Deane sailed for Europe in March. Three months later, Morris sent a second protégé abroad, this time to Martinique in the West Indies. The island was France’s gateway to New World trade and a booming hub of international commerce. Its inhabitants’ eagerness to sell weapons to the rebels under the protection of French neutrality was a magnet to the Secret Committee and a thorn to Great Britain.
Morris’s appointee, William Bingham, presented himself on Martinique as a private businessman. Born to wealth, Bingham was well educated and worldly, possessed a composed efficiency belying his twenty-four years, and displayed none of Deane’s compulsive personal and financial turmoil. He quickly secured military wares for shipment home on Congress’s account, disseminated American propaganda and upbeat war reports to French officials, and began monitoring activities of the French fleet in the West Indies “and whether they mean to act for or against America.” On Congress’s recommendation, he partnered with local merchants to promote his entrepreneurial cover and solicited “private adventurers” of any nationality to raid British shipping for profit.
The triangle formed by Bingham and Deane on each side of the Atlantic and Morris in Philadelphia became a busy backchannel of financial opportunism and patriotic zeal, elements never more entwined than in the men’s involvement in privateering. But Congress’s embrace of privateering’s quintessential “private adventurers” would sour when rumors arose late in the war that Morris, Deane, and Bingham had invested in warships with public money and skimmed the profits for themselves.
By then their circumstances had drastically diverged. Morris was still a financial colossus, though overambition was poised to undo him. Deane was ruined—scorned by his nation and friends. Only Bingham withstood the storm of indignation, for which he thanked the obscurity of Martinique. “If my services had been more conspicuous I might perhaps have had much to fear.” He didn’t mean fear from the British. It was an American “voice of calumny” that assailed him and his colleagues, “the pursuits,” Bingham said, “of the envious.”
Yet in Deane’s case at least, a cautionary note written before the war suggests he might have blamed himself as well. “I have known very honest men, when unfortunate, to suffer in their character and never retrieve their affairs only because of their being careless.” It was a prescient observation, for though Deane’s honesty remains debatable, his carelessness and misfortune are certain.
His assignment in France was twofold. First, he was to arrange weapons shipments from French suppliers on the promise of future remittance with American commodities, which is to say on unsecured credit extended to a lone agent who had few funds, no official title, no political power, and no authorization from the full Congress, which had been kept in the dark about his mission. Second, he was to parlay a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, internationally famous for his study of electricity, into face-to-face meetings with French officials in order to gauge their willingness to strike a military and commercial alliance with America.
The obstacles were considerable. Whatever social refinement Deane possessed was superficial and not indicative of a nuanced intellect suited to negotiate, in a language he barely spoke, the maze of indirection and subtext that characterizes all diplomacy, and which was the particular forté of French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most powerful and adroit statesman in Europe.
In Deane’s favor, however, was France’s bitter antipathy toward Britain. Its fall from world dominance resulting from defeat in the Seven Years’ War had been a point of national humiliation ever since the Peace of Paris was signed in 1763. The wish to get even in any way possible made Vergennes receptive to Deane’s overtures.
The French king, Louis XVI, was only nineteen when he’d assumed the throne in 1774. Cautious in his domestic rule, he was likewise skittish about provoking war and thus disinclined to push the limits of international neutrality agreements, which for many years had balanced the power in Europe between Britain and Portugal on one side and France and Spain on the other.
Vergennes held a bolder view. At fifty-eight, experienced and wily, he manipulated policy toward his objectives and then presented it to the young king as inevitable. There was no disagreement within France that a Britain shorn of its American colonies would be a fine thing. Out of deference to his monarch’s sensitivities, however, the foreign minister couldn’t yet openly back the American rebellion. But he was prepared, in his words, “to connive at certain things.”
Even before meeting Deane he’d approved a loan of 1 million livres (about $10 million) to Roderigue Hortalez & Company, a dummy firm created to funnel covert aid to America. Spain, as eager as France to see Britain beaten, matched the loan, as did a consortium of friends of the company’s founder, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.
A playwright (he later wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville) and political gadfly, Beaumarchais had a zest for capitalism, court intrigues, and American liberty. Vergennes designated him Deane’s unofficial liaison to local arms dealers, and beginning in the summer of 1776 Beaumarchais and Deane began acquiring military supplies to ship to the Continental Army. They took customary commissions and planned to replenish the Hortalez accounts once Congress’s commodity shipments, especially tobacco, began arriving from America.
The company’s funds were almost all gone when a letter came in late July from the Secret Committee apologizing “that we have been so unfortunate in our remittances to you.” The Royal Navy was raising havoc with American transports and the situation was getting worse. “Hitherto you will think yourself unlucky in these untoward circumstances,” the letter warned, adding brightly, “but this must not dispirit us.”
Deane panicked. Hortalez was a shell, after all, a fiction necessitated by neutrality agreements among the governments of France, Spain, and Britain. Loans ostensibly made to the company were in reality extended to Congress on the basis of its promise, certified by Deane, to deliver valuable cargoes as repayment. Delay could prove “a mortal stab to my whole proceedings,” he wrote. Beaumarchais, having promised Vergennes and others a multifold return on their investment, was no less exposed. In the shadow of disaster their friendship was cemented.
It was a remarkable collaboration of two incorrigible yet idealistic mavericks. Born into the watchmaking Caron family, the forty-four-year-old Frenchman had, like Deane, initiated his social climb by marrying a rich widow; later he added “de Beaumarchais” for noble effect. Along with self-invention he shared Deane’s romantic view of the role he might play in American independence. Deane relished his place “on the great stage of Europe” and the boost his supply deals could give the war effort; his initial sales pitch to Vergennes had included a vow that aiding America would bring forth between their countries “the most lasting, extensive, and beneficial commercial intercourse and connection that the world has ever seen.”
Beaumarchais was no less expansive in courting America’s trust and, he hoped, its exclusive reliance upon him as its arms broker. “Look upon my house,” he wrote Congress, “as the chief of all useful operations to you in Europe, and my person as one of the most zealous partisans of your cause.”
His characterization of himself as “useful” echoed Deane’s desire to be of “the greatest and most extensive usefulness,” and for each man the fulfillment of his wish proved a harsh blessing. Though they hoped to get rich through commissions and private ventures stemming from their government work, their devotion to American liberty was real and their belief that they were indispensable to its attainment honest if overblown. The recklessness with which they ran their operation—inflated promises, shoddy accounting—was excusable in their minds as incidental to the integrity of their intentions.
Historians generally rate Deane as little more than a “catspaw” or “venal dupe.” His early acquisition of French military aid is judged a minor feat in light of Vergennes’s predisposition toward any plan to take Britain down, and the self-intere
st so much on his mind tends to blight even his nobler moments. Yet during his first months alone in France Deane was a novice gambler at a high-stakes table with very few cards to play, who somehow stayed in the game for the good of his country.
His superiors in Congress were no help. Months went by without a word. “The want of instructions or intelligence or remittances has sunk our credit to nothing,” he anxiously wrote after spending millions of borrowed dollars on supplies for twenty-five-thousand troops. His partner, Beaumarchais, was undaunted (“this is depressing, but depression is a long way from discouragement”), but Deane agonized that French officials were getting “extremely uneasy” about the lack of positive news and financial reciprocation from America.
Unaware of the commitments already made in its name, the Secret Committee ordered him in October to entreat the French court for further loans “sufficient to dispatch immediately very considerable quantities of stuff.” As exactly how to accomplish this without collateral, “We hope you’ll be able to influence them by one means or other.”
Forced to find new ways of enticing suppliers, Deane relied less on Franco-American solidarity and instead fell back on his roots in market capitalism, a shift he admitted to Congress. “Politics and my business are almost inseparably connected.” His point was that mere salesmanship no longer sufficed. With zero credibility left, he had to provide instant rewards in order to attract money and materiel.
One of his ploys originally had been suggested by Arthur Lee, the Secret Committee’s representative in London. Young and ambitious, Lee had met Beaumarchais in 1775 and conceived with him the idea of a commercial front as a means secretly to aid American fighters and get rich to boot, an idea later put into practice (to Lee’s furious envy) by Beaumarchais and Deane through Hortalez & Company. Beaumarchais subsequently urged another of Lee’s proposals on Deane—to accept the many petitions of European aristocrats, “especially soldiers of fortune,” to become Continental Army officers.
Though most of the applicants were vainglorious ne’er-do-wells seeking high commands to suit their egos, Deane, in taking up the idea, believed much of their braggadocio. A colleague in America sniped that he was “unable to say nay to any Frenchman who called himself count or chevalier.” Deane went so far as to affront Congress with a suggestion that placing all its forces under the command of a proven foreigner might “give character and credit to your military, and strike perhaps a greater panic in our enemies.” Its military detriment aside, however, his recruitment of foreign officers ingratiated him with influential European families (“the best ones of their class”) at a time when he had little else to offer.
Marquis de Lafayette, who joined the Americans through Deane’s auspices in 1777, was one success, but by and large the foreigners were dead weight and aroused only annoyance when they appeared at Washington’s headquarters waving generals’ commissions authorized by an American civilian a world away in Europe. “Harassed to death with applications,” Deane signed up almost twenty of these poseurs that fall. He surmised that their reception was chilly but believed his dire situation warranted the inconvenience back home. “I have made one excuse after another until my invention is exhausted.” He had to grant favors if he expected to obtain them. Informing Congress of one officer he accepted in November while negotiating a shipment of two hundred brass cannon, he acknowledged bashfully, “I hope the terms I have made with him will not be thought exorbitant, as he was the principal means of engaging the stores.”
Privateering posed another way of attracting support. From his earliest days in France, Deane had been beseeched by “persons of the first property” to license private warships to seize British prizes and sell them in America. (Neutrality agreements forbade French ports from receiving prizes.) Against a backdrop of worsening war news—in early fall the Continentals were driven at great loss from Long Island and Manhattan, and by November important bastions at Fort Lee and Fort Washington had been overrun by the British, setbacks Deane downplayed in Paris as “skirmish rather than battle”—a bright spot was the success of the privateers. Europeans following the war with intense interest agreed that “what is certain on the side of the Americans is their activity at sea and the ships of the crown they are capturing.”
Silas Deane, shown here at the height of his prestige as a freewheeling diplomat-entrepreneur in Paris, dabbled in politics, privateering, and anti-British terrorism. His compulsive leaps from deal to deal left him with many enemies and few friends when his fortunes took a fall.
With the same visions of wealth that dazzled the New Englanders, European shipowners offered Deane a piece of their privateering profits in exchange for his signature, but he was reluctant to act on his own authority. In frantic letters to Congress he proposed a series of schemes such as fomenting native revolts in the British West Indies, recruiting disgruntled British fishermen on the Grand Banks, razing the Scottish port of Glasgow “by a single frigate,” and sending Deane “curious American productions” such as insect collections or “a few barrels of apples” as gifts for whichever “certain personage” he was trying to woo at the moment; for the French queen he suggested saddle horses since she was “fond of parade, and I believe wishes a war.”
His repeated requests for blank privateer commissions came across as another mad notion at first, but he was adamant about their strategic potential and their efficacy in forging partnerships with potentially helpful Europeans. “You may have any number of recruits in Europe for such ships,” he wrote his superiors excitedly, “and by sending out commissions have individuals join you in the adventure under your flag.” Yet as 1776 wound down, no commissions came.
Frustrated on every front, he appeared powerless and out of touch to his French hosts. Underscoring that impression was the lack of Congressional confirmation, four months after the fact, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Rumors of the document had reached Europe in August, yet without a copy in hand he had no basis to refashion his requests for military aid as coming “from the United Independent States of America” rather than an outlaw band of British rebels.
He appreciated the legal significance of the Declaration overseas as Congress did not, for it directly related to his hope of unleashing foreign privateers against Britain. The point had been brought home earlier that fall when a Massachusetts privateer working the eastern Atlantic had entered the Spanish port of Bilbao to put its captives ashore. Britain had immediately demanded the skipper, John Lee of Newburyport, be handed over as a pirate.
Deane had realized at once that an important precedent hung in the balance. A Spanish decision to uphold Lee’s commission would implicitly acknowledge American sovereignty. “If the reverse, the only ground on which the determination can go against the captain is that the United States of America or their Congress are not known in Europe otherwise than by common fame in newspapers.” Official acknowledgment was key because privateers sailing without a legitimate flag were plain criminals fit for hanging, a fate few mariners cared to risk.
He sought Vergennes’s help and again found him sympathetic for reasons purely in France’s interest. The foreign minister earlier had praised “the order issued by Congress to its shipowners to chase indiscriminately all English vessels in all parts of the world. The desire to make captures more easily may attract privateers in the European seas where the English are less on their guard.” Vergennes knew that Spain’s support of Captain Lee would encourage anti-British privateers (of any nationality) to seek shelter in the ports of continental Europe, making evasion from the Royal Navy easier and prosecution by British courts harder. And short of a French declaration of war, anything that undermined Britain’s effort to subdue the American uprising was fine by him.
When Spain indeed decided, at Vergennes’s behest, to protect Lee from British justice, Deane called it “striking proof of what I have so positively asserted of the good disposition of both these courts.” Coupled with the arrival in November of a copy of the
Declaration of Independence, the decision led him to predict that local ports would spawn dozens of privateers once Congress supplied the commissions. “Hasten them out I pray you,” he implored in a letter of December 3. By then he’d learned enough about Old World treaties to understand their fragility. “This is a capital stroke and must bring on a war.” The war he sought was between Britain and France. Mutual mistrust was the tinder to which privateers might apply a spark, especially now that their right to lay up in harbors just across the English Channel had been publicly affirmed.
On the day Deane wrote that letter, Benjamin Franklin landed in France with instructions from Congress to head up the diplomatic mission with Deane and Arthur Lee as his co-commissioners. With a keener sense of the strength of America’s negotiating position, Franklin took an artful, more confident approach. He knew that France very much wanted an alliance with America and simply feared committing too soon lest the rebellion fail and Britain, bruised but intact, turn a vengeful eye on those who’d meddled in its affairs. He also knew the French objective of a diminished, defeated rival carried a nightmare alternative of Anglo-American reconciliation and Britain’s subsequent rebirth as an invigorated power.
Franklin dropped Deane’s hard-sell style and let silence and feigned ambivalence draw France into making a move. In his first meeting with Vergennes, he listed the advantages to France that would result from American independence before dangling the possibility of rapprochement with Britain “unless some powerful aid is given us or some strong diversion is made in our favor.” Moreover, France had better act quickly if it wanted to be America’s preferred trading partner. “The opportunity of securing all the advantages of that commerce, which in time will be immense, now presents itself. If neglected, it may never return.”
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