Meanwhile, Francis Dana watched helplessly from his interminable exile in St. Petersburg as Catherine and Potemkin used the cover of his own nation’s struggle for independence from an imperial power to subjugate a formerly autonomous people to Russia’s imperial will. There was little he could do. He had been frustrated at every turn, shunned by the Russian government, outflanked by his British counterpart, undermined by his French allies, and his advice ignored by his own government. It had become clear that nothing he could do would change his plight. The Russians would not sign a treaty with America, would not force peace negotiations nor even recognize American independence while they were occupied in the Crimea. The important diplomacy would happen elsewhere, in Paris, in London, and in The Hague. It must have seemed to Dana that he had suffered humiliation and shivered through three Russian winters for nothing. In a despondent state he wrote to Elbridge Gerry, “I am weary of the life I lead here, and shou’d infallibly have quitted this situation . . . had I not entertained some hopes . . . we might have peace.”56
By January 1783, with peace now finally at hand, he began to request permission to leave his post. He had had his fill of European diplomacy and with the European system more broadly. “I am sick, sick to the heart,” he confided to Adams, “of the delicacies and whims of European politicks.” In the months after the Peace of Paris, Dana had at last begun the heavy work of negotiation with the Russian ministry, but though American independence was officially recognized in June 1783, he had still failed to secure an audience with the tsarina, and a treaty was still nowhere on the horizon. Resigned to failure and fearful that the Crimean conflict would lead to a new European-wide war, Dana began to develop a new philosophy for American foreign relations, one that would be adopted by many of the men who had spent the war in European diplomacy. In a letter to John Adams he advocated an isolationist policy, an embryonic Monroe Doctrine. “We have a world to ourselves,” he told Adams, and that critical separation allowed the United States to “form a system of politics for ourselves,” a new balance of power distinct and isolated from the quagmire of Europe. American isolationism, a regular feature of American politics for the next 150 years, was born out of America’s first experience on the world stage.57
In May 1787, a resplendent Catherine the Great began a triumphal procession through her new-won possessions on the Black Sea. The six-month cruise down the Dnieper River to the Crimea, organized by the ever-present Potemkin, was a lavish spectacle designed to demonstrate and consolidate Russian power in the region. Catherine and her guests—princes, ambassadors, and even her ally Joseph II in disguise—made a stately progress downriver on a series of royal barges. There were even rumors that Potemkin had constructed fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper to create the impression that the depopulated wastelands of the previous war were in fact thriving. The “Potemkin villages” were assembled by and peopled with his own men on the empress’s approach and disassembled and reconstructed again further downriver once the imperial party had passed.
The sumptuous statement of intent did not go unnoticed by the Ottomans, who were outraged by the effrontery of the procession. Still smarting from their losses in 1774 and 1783, the Ottomans had reason to fear the ambitions of the Russian empress and the Austrian emperor. Word had reached Istanbul of a so-called Greek Plan devised by Potemkin. Joseph and Catherine had secretly agreed to conquer the Ottoman Empire, partition its territory between them, and establish a new Christian Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital. Catherine’s grandiose imperial ambitions were nothing new for a Russia tsar. The Romanovs had long claimed an illustrious pedigree, asserting descent from Roman emperors even as rulers of a relative backwater. As their power grew, however, so too did their genealogical claims. Ivan III had married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor in 1472, and by the sixteenth century the increasing power of Muscovy was burnished by a new claim of descent from the Emperor Augustus. In the seventeenth century the Romanovs’ claim to be the rightful heirs of Rome’s founding emperor and its last emperor was officially recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Orthodox Church. Since then, Russia’s inexorable expansion had been cloaked in imperial purple, justified as the recovery of its rulers’ rightful patrimony as the true heirs of Rome. Before the eighteenth century such pretensions had been little more than empty boasts; the Ottomans remained firmly ensconced in the former capital of the Byzantine Empire. As Catherine chipped away at the borders of a weakened Ottoman Empire, however, the recovery of Constantinople and the crowning of a Russian Roman empress began to seem a real and frightening possibility. When Catherine’s second grandson was born in 1779, she used the occasion to make her designs clear. The child, whom Catherine hoped would one day sit on the imperial throne in Istanbul, was named Constantine after the founder of Christian Constantinople and silver coins were minted bearing a depiction of the Hagia Sophia—the iconic Byzantine cathedral the Ottomans had converted into a mosque. The sultan had every reason to be wary.58
By 1787 physical signs of Russia’s Byzantine ambitions had already appeared. Along with the renaming of Crimean cities, by 1786 the Russians had constructed a new cathedral at Kherson—not so subtly named St. Catherine’s—designed to highlight Russia’s claims to be the inheritors of the Byzantine Empire. Catherine’s Crimean procession seemed to confirm the Ottomans’ worst fears, and, with British and French backing, in August 1787 the sultan demanded that Russia evacuate the Crimea. Catherine, however, was not cowed—indeed, she welcomed the renewal of war as a means to put her Greek Plan in motion—and Russia swiftly declared war on the Ottomans in August 1787, with Austria following suit in 1788.
Though they vocally supported the Ottoman Empire in its contest with an emergent Russia, Britain and France were in no condition to offer much more than words of encouragement. Once more, Russia had surveyed the European scene and found that the impact of the American War had left her with a free hand in the east. On paper, France’s fight against Britain seemed a smashing success, but beneath the surface lurked the makings of a crisis. The war had been ruinously expensive. When the war began France’s minister of finance Jacques Necker was determined to fund France’s military without recourse to raising taxes. Instead, he opted to finance almost the entirety of the war effort through loans, mainly from foreign bankers. This was fully in keeping with the latest thinking on government finances, and echoed both British practice and the opinions of the Spanish minister Francisco Saavedra among others. Between 1777 and his downfall in 1781, Necker borrowed 520 million livres to pay for the war. His successor as finance minister, Fleury continued Necker’s practice and borrowed a further 250 million livres between 1781 and 1782. By this point, however, France’s credit was suspect, and further loans were only successfully secured after raising taxes and borrowing against revenue. Even after the war ended, the new finance minister Calonne was forced to continue borrowing just to ensure interest payments could be met. In total, the American War cost France 1.6 billion livres (not including interest)—more than twice the annual revenue of France—resulting in a gap between revenue and expenditure of 160 million livres per year. In all, 91 per cent of France’s war costs were covered by loans, but substantial borrowing came at a cost France was ill suited to bear. Necker and his successors were forced to borrow at high rates of interest, at 4.8–6.5 per cent, almost twice the rate the British were paying. The ruinous interest rates were compounded by rapid repayment schedules, with many loans due within ten years.59
Paying down this massive burden of war debt would have been difficult enough if military spending had been drastically cut once peace was made, but, ironically, France’s ostensible success in the war had convinced the government that global competition with Britain was not only possible but vital if France were to reap the rewards of victory and recover its place as a world power. Now certain that the policy of naval expansion had been decisive in the war, and with its beleaguered empire still in place but under
threat, France committed itself to defense of its imperial territory and continued expansion of its navy. France’s naval expenditure had risen fourfold in the years between 1776 and 1783, a trend that continued apace even in peace-time. The most potent symbol of this heedless naval growth was the transfiguration of the harbor of Cherbourg. Fired by the navy’s recent success against the British and blinded by the technical wonders of Enlightenment science, 28 million livres was spent between 1784 and 1789 to construct a fanciful system of defense. More than ninety oak cones, measuring 142 feet in diameter and rising 60 feet above the water, were to be partially submerged and chained together as firing platforms. The public was swept away by the impressive feat, and the king even made a personal visit to the site (a rare treat), but despite the great cost, the system was an impractical and expensive disaster.60
In many ways, defeat would have proved more beneficial for France than its triumph. Unlike its great rival Britain, which could now demobilize a significant segment of its military, France’s geographical position meant that it had to bear the enormous cost of a navy at the same time as it funded an army of 150,000 soldiers or more to defend its land borders. In the eighteenth century, no other European power attempted to be both a continental military power and a global naval power. France was overstretched. It was not just participation in the American Revolution that crippled France, but victory itself.
There had been some hope that access to American markets would help fill French coffers emptied by the war, but almost immediately, indeed before the pen of peace had even been put to paper, there were signs of the United States’ rapid reorientation back toward Britain. The degrading wartime experience of American diplomats in Europe had taught men like Francis Dana and his friend John Adams a healthy distrust of European politics in general, and the French in particular. During the war Dana, Adams, and their supporters had grown increasingly wary of the slippery French foreign minister Vergennes, who had done his best to manipulate America’s novice diplomatic corps throughout the conflict. For years they had felt that France’s commitment to the interests of the United States was only ever skin deep and that France would pursue its own interests to the detriment of America. As the end of the war loomed, Vergennes once more went to work to shape and mold the outcome of the coming peace and urged the Americans to allow France to lead joint negotiations with Britain. The Francophobe, isolationist faction led by Adams and Dana saw the offer for what it was and pushed for a separate American treaty with Britain.
The result was two separate treaties with Britain, one American, one French, and the first sign of a fracture between the erstwhile allies. It also signaled that French hopes of replacing Britain as America’s preeminent trading partner would come to naught. Vergennes’ hopes of recouping the costs of intervention through expanded trade with the new United States had seemed entirely feasible during the last years of the war. Between 1779 and 1782, French exports to North America had expanded greatly, rising in value to more than 11 million livres per annum. At the same time, the disruption of American shipping meant that French imports of American goods declined, creating a favorable French trade balance with the United States. France’s success in the war also meant that it gained or regained potentially lucrative colonial holdings in Tobago, St. Lucia, and the Senegal River. These gains, however, would prove to be only temporary.61
In its separate treaty negotiations with the United States, Britain did its best to recapture its place as America’s most important trade partner. To this end, it chose as its negotiators Richard Oswald, a Scottish merchant and slave trader with deep American ties and interests from Nova Scotia to Florida, and David Hartley, a vocal critic of Britain’s war policy and a friend of Benjamin Franklin. The British also offered the United States generous territorial concessions in Appalachia and the Mississippi basin as a means of winning back economic ties and creating new American markets for British goods. It was clear enough to Vergennes that Britain hoped to use the peace negotiations as the first tool for recovering America’s commerce. “The English,” he fumed, “buy peace rather than make it.”
He was right to be concerned. Before the ink on the treaty had time to dry, problems developed in the trade relationship between France and the United States. For a start, the countries differed in their interpretation of the Franco-America Treaty of 1778. The French insisted that the treaty stipulated that French commerce receive preferential treatment in American ports. The Americans, committed to free trade, argued that the treaty only guaranteed that all foreign trade was treated equally, an interpretation enshrined in American law when the First Congress passed a law that levied equal customs duties on all foreign vessels. Many in France, Vergennes among them, saw this as a shocking display of ingratitude given France’s role in securing American independence, and demanded that France be exempted, but to no avail. France, however, deserved some of the blame for their failure to secure a greater piece of America’s trade. France’s own monopolistic protections, including duties on American imports, did much to undermine Franco-American commerce. Furthermore, as Lafayette discovered when he investigated France’s export trade, many French manufacturers and merchants were slow to change and failed to adapt their products for the American market.
In all likelihood, Britain would have recovered its dominance of transatlantic trade, even if French manufacturers had been quicker to adapt. French exports had increased during the war, but they had never come close to displacing the trade between Britain and America. Throughout the war, American merchants had continued to trade with their British counterparts, ensuring that the value of Britain’s American trade remained more than double that of the French, even at the height of the war. After the war, while Americans bought much less from French merchants than they had during the war, Britain’s trade, no longer held back by the conflict, surged. British and American merchants were quick to resume the long-established relationships and networks that had existed before the war. British manufacturers and merchants were already familiar with the American market and its demands, and thus were easily able to outmaneuver their French rivals. Britain, wrote the French economic writer Tanguy de la Boissière, had “lost nothing but the sterile right of sovereignty.” Its economic dominance remained untouched.62
Even France’s gains in the West Indies proved ephemeral. France’s Caribbean possessions formed the most lucrative part of its imperial economy. Using almost all available land for cash crops—especially sugar and tobacco—made economic sense for the colonists, but it also necessitated the importation of foodstuffs and other supplies that had been crowded out by the sugar monoculture. Legally, supplying the islands was a French monopoly, but in the post-war period most of this trade was captured by American smugglers, who used the wealth gained by selling supplies to re-export French sugar and coffee, undermining another supposed monopoly. To make matters worse, at the same time that French exports to America declined to about 1.8 million livres annually, French imports from America expanded rapidly to over 20 million livres per year. The wartime trade surplus evaporated, leaving France with a growing deficit and draining the country of much-needed specie. More galling still, America used much of this trade surplus with France to purchase British goods and products, thus impoverishing their former ally while they enriched France’s foremost foe. The French consul in Boston, Jean Toscan, spoke for many when he complained bitterly that their former allies “now send their vessels to England taking to their manufacturers the gold and silver France spent in America . . . to help them win their independence.”63
As the years passed and France’s commerce failed to expand to the hoped-for heights, more desperate measures were adopted to shore up French trade. In 1786, France signed a free trade agreement with Britain—the so-called Eden Agreement—in the hope that access to British markets would prove a boon to the French economy. Fatally for France, however, the manufactures churned out by an increasingly industrial Britain were cheaper than their French counterpar
ts, which undermined French industry, and angered French manufacturers, who came to blame the trade agreement for many of their ills. France had hoped that intervening in the American War would enrich France and beggar Britain, but, as was becoming clear in the 1780s, it was the French economy that was crippled by the conflict. In a few short years the French financial crisis would help to push the French people to follow the example of the American Revolution and begin a revolution of their own. The French Revolution would throw Europe into yet more turmoil, but it would also ensure that Russia’s resumed assault on the Ottoman Empire would escape French opposition.
The German states, drained and depopulated by the mercenary trade, were also ill equipped to check Russia and Austrian aggression in the east. Sweden and Denmark, Russia’s traditional rivals in northern Europe, were likewise too preoccupied by the effects of the American War to offer much in the way of opposition. Scandinavia’s wartime economic prosperity proved short-lived, with peace bringing economic stagnation and growing frustration with King Gustav’s increasingly authoritarian policies. Some of these critics of rampant absolutism turned to the American Revolution as a source of monarchical critique. Pehr af Lund, for instance, wrote in warning that the fact that “there is one place on earth where a man can be free from his chains . . . [should] frighten despots and hold them in rein.” Bengt Linder wrote in praise of the “Brutian Washington,” who “snatches a bloody scepter from the tyrant’s hand,” while Carl Nordenskiöld proclaimed that “the independence of America for all time shall cause wise rulers to govern their subjects under the banner of freedom, for America has taught Nations to know their rights . . .”64
Among the officers most deeply influenced by their experience in the American War was a Finnish soldier named Göran Manus Sprengtporten. An officer in the Finnish corps, he had become disillusioned with his lack of personal advancement and by Gustav’s absolutism. As a result, he left Scandinavia in 1780 for France, where he joined the French expedition bound for the United States. He returned to Europe in 1782, full of the ideas of the American Revolution and intent on Finnish independence from Sweden. Back in France in 1782, Sprengtporten came into contact with Benjamin Franklin, who helped to cultivate in him a concrete desire to see his Finnish homeland free from Swedish despotism. For Sprengtporten, “North America’s independence” gave him hope that “Finland might also be separated from Sweden and become independent.” Suffused with the possibility, he began to preach to his fellow Finnish officers, many of whom came to see him as a “true patriot, worthy of treading in the footsteps of Washington.” In 1785, he entered into the service of the Netherlands and quickly became involved in the Dutch Patriot Party. He drafted a constitution for the “Republic of the United Provinces of Finland” that combined the aristocratic elements of the Swedish constitution Gustav had replaced in 1772 with aspects of Dutch republicanism and the United States Articles of Confederation. He even approached the Duke of Södermanland about ruling an independent Finland, but the duke wisely declined. There was still insufficient support for his plan in Sweden, so in 1785 he presented his plans for an independent Finland under Russian protection to the Russian minister in the Netherlands and then the Russian minister in Stockholm. Despite these efforts, Sprengtporten’s autonomist movement faltered before it ever really got off the ground, as the example of Crimea and Russia’s treatment of its Baltic possessions soured many Finns on the prospect of a Russian-controlled Finland. Sprengtporten temporarily abandoned the plan and accepted a military commission in Russia, but his movement would return when Sweden mobilized for an unpopular war with Russia later in the 1780s.65
To Begin the World Over Again Page 29
