foreign policy, was left in the hands of France. For many Americans, there were ample reasons to fear that French interests might not align with America’s, and the idea that France might make a separate peace with Britain was always a grave concern. In some corners it was fervently believed that America’s representatives in Europe, Benjamin Franklin especially, were part of the problem, dangerously independent and worryingly sympathetic to French interests. To remedy this lack of formal agents, bring American diplomacy more firmly under the thumb of Congress, and blunt undue French influence, Francis Dana and his old friend John Adams were sent to Europe in 1779.
Adams and Dana arrived in Paris in February 1780, weather-beaten and travel worn. The trip had not been an easy one, even by eighteenth-century standards. Sailing east across the storm-tossed seas of the Atlantic winter, Dana’s ship had been plagued by leaks, dogged by hostile British ships and the loss of one of its escort ships in a sudden gale. The perilous crossing forced the ship to land at Ferrol on the north-western coast of Spain, necessitating a long, arduous overland journey through the mountains of Galicia and over the Pyrenees before turning north to Paris. If the horrendous sea crossing made the feeling of firm ground beneath their feet a blessed relief, the trip through Spain and France may well have made Dana and Adams long for the creaky confines of their battered ship. In Galicia, their carriage crashed; in the Pyrenees, Dana was struck down by mountain sickness; in France they were buffeted by wind and snow; and everywhere they encountered miserable weather, terrible roads, damp, vermin-filled lodgings and inedible fare. For Dana, it was all a mere foretaste of things to come.
When they finally limped into glittering, glamorous Paris after months of arduous travel, Dana and Adams were granted little time to recover. Negotiations with Britain were ongoing, and there was some hope on both sides that terms of peace could be ironed out. But, from Dana’s perspective, the terms offered by Lord North still fell well short of the mark. Dana had been a member of the congressional committee that had rejected North’s earlier “Conciliatory Resolution” in July 1775, and he considered the prime minister’s new attempt—the ill-fated Carlisle Commission of 1778—with scarcely more favor. While direct negotiations with Britain were dragging on unproductively, American diplomats were busy seeking recognition, treaties, and alliances in all the major European capitals, with one notable exception. American agents were present in Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, and Vienna, but in 1780 the United States still lacked a representative in the capital of one of the great and growing powers of Europe: the Russian Empire.
Mere weeks after Dana arrived in Paris, this diplomatic oversight took on a new importance with the announcement of Catherine the Great’s League of Armed Neutrality. Why exactly Francis Dana was chosen for this critical, delicate mission is not entirely clear. When he was named American agent for St. Petersburg in 1780, he had no specific credentials to recommend him for the post. He was not well versed in Russian history, politics or culture, he spoke no Russian, though this was hardly a major hurdle in an age when French was the language of Russian elites and the Russian court. But Dana was no linguist, and even after years spent in Paris, mingling with French officials and attending the court of Louis XVI, his conscious and conscientious efforts to learn the Lingua Franca of European diplomacy had come to naught. But Dana did have some diplomatic experience in Europe, and he could be more easily spared than a John Adams or Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps it was merely the fact he himself had been one of the correspondents who first alerted Congress to the possibility of an alliance of northern and eastern powers that singled Dana out for the mission. Dana also had connections with key members of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, including its chairmen, James Lovell, a fellow son of the Bay State. For Lowell, the choice of Francis Dana made good sense for the sensitive mission to the court of Catherine the Great.
Whatever the rationale, in December of 1780, Francis Dana received his instructions from Congress and began to make preparations for the long journey to St.
Petersburg. Dana’s mission was to have two primary aims: “to engage her Imperial majesty to favor and support the sovereignty and independence of these United States,” and to seek formal admittance of the United States “as party to the convention of neutral powers for maintaining the freedom of commerce.” Beyond this his instructions were left intentionally vague. In an age when communications over such great distances could take months, success would depend on the conditions on the ground and a “variety of sources and contingencies.” Much therefore rested on Dana’s shoulders:
[T]he greatest room must be left for the exercise of your own penetration and assiduity in gaining proper information, and for your prudence and address in improving it the best advantage. Your zeal for the public interest will lead you to embrace every favorable incident and expedient which may recommend these United States to the friendship of her Imperial majesty and her ministers. Your attachment to the honor and independence of your country will restrain you from every concession unbecoming the dignity of a free people.12
On July 7, 1781, after a seemingly interminable delay brought about by French opposition to the Russian mission, Dana finally bid the Netherlands farewell and embarked for the court of Catherine the Great. Traveling in the guise of a private gentleman rather than with the pomp of an official diplomatic mission, Dana’s party would have to remain small and inconspicuous. A servant would be needed as no self-respecting gentleman, especially one who wished to make a favorable impression on a foreign court, would have been seen without at least one. And then there were Dana’s linguistic deficiencies to consider. He would need a secretary fluent in French to assist with the communications with the Russian court and the various foreign diplomats stationed in St. Petersburg. His first choice of secretary dropped out at the last minute, and with French-speaking Americans willing to travel to the frozen edge of Europe thin on the ground in Amsterdam, the task fell on the untested shoulders of the young son of John Adams. Only 14 years old when he joined Dana’s mission, John Quincy Adams could nonetheless boast considerable experience in Europe—having arrived with his father in 1778—and a facility with languages far surpassing Dana’s rudimentary French.
With his little fellowship selected, Dana planned his journey across central Europe. He chose his route through Germany with care, opting for a less common and considerably longer route from Amsterdam through Cologne, Frankfurt, and Leipzig to Berlin in order to avoid having to cross through the Electorate of Hanover. Hanover and Britain had been connected by a common monarch since 1714, when George, the Elector of Hanover, became George I of Great Britain and Ireland. Because of this connection, Hanover had sided with Britain in all of the previous conflicts of the eighteenth century and continued to do so throughout the American War. Hanover was thus enemy territory and if an American agent was discovered traveling across the Electorate, not only would news of his mission to Russia quickly leak to Britain, but “seizure of person and papers” was sure to follow. Circumventing Hanover, Dana traveled through many of the smaller states of the Holy Roman Empire, pausing at the Free Cities of Cologne, a major trading center on the Rhine, and Frankfurt on the River Main, before crossing central Germany to reach Leipzig in the Electorate of Saxony.
While still in the Netherlands, Dana purchased a coach for his embassy and on July 9 set off from Utrecht for Nijmegen on the German border some 50 miles away. The trip south across the Rhine by rope ferry, along the high dykes that kept the River Waal at bay and eventually across the river on a movable bridge of boats, took about ten hours in all, a largely pleasant ride over good roads and flat terrain. From Nijmegen they hugged the banks of the Rhine for 100 miles, through Dusseldorf to Cologne, riding sometimes on one side of the great river and sometimes on the other as it twisted its way through the German plains. Dusseldorf was famed for its art collection, but Dana was not a tourist, and besides, he had had his “Curiosity of that sort” more than sated in London, Paris, and Antwerp. He was no more impressed with Cologne. It was “very ancient” and quite large, but compared to the tidy, rationally planned streets of Boston and Philadelphia also “irregular, and dirty” with decrepit house marring narrow twisting streets. Leaving Cologne behind, they traveled some 70 miles to Bonn, where the staid plains gave way to the romantic mountains and steep, vineyard-clad river valleys of the Rhine, and on to Koblenz. From Koblenz Dana finally took his leave of the Rhine, turning east across the heart of Germany to Frankfurt and Leipzig.13
Although his exact route through central Germany is not entirely clear, it is almost certain that Dana would have traversed the territories of Hesse-Kassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, and perhaps Hesse-Hanau, and Ansbach-Bayreuth. As he traveled through these myriad states and principalities of the Holy Roman Empire Dana must have been shocked to realize that, although this was technically a land at peace, a land far away from the fighting in North America, the specter of war still haunted the German lands. As Dana himself well knew, these states, along with Anhalt-Zerbst and Waldeck, were in fact embroiled in the conflict in North America. They were the native lands of the dreaded “Hessians” that plagued the imaginations of Americans everywhere, filling their nightmares with images of brutish and subhuman “Huns.”14
As early as 1777, American observers in Europe began to notice the ruinous effects the war was having in many German states. From his post in Berlin at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Arthur Lee informed his colleagues on the Committee of Foreign Affairs in Philadelphia:
The consequence of the Prince of Hesse’s conduct is beginning to be a lesson to the other German princes, so that it is not probable they will draw any more supplies from them. The country of Hesse is depopulating so fast, from the apprehension of being forced into this service, that the women are obliged to cultivate the lands. At present, therefore, the foreign resources of Great Britain seem to be exhausted.
A few years later, a returning soldier was shocked to discover that women were manning the oars on transport vessels in port cities further north, forced by poverty and a dearth of men to take on traditionally male employment. It seemed as if the lands themselves were being squeezed dry, drained of their men, leaving behind an impoverished land of Amazons in central Europe. The young men, and many not so young, were gone, shipped off in their thousands to America to crush the colonial uprising and fight the wars of George III of Britain.15
In 1775, Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, had agreed to supply Britain with a force of 12,000 troops—augmented by yearly replacements of the dead and wounded—to quell the growing rebellion in America. The negotiations had begun in 1774, when it was still hoped that the deepening crisis in the colonies could be averted, but it was only after the shock of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 that pen was finally put to paper, with similar contracts made with other German princes following quickly. Brunswick would agree to supply some 6,000 men, Waldeck 1,200, Hesse-Hansau 2,500, Ansbach-Bayreuth 2,500, and Anhalt-Zerbst 1,200.
It would have come as no surprise to those familiar with European warfare and diplomacy that George III would turn to Germany for mercenaries to fight his battles. As George was also Elector of Hanover, he would likewise have drawn men and materials from that principality for the fight across the Atlantic. Indeed, Hanover and Britain had long-standing relationships with many of the smaller German states. Since the days of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation many of these states, Hesse-Kassel prominent among them, had been part of a “Protestant System” of alliances with Britain, the Netherlands, and later Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden, which sought to counterbalance the Catholic powers of France and the Habsburgs. These alliances continued through the near constant warfare of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently in the Seven Years’ War. Small states like Hesse-Kassel could not hope to survive long without such alliances, nor could they afford to contribute financially, as Britain preferred to do. Instead, they contributed by renting their armies as mercenary forces to their traditional allies, enterin
g into thirty such subsidy treaties between 1702 and 1763.16
The Soldatenhandel, or mercenary trade, made a considerable impact in the German states. Hesse-Kassel, the most prominent and prolific mercenary state, quickly became proportionately the most militarized state in Europe, with a standing army of 12,000 and an equal number of militiamen out of a total population of only 275,000. Incredibly, 1 out of every 15 citizens was a member of the military in some capacity and a full quarter of all households were represented in the army, a ratio twice that of notoriously militarized Prussia. Standing armies were anathema in Britain, potential tools of monarchical despotism, so when the American rebellion broke out in 1775, Britain looked to states that already possessed armies trained and ready to go. Germany would once more be the human supply depot for British foreign adventures.17
For states like Hesse-Kassel, the choice to sell soldiers to the British, familiar though it was, was hardly a free decision. Unlike Germany today, in the eighteenth century German principalities like Hesse-Kassel were deeply poor. Britain itself had witnessed this poverty first-hand earlier in the century, as waves of desperate German peasants, tens of thousands of “poor Palatines,” had drifted into the country, many eventually making their way to settlements in America. During the Seven Years’ War many of these states found themselves stuck between the opposing forces of France and Prussia, their cities looted and countryside ravaged by the constant combat. Despite official neutrality, Hesse was invaded by the French on three separate occasions during the war and its largest cities conquered and re-conquered again and again. The capital of Kassel changed hands four times and the second city of Marburg was tossed between the belligerents an astounding fifteen times before the fighting finally ceased in 1763. The economy of Hesse-Kassel, like that of many of its neighbors, was almost completely ruined. Fortunately, the worst of the consequences were offset by the subsidy paid by the British for the use of Hesse’s army during the war. By 1770, however, the British subsidy had been paid in full, so when a Europe-wide harvest failure hit that same year, the result was famine and financial crisis. The price of grain doubled in 1770, tripled in 1771, and sextupled in 1772. In the capital, mortality rates reached 70 per cent while the principality’s 7,500 Jews faced waves of persecution and expulsion from the countryside as peasants and officials alike turned once more to familiar scapegoats. When news of trouble in America reached the continent in 1774 then Frederick II must have greeted the possibility of a new mercenary convention with considerable relief. It was, it seemed, the only way to save his people.18
To Begin the World Over Again Page 25
