Arthur Lee traveled to Spain in February to petition the Spanish court for assistance and an alliance. Spain promised some token aid, but, as Spanish Foreign Minister Jerónimo Grimaldi confided to Vergennes, only “a little so as to nourish their hopes.”15 “The example of a rebellion” Grimaldi wrote the Spanish ambassador in Paris, “is too dangerous for his Majesty to wish to support it openly.”16 Congress also sent envoys to Tuscany, Vienna, and Berlin, but the prevailing belief that the revolution would soon fail caused them to turn the American representatives away.
While waiting to hear from the French government, the commissioners received a letter from Robert Morris, writing on behalf of Congress, saying that unless help arrived soon the future of the revolution looked bleak. British General Henry Clinton had taken Rhode Island. The Continental Army suffered military defeats on Long Island and in the Hudson River valley, and the British, who occupied New York, had chased Washington’s ragged, barefoot soldiers through New Jersey and driven them across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. The revolution was on the verge of collapse for lack of muskets and gunpowder. Inflation was out of control, and with the American currency nearly worthless, Congress found it increasingly difficult to find funds to keep the army in the field. The British fleet blockaded American ports, and England was making preparations for a final campaign to finish off Washington’s army.
Robert Morris described the situation as so desperate that only France entering the conflict could prevent catastrophe. “I must add to this gloomy picture,” he wrote, “one circumstance, more distressing than all the rest, because it threatens instant and total ruin to the American cause, unless some radical cure is applied and speedily; I mean the depreciation of continental currency. The enormous pay of our army, the immense expenses at which they are supplied provisions, clothing and other necessities, and, in short, the extravagance that has prevailed on most departments of the public service, have called forth prodigious emissions of paper money, both continental and colonial.”
He concluded: “If the Court of France open their eyes to their own interest, and think the commerce of North America will compensate them for the expense and evil of a war with Britain, they may readily create a diversion, and afford us succors that will change the fate of affairs; but they must do it soon; our situation is critical, and does not admit of delay.”17
The commissioners also received a letter from Arthur Lee’s brother Richard Henry Lee, a member of Congress from Virginia, separately relaying Congress’s warning that independence would be in jeopardy if they could not arrange an alliance with France and Spain and obtain money for arms, supplies, and ships, and emphasizing “how all important it is to the security of American independence that France should enter the war as soon as possible.”18
Franklin submitted a second offer of a military alliance to Vergennes on February 1. With no answer from the French ministry, the commissioners decided to exceed their instructions and extend France an assurance that the United States would not make a separate peace with England, in exchange for a similar commitment from France, should a commercial treaty with America lead to war between France and England. “[I]n the present peril of the liberties of our Country,” they insisted, “it is our duty to hazard everything in their support and defense. Therefore, Resolved unanimously: That if it should be necessary, for the attainment of any thing, in our best judgment, material to the defense and support of the public cause; that we should pledge our persons or hazard the censure of Congress by exceeding our instructions—we will, for such purpose, most cheerfully risk our personal liberty or life.”19
On March 14, new instructions arrived. In desperation, Congress authorized the commissioners to sweeten their proposal, confirming the course they already had independently taken, and allowed them to make any offers they felt necessary to obtain French assistance. “Upon mature deliberation of all circumstances,” Congress wrote the commissioners, “Congress deems the speedy declaration of French and European assistance so indispensably necessary to secure the independence of these states, that they have authorized you to make such tenders to France and Spain as they hope will prevent any longer delay of an event that is judged so essential to the well-being of North America.”20 The Americans requested an additional loan of two million livres from France and presented Vergennes and the Spanish ministry with a proposal for a formal triple alliance with France and Spain for immediate war against Britain to last until the establishment of American independence, the Spanish conquest of Portugal, and French and American forces’ ejection of British forces from North America and the Caribbean. The Americans included a new demand, that France not only join an alliance and provide aid, but also help with the conquest of Canada, a particular aim of Franklin’s. Canada and Newfoundland would go to the colonists, and France would take possession of the British West Indies. To encourage Spain to join the alliance, America offered to declare war against Portugal and to “continue the said war for the total conquest of that kingdom to be added to the dominion of Spain.”21 The proposal ended by warning that unless France intervened directly America might be forced to sue England for peace.
Uninterested in new territory and apprehensive about American military prospects, the French politely but firmly rejected the proposal, as did Spain. France did not share their impatience, Vergennes told the American commissioners. “Even a precarious peace for now would be better than war,”22 the French prime minster, Count Jean-Frederic Maurepas, wrote the French naval minister. The Americans decided not to press the offer. “It is proper to observe,” Deane recalled, “that Doctor Franklin was from the first averse to warm and urgent solicitations with the Court of France. His age and experience, as well as his philosophical temper, led him to prefer a patient perseverance, and to wait events, and to leave the Court of France to act from motives of interest only. He used often to say that America was a new and young state, and, like a virgin, ought to wait for the addresses of other powers, rather than to make even the first advances; and what confirmed him in these sentiments was, his having early in the contest made it a fixed and certain point with him that France would not in any circumstances or situation suffer America to return under the domination of Great Britain.”23
In fact, the French were providing surreptitious aid to the colonists. To the Americans’ great relief, in late April 1777, two French ships, the Amphitrite and the Mercure, evaded the British blockade and arrived in Boston with twenty thousand muskets, gunpowder, balls, and lead. To ferry supplies to the United States, other French ships sailed under forged bills of lading to the French West Indies, where the cargo was unloaded at night into small ships and smuggled into American ports. This French support was a welcome reprieve, but not enough to alter the balance against the British.
American military defeats continued with the fall of Fort Ticonderoga to General John Burgoyne’s army in July, which left the headwaters of the Hudson in the hands of the British, threatened to sever communication between New England and the other colonies, and reinforced a belief in France that the American Revolution was doomed. “It is a problem,” Vergennes wrote, after hearing of the loss of Ticonderoga, “whether they can preserve the liberty for which they have taken up arms; attacked in the rear by the English army of Canada, while General Howe assails them in front. Have they the force, the unity, the leadership, to resist this storm?”24 Vergennes moved cautiously. “Everyone does what he has to do,” he wrote, but if the American interests prompted them to “embrace anything that might benefit their cause, ours is not to allow ourselves farther than it is in our interest to go.”25 Rather than commit France to an uncertain proposition, Vergennes preferred to wait and sign a treaty with the United States after it gained independence.
On September 25, Franklin approached Vergennes for an additional fourteen million livres of aid. Congress needed eighty thousand blankets, forty thousand uniforms, one hundred thousand pairs of stockings, one million flints, and two hundred tons of lead.26
Having almost exhausted their funds, the American envoys were themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, as they had received no payments from Congress and the French loans were spent. Their financial outlook was so grim that Franklin suggested they cancel contracts for weapons and uniforms and sell guns and supplies they had bought but not yet shipped. Lee read his colleagues part of a letter from his brother Richard Henry warning that “without an alliance with France and Spain, with a considerable loan to support their funds it would be difficult to maintain their independence.”27 The American commissioners agreed their best hope was for France to keep paying the interest on their debts, which would spare them from going to jail.
Less than two weeks later, shortly before noon on December 4, a messenger from Boston arrived with word that Philadelphia, the American capital, had fallen to the British, and the Continental Congress fled to Baltimore, where it continued to meet in an old tavern. But that was outweighed by other news of far greater strategic importance: General Burgoyne and his entire army had surrendered to American forces at Saratoga. Two thousand British soldiers were killed, and almost six thousand men taken prisoner, including four members of Parliament, six generals, three hundred officers, five thousand five hundred enlisted men, and thirty-seven pieces of artillery. The British pincer had been broken, its northern army had been wiped out, and American forces had triumphed in the field against the best the British had to offer.
The American victory at Saratoga had an immediate effect on the French calculations and drove home to Vergennes the need to make a decision regarding the colonies. “Recent military victories seem to offer a new perspective,” Vergennes declared, since it removed French doubts about the “solidity”28 of American resistance to Britain. The French worried that the American victory would strengthen those within the British government who favored reconciliation with America, and Vergennes felt France would have to act before a newly humbled Britain offered the colonies tempting peace terms. “What ought to lead France to join with America,” he wrote Montmorin, “is the great enfeeblement of England to be effected by the subtraction of a third of her Empire.”29 Within two days, Vergennes’s deputy, Conrad Alexandre Gerard, called on the American representatives at Passy. As “there appeared no doubt now,” he told them, “of the ability and resolution of the States to maintain their independency,” he could assure them that American overtures would find a more willing ear, and invited the Americans to resubmit their proposal for an alliance, adding that “it could be done none too soon.”30
Two days later, Franklin, Deane, and Lee gave Vergennes a renewed proposal for an alliance. In it they reminded him that it had been almost a year since they had approached the French court for help, and called on France for “immediate and public action to correct the ill impressions on the minds of our people, who, from the secrecy enjoined us, cannot be informed of the friendly and essential aids that have been so generously but privately offered us.” Otherwise, the commissioners implied, the American public, unaware of the covert French support, might be tempted by British peace offers.31
On December 12, Vergennes and Gerard secretly met the Americans at a house a half mile outside of Versailles. The French foreign minister let them know he was willing to consider a treaty of alliance and trade, and recognition of American independence, before explaining: “If we enter into a treaty with you, we will be affirming your independency. Necessarily this will bring about war with England. We cannot do this without consulting Spain, without whose concurrence nothing can be done.” According to the Bourbon Family Compact of 1761, part of the compromise that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, France and Spain committed to act in concert in matters of war and peace, so an alliance with the United States required Spain’s consent. Vergennes ended by warning them: “Your independency must still be considered in the womb. We must not endeavor to hasten its birth prematurely.”32 He dispatched a courier to Madrid and told the Americans they would hear back in three weeks. “Take for your motto,” Vergennes advised the Spanish ambassador in Paris, “and make them adopt it: Aut nunc aut numquam” (either now or never).33 Otherwise, if they let slip “the most interesting conjecture that heaven could present us, the reproaches of the present generation and of the generations to come will accuse us forever of our culpable indifference.”34 “Let us not be mistaken,” Vergennes wrote Montmorin, “the Power which first recognizes the independence of the Americans will be the first to gather all the fruits of this war.”35
King George III’s government, shaken by Saratoga and concerned by Franklin’s presence in Paris, decided to forestall any alliance between France and the Americans with an offer of reconciliation between the colonies and Britain. It sent an envoy, Britain’s chief spy in Europe, Paul Wentworth, to meet Deane (Franklin refused to meet Wentworth, and the British believed Deane was the most approachable of the commissioners) at Deane’s apartment on the rue Royale on December 15 and 16. Over dinner, the British emissary outlined a proposal for reconciliation in which the colonies would be self-governing in all matters except trade and foreign affairs. Deane refused Wentworth’s offer, telling him independence was the only road to peace. While Vergennes and the American representatives waited to hear from Spain, Lord North, the British prime minister, announced that he intended to submit a proposal for amnesty and reconciliation with the American colonies when Parliament reconvened January 20. With British overtures appearing imminent, the Americans pressed Vergennes on whether the colonies would be able to rely on France and Spain for help. “England’s aim being no longer doubtful,” Vergennes wrote, “it seems that neither should our decision be so; for the question we have to decide is to know whether it is more expedient for us to have war against England and America together, than with America for us against England.”36
Vergennes felt pressed to preempt the British peace overtures. “If the English,” he worried, “learned wisdom from their misfortunes and made terms of peace, what could France do to prevent a reconciliation?”37 Vergennes feared that the North government, reeling from the loss at Saratoga, was close to making a generous peace offer that would include independence in all but name that the exhausted colonies, fighting alone and deprived of the prospect of outside help, would find difficult to refuse if France continued to deny them open support. French fears took the upper hand, and Vergennes decided he had to do something. “There remains hardly any time for a decision,” he wrote. “The moment is decisive.” If France did not act, Vergennes worried, “the British Ministry . . . may cut us out, and leave us nothing but useless regret at having wantonly lost the most fortunate opportunity which Providence ever offered the House of Bourbon.” Vergennes did not want to lose what he called “the only opportunity which may perhaps happen for many centuries for putting England in its true place.” 38 He instructed Gerard to “make glitter before his [Deane’s] eyes, . . . everything necessary to keep the legation in the lap of France.”39 On December 17, Gerard visited the commissioners at Franklin’s house at Passy and told them that after long and careful deliberation, Louis XVI had resolved to recognize their independence and would grant a treaty as soon as confirmation arrived from Madrid.
The confirmation never came. On December 31, Vergennes’s courier returned with word that Spain rejected an alliance. Spain’s interests differed from France’s, and the Spanish stood to gain less than the French from a successful American uprising, and had more to lose. The settlement of a dispute between Spain and Portugal had removed a source of friction with England, and Spain’s less industrialized economy and smaller merchant fleet were not well-positioned to benefit from the opening of American trade. While France saw reducing British power as the key to reestablishing itself as the dominant nation in Europe, Spanish ambitions were directed to its overseas colonies, which were easy targets for the British navy and vulnerable to rebellion should the American example succeed. Spain had little appetite for committing itself to a war whose main purpose was to humble France’s rival. “One does
not make war,” Spain’s new foreign minister, Count Floridablanca, explained, “except to preserve one’s own possessions or to acquire those of others.”40 The Spanish preferred to provide just enough aid to draw out the conflict. “Certainly it is for our advantage,” he wrote, “that the revolt of these people should continue; we must wish that they and the English should exhaust each other.”41
That winter the revolution hung by a thread. The Continental Army, camped at Valley Forge, had twenty-five barrels of flour for eleven thousand men, and many starved. “An army of skeletons appeared before our eyes naked, starved, sick and discouraged,”42 Gouverneur Morris, a member of the Continental Congress, reported after a visit. Almost three thousand died, some frozen to death, others of illness or hunger. “The unfortunate soldiers,” wrote the Marquis de Lafayette, who had traveled to the United States to fight with the Continental Army, “were in want of everything; they had neither coats nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes. Their feet and their legs froze until they were black, and it was often necessary to amputate them.”43
Washington wrote: “Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by their sufferings, to a general mutiny or dispersion. Strong symptoms, however, of discontent have appeared in particular instances; and nothing but the most active efforts everywhere can long avert so shocking a catastrophe.”44 In February 1778 he wrote: “Our present sufferings are not all. There is no foundation laid for any adequate relief hereafter. All the magazines provided in the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, and all the immediate additional supplies they seem capable of affording, will not be sufficient to support the army more than a month longer, if so long.”45
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