Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  “Every time I think how we hold in our hands the destiny of the world,” Beaumarchais wrote to Vergennes with an openness that few commoners would dare display to a person of high nobility, “and that we have the power to change the system of things — and when I see so many advantages, so much glory ready to escape, I regret infinitely not to have more influence … to prevent the evil on one hand, and aid the good on the other. I know too well your patriotism to fear offending you in speaking thus.”20

  At the end of 1776, the piles of military equipment on the docks at Le Havre and the arrival of three transport ships drew the attention of British spies, who reported their findings to British ambassador Lord Stormont. The last semblance of secrecy surrounding the accumulated armaments disappeared when Benjamin Franklin sailed into the port city of Nantes. Upon his arrival, Franklin immediately wrote to his cher bon ami Dr. Dubourg and reignited the latter’s hopes — and all-too-public boasts — that he would play a major role in supplying French arms to America. Like Deane, Franklin arrived in France charged with obtaining arms, ammunition, military supplies, and loans from foreign governments — for which he too stood to reap 5 percent commissions, a substantial private fortune, and the thanks of a grateful nation. Unlike Deane, Franklin had had the foresight to sail to France with a cargo of indigo he had bought in America. Its resale at a profit on the Nantes dock filled the venerable doctor’s pockets with an abundance of cash — and left Dubourg crowing about his plans to buy arms for America in partnership with Franklin.

  Benjamin Franklin, the venerable American scientist, went to Paris to purchase arms and ammunition from a French friend and associate, only to be frustrated when he learned that the French government had given a monopoly on its arms trade to Beaumarchais.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  “Is there no way to shut his mouth?” Beaumarchais complained to Vergennes. “Dubourg must be made to keep silent and not compromise the ministry,” he warned. “If while we close the doors on one side, someone opens the windows on the other, it is impossible for the secret not to escape.”21

  Although Beaumarchais had hoped to establish a friendship with Franklin, the American rebuffed his overtures after learning that Beaumarchais had already obtained a monopoly on purchases of French government arms and would therefore prevent Franklin from profiting from the arms trade.

  As military supplies continued accumulating on the docks at Le Havre, British agents reported to the British government in London, which responded with ever-more-menacing warnings to the French government. Versailles replied unconvincingly with bland statements that the arms were destined for French forces in the French West Indies and that the government had no power to restrict private merchants. Beaumarchais, meanwhile, raced to Le Havre disguised as Durand to rid the docks of the troublesome supplies and get them on their way to America. Unfortunately, he reached Le Havre just as his popular play Le Barbier de Séville had opened in the local theater. Outraged by what he considered a careless and inferior performance, he threw off his disguise and insisted on leading rehearsals. No longer Hortalez, Ronac, Durand, or anyone else, he reverted to the irrepressible, flamboyant playwright, dashing about town, entertaining officers he had recruited, then storming into the local theater to promote performances of his plays. Spending half his time at the docks and half at the theater, he managed to oversee cargo loading at pier side and rehearsals onstage, coaching dockworkers and actors with equal verve — and unmasking himself before the world in the greatest performance of his life. The identities of Durand, Ronac, and Hortalez became clear to all. “His precaution of concealing himself under the name of Durand,” said one officer, “became perfectly useless.”22

  After Lord Stormont learned of Beaumarchais’s involvement in arms shipments, he issued “the most vehement remonstrances to the French government” and threatened war. Fearing the imminent outbreak of hostilities, Louis XVI ordered a halt to the Beaumarchais operations at Le Havre. The minister of war prohibited all army officers from leaving France, and Vergennes ordered the rest of the Beaumarchais fleet to remain in port. Beaumarchais, however, had spies of his own, one of whom galloped out of Versailles and reached Le Havre before the orders arrived from Vergennes. Beaumarchais ordered his ships to leave port immediately — only to have volunteer officers refuse to board unless Beaumarchais paid them a full year’s salary instead of six months’ as originally agreed. Beaumarchais had no choice but to comply or face bankruptcy if the embargo prevented his sale of military stores to America.

  By the time the order from Versailles arrived to halt the sailings, the largest of Beaumarchais’s three ships — the Amphitrite — was already under way with the largest share of Hortalez et Cie. stores on board. Its cargo included 52 brass cannon, 52 carriages for same, 20,000 four-pound cannonballs, 9,000 grenades, about 6,500 muskets, more than 900 tents, assorted tools — spades, pickaxes, and so forth — 320 blankets, 8,545 black stockings, 4,097 shirts — and 1,272 dozen pocket handkerchiefs!

  A jubilant Beaumarchais had climbed aboard to celebrate as the ship left the dock, and he disembarked with the pilot when the ship approached the end of the channel and the open sea. As he watched the Amphitrite sail off to America, Beaumarchais was celebrating more than the successful birth of his arms-trading business. A few weeks earlier, on January 5, 1777, his beloved Mlle. de Willermaulez had given birth to Beaumarchais’s daughter, whom they named Eugénie, after his first successful play.

  Among the officers on board the Amphitrite was Major Philippe Charles Tronson du Coudray, a self-styled engineer and artillery expert who had persuaded Deane to send him to America as chief of artillery with the rank of major general. Eager for his own share of profits from the arms trade, du Coudray tried commandeering the ship after it got under way, demanding quarters befitting his rank and challenging the captain for ultimate command of the ship. The captain ordered the ship to come about and put into Lorient, a port on the southern coast of Brittany. With two Beaumarchais ships trapped at Le Havre by Vergennes’s embargo and the Amphitrite docked in Lorient, Hortalez et Cie. — and Beaumarchais — faced financial collapse. Its effort to supply French arms to the Americans seemed doomed, and with it the American War of Independence.

  Figaro Here, Figaro There …

  WHEN BEAUMARCHAIS learned of the Amphitrite’s return to port, he sent his trusted confidante Francy galloping to Lorient, where he confronted du Coudray, handing him a letter from Beaumarchais, who called du Coudray’s conduct inexplicable. “As the real owner of the vessel ‘Amphitrite,’ ” he wrote to du Coudray, “I order Captain Fautrelle to take the sole command of it. … Consequently, you will have the kindness, sir, to obey, or to find another ship and go where you please. … On receipt of this letter, you will kindly put Captain Fautrelle in possession of all the parcels, orders, and letters relating to delivery of the cargo of his ship.”1

  Beaumarchais sent Vergennes a plea to reverse his orders halting the departure of his ships. “I prostrate myself at your feet, Monsieur le Comte,” Beaumarchais implored the foreign minister. “It serves no purpose allowing these ships to sit idly in port. As a personal favor to me, let the ships sail to Santo Domingo or let me order the artillery unloaded onto foreign vessels and let me satisfy the terms of my arrangements with my American friends.”2

  Beaumarchais was able to obtain a partial lifting of the embargo, with all arms on French ships to sail only to French territory and all arms bound for America thereafter to be carried on American ships. Beaumarchais gave Captain Fautrelle new official orders showing Port-au-Prince on the French island of Santo Domingo as his destination — but he gave the captain verbal instructions to change course for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, if possible, once he got under way, and to deliver his cargo directly to the besieged American revolutionaries.

  The Amphitrite finally left port on February 6, 1777, with du Coudray remaining on shore to await another ship for America. On board was Beaumarchais’s young nephew, whom the play
wright had raised as his own son after the boy’s mother had died. Inspired by his uncle’s struggles against aristocrat oppression and praises for the American Revolution, Beaumarchais’s nephew signed on with Silas Deane as a volunteer artillery officer — despite his uncle’s admonitions that he was too young. When Francy discovered the boy on the Amphitrite, he wrote to Beaumarchais, who recognized the futility of trying to stop him. Describing the boy’s impulses as childish, he nonetheless asked Francy to have one of the older officers watch over him and gave the boy his blessing. Within a year, he had earned promotion to the rank of major and wrote to his uncle on the eve of battle:

  Your nephew, my dear uncle, may be killed, but he will never do anything unworthy of one who has the honor of being related to you. This is as certain as that he will always feel the greatest affection for the best uncle living.3

  As the Amphitrite sailed off to America in the winter of 1777, nothing but the disastrous news noted earlier was arriving from that far-off wilderness. Two months earlier, on December 11, 1776, the remnants of the American army — a mere 5,200 — had barely escaped capture by crossing the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where they lay on the frozen ground, without tents to shield them from the wind, sleet, and snow, and without a drop of rum to keep them warm. Death and desertions had reduced Washington’s army to only 5,200 men — one-third of them too sick or hungry to serve. The desperate American commander in chief knew that if the ice on the river grew thick enough to allow the enemy to cross, he and his men faced annihilation. With New York and New Jersey in British hands, Congress had fled Philadelphia for Baltimore to draw up terms of capitulation in the evidently futile struggle for independence.

  “It is with a heavy heart I sit down to write you,” banker Robert Morris wrote to Deane from Philadelphia just before Christmas, lamenting that “the late unfortunate turn of American Affairs leaves no room for joy in the mind of any true friend of our country. I am now the only member of Congress left in this city and cannot pretend to give you a regular detail of our manifold misfortunes.”4

  Some congressmen believed Washington incompetent — and he was thinking much the same thing: “It is impossible … to give you any idea … of my difficulties — and the constant perplexities and mortifications I constantly meet with,” he wrote to his brother. “Adieu my dear Sir — remember me affectionately to … the family. Your sincerely affectionate brother, George Washington.”5

  On the morning of December 22, his aide Colonel Joseph Reed came to him. “We are all of the opinion,” he warned, “that something must be attempted to revive our expiring credit. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event.”6 Three days later, Washington responded. In one of the most daring exploits in American military history, he led 2,400 troops through a blinding snowstorm on Christmas night across the ice-choked Delaware River and stormed the Hessian garrison guarding the town. Catching the Hessians asleep in their barracks at dawn on December 26, the Americans captured 918 of the 1,400-man garrison and killed 30, including the Hessian commander. The Americans suffered but five casualties.

  After moving his Hessian prisoners into a holding area, Washington ordered his entire force into Trenton, where ample Hessian provisions reinvigorated their bodies and spirits. On January 2, 1777, a British force under General Lord Cornwallis approached from the east to counterattack. Washington established the semblance of a camp in defensive positions east of Trenton, but he led the bulk of his force around Cornwallis’s flanks during the night and arrived near Princeton by dawn. With Cornwallis boasting that he would “bag the fox [Washington],” the British attacked what proved to be an illusory American camp east of Trenton, while the bulk of Washington’s army now attacked the sides and rear of the British force. Fearful of being trapped, Cornwallis led a hasty retreat eastward and ceded all of western New Jersey to the Americans. By mid-January, Washington’s courageous little army had cleared most of western New Jersey of enemy troops and sent American morale — both civilian and military — soaring. The news electrified the world. A band of untrained, half-starved, ill-equipped citizen-soldiers had defeated a larger force of the best-trained professional soldiers in the world.

  Congress immediately returned to Philadelphia, and when news of Washington’s victory at Trenton reached Versailles, France, “it produced the most vivid sensation,” Deane wrote to Congress in a letter cosigned by Franklin and Arthur Lee. “The hearts of the French people are universally for us and the opinion for an immediate war with Great Britain is very strong, but the court has its reasons for postponing a little longer.”7

  At Versailles, Washington’s triumph at Trenton provoked the comte de Vergennes to reverse his orders and allow Beaumarchais’s two other ships to set sail for America. The Seine and the Mercure left for America with more arms and ammunition and thousands of tents, blankets, and articles of clothing, including 1,800 dozen pairs of worsted hose, 1,700 pairs of shoes, and 1,245 dozen pocket handkerchiefs.

  As the Seine, Mercure, and Amphitrite bounded over the waves to America, Beaumarchais chartered two more ships and sent them off with more brass cannon, cannonballs, bombs, muskets, clothing, and bedding. By March, Beaumarchais added two more ships; by summer his fleet had grown to twelve; by autumn, twenty. “Never has a commercial affair been promoted with such vigor,” Beaumarchais boasted to Vergennes. “May God bless it with success.”8

  After the Amphitrite had sailed, Deane wrote to Congress, “The eyes of all are on you, and the fear of your giving up is the greatest obstacle I have to contend with. … Monsieur Beaumarchais has been my minister in effect, as this court is extremely cautious and I now advise you to attend carefully to the articles sent you. … Large remittances are necessary for your credit, and the enormous price of tobacco, of rice, of flour and many other articles, gives you an opportunity of making your remittances to very good advantage. Twenty thousand hogsheads of tobacco [10 hogsheads = approximately 1 ½ bushels] are wanted immediately for this kingdom and more for other parts of Europe.”9

  Again, Congress failed to respond or reply.

  In the spring of 1777, British Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord George Germain ordered his commanders in America to crush the insurrection or face dismissal and disgrace. General Sir William Howe, whose forces controlled New York City, and General John Burgoyne in Canada planned a three-pronged strategy aimed at capturing the rebel capital of Philadelphia, and isolating New England from the rest of the colonies by gaining control of the Hudson River Valley and the waterways to the Canadian frontier. While Howe sent one-third of his force from New York to capture Philadelphia, a second force would sail northward along the Hudson River toward Albany. Meanwhile, Burgoyne would march southward from Canada, along Lake Champlain and Lake George, to meet the troops from New York at Albany.

  Rather than confront Washington’s Continental Army in New Jersey, north of Philadelphia, Howe decided to approach from the south. He loaded 15,000 British troops onto a fleet of ships that sailed into Chesapeake Bay and up to its northern shore, where his army landed and began what he hoped would be an easy march toward the American capital. Burgoyne’s campaign also started well, as he led 8,000 British troops and Indian warriors from the Canadian border southward, capturing Lake Champlain and overrunning Fort Ticonderoga, Mount Defiance, and, finally, Fort Anne. Hopelessly outmanned and outgunned, the Patriots — now reduced to raw recruits — deserted by the scores, knowing they were helpless to slow Burgoyne’s inexorable advance to Albany. For them, at least, the American Revolution in the North seemed at an end …

  … until a small band of farmers suddenly appeared on the outskirts of Bennington, Vermont, each carrying several muskets or more, firing into the air as they approached — shouting incomprehensibly about a ship … a French ship.

  The Saratoga Campaign saw British General John Burgoyne lead 7,700 British and German troops from Canada along Lake Champlain and Lake George to Saratoga. Intent on reaching A
lbany and isolating New England from the rest of the continent, he met final defeat and was forced to surrender to the Americans after a decisive battle at Bemis Heights.

  On March 17, 1777, the 300-ton Mercure, the first of the three Beaumarchais ships that had set sail in January and early February, had appeared at the entrance to the harbor at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. As puzzled townsfolk gathered at pier side, the ship ran its colors up the mast. The ship was French, carrying 12,000 muskets, 50 brass cannon, powder and ammunition, 1,000 tents, and clothes for 10,000 men.

  Spectators stared in disbelief at first, then, as sailors displayed the muskets to the crowd, townsmen began shouting, cheering, roaring, dancing, jumping aboard to hug sailors. Boys and men raced about town to find militiamen, militia commanders, and anyone in the military. Within a week the euphoria had metamorphosed into a carefully organized, determined effort to transport supplies to Saratoga by packhorse, wagon, and sheer human effort. Part of the shipment went to George Washington’s army in New Jersey, but the rest traveled 150 miles to the American Northern Army, which was trying to halt Burgoyne’s advance northeast of Albany, New York. Muskets were easiest to transport, with individual men and boys setting out on their own in small groups, each carrying several at a time on his back and outdistancing the heavily loaded wagons. As they crossed New Hampshire toward Vermont, they handed their extra muskets to unarmed volunteers and marched together to Saratoga, growing by the tens, the hundreds, and more. In Vermont, they crossed paths with men who had abandoned the front for lack of ammunition. Rearmed and reinvigorated by the arrival of arms and ammunition from France, they turned about and returned to war with the others.