Later he played the same angle when it became evident that British spies were passing to London inside information of his activities in Paris. He made no effort to root them out or avoid them, preferring to foster, for French consumption, an impression of collusion and potentially warming relations between the rebel leadership and the crown.
Such subtlety was part of Franklin’s character as it emphatically was not of Deane’s. At seventy, Franklin was not a man in a hurry. His wry, haphazard style exasperated his colleagues but confounded his foes. His seeming indifference to fashion and fame—all catnip to Deane—enchanted the French public and made him the perfect foil to the sophisticated, crafty Vergennes. “I rise at six, write until seven, dress and breakfast by eight,” Deane wrote, then work “until nine, then sup and go to bed by eleven.” Franklin would never have tolerated such an arduous schedule. But then, he was integral to American independence and French geopolitical gamesmanship whereas Deane was merely useful.
Franklin would shrewdly manipulate tensions between France and Britain to an eventual breaking point in 1778. His co-commissioner Arthur Lee, disliked by everyone who worked with him in Paris, skulked on the sidelines of the negotiations hatching theories of his colleagues’ financial skullduggery that Franklin attributed to Lee’s outright insanity, a diagnosis Deane thought “very charitable” given “the malignity of his heart.”
Meanwhile Deane concentrated on supply operations and the gathering presence in local waters of privateers emboldened, as Vergennes had foreseen, by Spain’s support of Captain Lee. He always had enjoyed socializing with seamen and shipowners. Now he happily immersed himself in maritime matters, which was where the money flowed with its rewards, temptations, and taint.
In May 1776 a transport flying Spanish colors had been boarded by patriots in Delaware Bay and found to carry strongboxes containing $14,000. The Maryland captain informed his colony’s leadership that the boxes “are marked W M from whence he thinks they belong to Willing & Morris, and that there may be more money on board.”
Willing, Morris & Company was a Philadelphia merchant house named for its founder, Thomas Willing, and for Robert Morris, the Liverpool-born financial wizard Willing had plucked at age twenty from the counting room and made partner in 1754. Concealing its money in the hold of a foreign ship caused no great surprise. The firm was known to engage in extensive trade on behalf of Congress, one-fourth of whose total cash disbursements between 1775 and 1777 went to one company—Willing & Morris. No one expected the breadth of that trade to be limited by the fact that Morris ran Congress’s procurement efforts through the Secret Committee, negotiating with himself in many transactions. People might mutter about conflicts of interest, but they accepted them as standard procedure.
Morris’s positive dealings with British merchants before the war had dampened his zeal for rebellion. Believing reconciliation still to be worthwhile, he’d voted against the Declaration of Independence but signed it once it was passed, a moment of hesitancy that neither his fellow congressmen nor his Pennsylvania constituents held against him. His political ambivalence later served him well when clear-eyed, unpopular measures were required to counter America’s wartime economic tailspin.
Congress, unable to secure large loans from foreign governments or to coerce the thirteen states to contribute significant funds to the national effort, had no way to raise revenue except by issuing more and more currency, a short-term remedy that caused the Continental dollar to lose 97 percent of its value by 1779. Bucking the same clamorous tide for fiscal expansion that had propelled the Revolution from the start, Morris pushed Congress to quit printing paper money, to abandon price controls and laws artificially upholding currency values, to demand that states contribute tax revenues to Congress, and to charter a centralized institution, the Bank of North America, to make loans and manage debt on a stringent, hard-money basis.
But while his pragmatism may have helped him make difficult policy decisions, it left an impression of flexible allegiances that would hurt him in the future. Morris was candid about preferring traditional European mercantilism to the unruly markets of the American democracy. He called common folk “vulgar” and “misguided,” and based his political and economic philosophy on belief that “the interests of moneyed men” went “hand in hand” with the public good. And despite personally funding decisive military campaigns at Princeton in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, he never accepted a government position without first stipulating that it not interfere with his private business.
As for privateering, whose exploding popularity he observed as a member of Congress’s Marine Committee, his opinion was mixed only insofar as it pertained to his own involvement. He extolled privateering’s strategic and commercial potential while refraining from participating out of loyalty to former business partners. Having enjoyed, he wrote Deane in September 1776, “extensive connections and dealings with many worthy men in England,” Morris “could not consent to take any part of their property because the government has seized mine.” Instead he made money on private trade and from commissions earned organizing supply voyages for Congress.
The ventures often commingled, as in an order for “linens and other European manufactures” he quietly placed with William Bingham in Martinique. Agreeing to split profits rather than pay him a commission, Morris had Bingham tuck the civilian wares into a cargo of muskets aboard a Continental sloop bound for Philadelphia. With Congress footing the shipping expenses, including if the vessel was sunk or captured, the inside arrangement was advantageous, borderline legal, and typical.
Morris presented such deals to Bingham and to Silas Deane through paired sets of instructions. He outlined government purchases in what he termed “political” letters, while his private purchases came in accompanying “commercial” letters. The high rate of interception at sea required that duplicates be sent on multiple vessels; captains were to throw them overboard in sacks weighted with cannonballs if threatened by enemy patrols.
Most letters to Deane never reached him—another instance of his consistent bad luck, since much of Morris’s communication with Bingham and various European merchants got through, a matter of mere chance which nevertheless stirred Deane’s paranoia about being ignored by colleagues in America. If he was not the right man “to solicit in your behalf,” he complained after an extended silence out of Philadelphia, “let me entreat you to tell me so and relieve me from an anxiety which is become so intolerable that my life is a burden.”
Certainly Morris, through letters sent if not received, tried to include Deane in “so fair an opportunity of making a large fortune since I have been conversant in the world.” Citing huge markups on “every kind of goods” and also on the ships that delivered them (by 1777 merchants and privateer investors, who sought to convert them to warships, were paying £4,000 for vessels that months earlier had gone for £1,000), he urged Deane’s “utmost exertion” in dispatching European cargoes “2/3 ds on account of Willing, Morris & Company and 1/3 d on your account.”
Lest his seriousness be unclear, Morris hinted at big paydays ahead thanks to the power of his position. “I shall be ever mindful of you while I hold a seat in the public councils and ever after in my private capacity.”
That tantalizing promise, combined with a growing confidence among European exporters that the profit potential of American markets more than compensated for the high risk of seizure by the Royal Navy, heightened Deane’s frustration at being unable fully to participate in the boom. Ever short of personal funds, he proposed a partnership to Morris whereby he would arrange shipments to America entirely on Morris’s account; when the cargo arrived, Deane’s one-third stake would be deducted from the proceeds before he took his share of the profits. It was a fair deal since, as Deane noted, “I shall have the principal charge of the affair here,” and Morris likely would have accepted it but for another lag in transatlantic mail that opened a major rift between them.
The financier had set up hi
s younger brother as Willing & Morris’s representative in the French port of Nantes. Contrary to Robert’s fond view that his brother was merely “frolicksome,” Tom Morris, apart from his financial ineptitude, was known to drink and whore “at least twenty-two hours of every twenty-four.” Deane, when Robert requested an honest report of his brother’s behavior, was wary that “men in such cases are prone to be offended” by unpleasant truths, in this case the consensus opinion that Tom was one of “the lowest reptiles of human society.”
Unfortunately Deane’s discreet hint that “pleasure has got too strong hold of him” took six months to reach Philadelphia. In the interim Robert appointed his brother “Superintending Agent” for the Committee of Secret Correspondence, a post empowering him to arrange government arms deals and to supervise privateer prizes once French ports began receiving them. Tom’s slide into deeper debauchery soon forced Deane and Franklin to petition for his dismissal, a recommendation Congress adopted in a public pronouncement that left Robert, having not yet received Deane’s gentle warning of Tom’s decline, shocked and humiliated.
At once he terminated his friendship with Deane on grounds of betrayal and maintained the estrangement through 1777, until testaments of Tom’s dissolution poured in from so many quarters that he could no longer deny their truth. Tom died of alcoholism in January 1778. John Paul Jones, in Nantes refitting his Continental sloop, honored him with a thirteen-gun salute. But by then Robert had loudly renounced all ties to his brother (“the worthless wretch”) in order to preserve his own reputation. He would do the same with Deane in time.
In late 1777 Deane learned from a months-old newspaper that his wife Elizabeth had died in Connecticut. She was the correspondent to whom he’d expressed his hopes and fears most candidly. Moreover, losing connection to her aristocratic family further spurred his quest for the status wealth confers, a quest driven as well by concerns about supporting his son and by glittery reports from home that his younger brothers Barnabas and Simeon were making fortunes in private trade. As a result he grew more prone than ever to impulsive schemes of moneymaking and war meddling, schemes that in addition to dabbling in privateers included speculation in the London stock market on the basis of war headlines from America and, most bizarrely, backing an attempt to burn down the Royal Navy shipyards in Portsmouth, England.
Deane’s cohort in these ventures was a thirty-three-year-old American expatriate named Edward Bancroft. A member of British science’s Royal Society, Bancroft was a physician, a botanist of tropical plants specializing in natural poisons, and an expert in the chemistry of dyes. Like Deane’s garrulous French partner, Beaumarchais, he enjoyed money and luxury. Unlike Beaumarchais, he was indifferent to American independence, a frame of mind which freed him to play both sides of the conflict with astonishing facility.
Sixty years after the Revolution it would emerge that Bancroft was a British spy. Purely in it for the money (he received a lifetime pension of £500 a year for his services), he tracked the secret negotiations between France and America under the pseudonym “Edward Edwards.” He befriended John Paul Jones when the captain was feted in France after his great victory over HMS Serapis in 1779, and as Franklin’s personal secretary he had access to the old diplomat’s correspondence. But Deane was his most valuable asset.
A double agent, Bancroft passed British secrets to the commissioners in Paris almost as often as he passed their secrets to London; much was deliberate misinformation meant to plant mistrust between the Americans and French, but some was accurate and helpful, such as his warnings about Royal Navy deployments outside French ports to intercept supply ships and privateers. His British spymasters regularly opened his mail out of suspicion that he was double-crossing them, and though George III had purchased his allegiance, the king called him “entirely an American” and held that “no other faith can be placed in his intelligence but that it suits his private views.” Bancroft’s countrymen, on the other hand, trusted him completely. The Committee of Secret Correspondence even had suggested him as a desirable overseas contact in its original orders to Deane.
By coincidence, Deane’s first job after college had been to tutor the young man, so their rapport was fast renewed. Bancroft instantly grasped his former teacher’s value as a source, and volunteered to be his interpreter in meetings with Beaumarchais and French officials. Thus he learned about the ruse of Hortalez & Company and about Vergennes’s clandestine support of America, information he promptly gave the British ambassador to France, David Murray, Lord Stormont.
Vergennes’s subsequent denials of collusion to Stormont in the face of detailed evidence gathered by Bancroft mirrored those of French authorities in the West Indies disputing the presence of American ships in their harbors. The denials were patently barefaced and hollow, yet there was little Britain could do beyond issue threats it couldn’t carry out.
Before long Deane and Bancroft were addressing one another as “my dear friend.” Together they imbibed the Parisian nightlife and chased every type of financial gambit from real estate to privateers in “an indissoluble partnership in infamy launched on a sea of claret.” Deane’s esteem for his American friend wasn’t unreserved, however. “Doctor Bancroft has been of very great service to me,” he wrote in December 1776, “but it costs something.”
Though he questioned the speed with which Bancroft had cultivated his trust, their dealings increased as Deane’s diplomatic chores were taken over by Franklin and his ties to Morris deteriorated due to distance and misunderstanding. By the end of 1777 Bancroft was his primary confidant and business partner, and any doubts he’d had about the man’s integrity had yielded to blind dependency.
Historians have speculated that Franklin knew Bancroft was crooked and that he retained him as secretary on the sly bet that information leaked to Britain would compel the French foreign ministry to hurry up and tie the knot with America. His word on the subject was typically blithe. “If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if for other reasons, I liked him.”
Edward Bancroft was brilliant, charming, ambitious, and lethal. The expatriate American scientist was Silas Deane’s closest confidante in Paris. When Deane wrote in 1776 that Bancroft’s friendship “costs something,” he had no idea how much.
Deane’s relationship with Bancroft ran on similar lines: affection trumped suspicion. They were friends, and when Deane’s career later collapsed Bancroft alone stood by him, supporting him emotionally and financially in what would seem an anomaly in a spy’s usual relationship with his victim but which squares with Bancroft’s oddly humane approach to betrayal. Though a cynical manipulator, he cared for Deane even as he exploited him; cared for him even as, evidence suggests, he plotted his murder.
Meanwhile young William Bingham was having a good war on Martinique. A bustling way station for France’s Caribbean and South American trade, the island, located three hundred miles north of Venezuela, was a placid backwater compared to the political hotbed of Paris. His official reception there in July 1776 had carried none of the cautious diffidence Vergennes had shown Deane three months earlier. Indeed, the community’s support for America was evident even before Bingham’s vessel, Reprisal, dropped anchor.
Its captain, Lambert Wickes, carried a bitter grudge. A month earlier in Rhode Island, he and his younger brother Richard had helped unload more than a hundred barrels of gunpowder off a stranded American blockade-runner. As British longboats approached, the Americans had abandoned ship after furling fifty pounds of powder inside a canvas sail, creating a time-delay fuse, which they lighted near the vessel’s remaining cargo of unloaded ammunition. Redcoats from two of the longboats “soon boarded her; one was close under stern, the others very near. Those on board had given three cheers and fired their arms after our people when the fire took effect on the powder and sent 30 to 40 of them into the air.” The transport was blown to bits. Body parts and debris rained down on the
water. In horrified rage the British frigate standing offshore fired several volleys after the fleeing Americans. These were ineffectual save for one shot that pierced Richard Wickes “through the arm and body” and killed him instantly. Lambert wrote their family, “I have lost a dear brother and a good officer which I know not how to replace.”
He got a chance to settle the score while bringing Bingham into Martinique’s port of Saint-Pierre. After a Royal Navy sloop approached to inspect Reprisal, Wickes lowered a dory to put Bingham ashore and then wheeled about to bring his guns to bear. “He struck us three or four times,” the captain of HMS Shark reported, “one of which came through the quarter and wounded a marine with the splinter.” People onshore flocked to watch the battle. They cheered when the fort overlooking the harbor opened fire on Shark and sent a cannonball through its sails, forcing it to withdraw.
Bingham watched wide-eyed as Wickes was “complimented and caressed beyond measure” by the crowd when Reprisal docked. He described his own feelings with the same precision he would bring to his job as congressional agent. “Never did I feel the sensation of joy in a more lively degree.” He sent Reprisal home with a mixed load of weapons for Congress and housewares for Willing & Morris. The transaction earned him £742 and set him on course to become, on his return to Philadelphia four years later, one of the richest men in America at age twenty-eight.
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