Lafayette’s raid was a French-led affair, with Armand, du Plessis, and other companions heading units. Ignoring the potential damage to America and France should he be captured, Lafayette led a surprise charge against the Hessian positions and, despite the arrival of British reinforcements, his group managed to kill twenty of the enemy and take fourteen prisoners. Greene lauded Lafayette’s actions in the field; Washington attached that Greene encomium to his request to Congress to now award Lafayette the command of a division. They did; and on the same day that Lafayette learned he was to lead a Virginia division he received a letter informing him of the birth of his second child.
De Kalb, the most experienced French soldier, chafing because he had yet to see action, in December importuned Washington for permission to attack the enemy’s rear guard, and was asked to content himself with observation. His small band “hung on the rear of the enemy for five miles,” he reported to de Broglie, “and it appeared that nothing could have been easier than, with four field pieces, to have utterly defeated and indeed cut off and captured a part of the rear guard.” Using this incident as example, he added, “I am convinced that [Washington] would accomplish substantial results if he would only set more upon his own responsibility; but it is a pity that he is so weak, and has the worst of advisors in the men who enjoy his confidence.” There were rumors floating about that Congress would replace Washington with Gates. That possibility spurred de Kalb to write to Henry Laurens from Valley Forge. Regarding the American commander whom he had once thought of supplanting with de Broglie, de Kalb expressed a feeling shared by many of the experienced French officers:
I cannot but observe, in justice to General Washington, that he must be a very modest man … for forbearing public complaints on that account, that the enemy may not be apprised of our situation and take advantage of it. He will rather suffer in the opinion of the world than hurt his country.… He did and does more every day than could be expected from any general in the world in the same circumstances.… I think him the only proper person … by his natural and acquired capacity, his bravery, good sense, uprightness and honesty, to keep up the spirits of the army and the people, and I look upon him as the sole defender of his country’s cause.
PART THREE
Making the Connection
1777–1778
8
“France and Spain should strike before England can secure the advantage.”
—Victor-François de Broglie
Conclusions that appear inevitable often require the most time and effort to make happen. Both Franklin and Vergennes believed that a Franco-American connection was the desirable, the logical, even the inescapable solution to problems besetting both countries. Yet on September 8, 1777, the American commissioners in Paris wrote home, as though complaining to an intimate diary, that “the Ministers of France still continue to act with their former duplicity,” both assuring the commissioners “of their most friendly wishes and intentions and verif[ying] those intentions by Substantial Proofs and favors,” and also continuing to placate the British, so “there must necessarily be much insincerity to one or another in this contradictory conduct.”
Applying to Vergennes for more credit to purchase war matériel, they were flabbergasted to learn that he already knew their intimate secrets; Stormont had presented a summary of their requests the previous day. This revelation confirmed Lee’s belief that there were spies in their midst, and Deane’s belief that efforts toward a Franco-American alliance would be in vain. To Franklin, who had presumed that the commissioners were under British as well as French surveillance, the more upsetting aspect of the stolen information was Vergennes’s use of it to justify French unwillingness to meet further American monetary needs.
France’s resolve seemed to shift with every rumor from the American battlefield. The commissioners definitely felt a cold wind after the arrival of news of Burgoyne’s summer capture of Ticonderoga and of Howe’s defeat of Washington at Brandywine. If America was not going to continue to keep Great Britain’s forces occupied, how could France justify more aid? In October and November 1777 the London newspapers suddenly went silent regarding the war in America, as did those in Amsterdam, the city to which sailing ships often brought less filtered war results. In this news vacuum, too much attention was paid at Versailles to Ambassador Noailles’s report that in a speech King George III had for the first time used the term “peace” and omitted the word “submission,” heretofore the only permissible outcome of the rebellion.
On the morning of December 4, 1777, Beaumarchais was visiting Valentinois. The playwright needed urgently to plead with Franklin, who had confiscated for the commissioners the cargo of the returning Amphitrite, which Beaumarchais considered to be his vessel. “I have lost the fruits of my most noble and incredible work,” he would write to Vergennes regarding this confiscation. Thus he was present when an American messenger rode into the courtyard and Franklin emerged from the house to brace him, asking, even before the young man dismounted, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?”
“Yes, sir,” the messenger replied.
Franklin turned away, hands clasped behind his back at the disheartening answer, and started to return inside.
“But sir,” the young man called after him, “I have greater news than that. General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”
The commissioners rejoiced. Franklin wrote two celebratory notices, a broadsheet heralding the victory, immediately distributed, free, in tens of thousands of copies, and a letter to Vergennes announcing the “total reduction of the forces under General Burgoyne, himself and his whole army having surrendered themselves prisoners.” Howe had taken Philadelphia, Franklin conceded, but “having no Communication with his Fleet, it was hoped he would soon be reduced to submit to the same terms as Burgoyne, whose capitulation we enclose.”
One benefit of a crisis to its participants is that even as it heightens the need for decision it reduces the number of possible responses to the problem. Saratoga did not make France choose to forge an American alliance—it had long since embarked toward one—but Saratoga did persuade him who most needed persuasion, Louis XVI. In council Vergennes painted the American victory as good news but problematic because now the Americans might believe they were in good enough shape to no longer need French aid, or they might use it as a lever in obtaining a reconciliation with Great Britain on favorable terms. The king and Maurepas now agreed with Vergennes that there was as much if not more danger in refusing a closer connection with the Americans as in making one. Another element in Louis’s assent was his awareness that France was now adequately prepared for the war with Great Britain that would ensue from an American alliance. In the Caribbean, France’s augmented forces and ships could defeat a British run at its vulnerable colonies. At home Sartine’s shipbuilding program had brought the navy to parity with the British, and the recalled Newfoundland fishing fleet could provide seasoned hands for those warships while the British would have to impress men to fill theirs. “An offensive on the part of France is absolutely necessary in 1778 since it would act as a preventive war,” wrote the diplomat Victor-François de Broglie, who in 1765 had submitted to Louis XIV a plan for a Franco-Spanish invasion of the British Isles that he now updated and offered to the new king. “The English, an extirpating and avaricious race, seeking to establish an universal monarchy, would soon aggrandize at the expense of French and Spanish possessions in the Americas, in the Antilles, and in Asia. Before England can secure the advantage, France and Spain should strike.”
Vergennes congratulated the American commissioners, informed them that the next installment of their subsidy, three million livres, was on its way, and requested that they resubmit the proposals for an alliance that had languished for a year. On December 12 he invited them to his home to convey that the king’s council had resolved that America and France should fashion a treaty, not on the basis of temporary advantage but of mutual interest, so as “to make it last as long as
human institutions would endure.”
* * *
“Fifty thousand troops, have not, in three years, been able to obtain secure possession of fifty miles of ground in America,” the Public Ledger wrote at the news of the capture of Burgoyne’s army. An Opposition Member of Parliament commented that “The amazement of the whole [British] nation was equaled only by the consternation they felt” at the event. And the historian and MP Edward Gibbon, previously a staunch advocate of suppressing the rebellion, wrote that he would no longer consent “to the prosecution of a war from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success.”
But George III refused to accept the loss of an army as the end of the war. He insisted that hostilities against the rebels continue. He did assent to a broad strategic review, however, which recommended decreasing the emphasis on land battles and increasing maritime pressure. He also agreed that if France became more involved, British focus should shift to the Caribbean. Finally he allowed the dispatch of a peace commission to offer his American subjects almost all that they had ever wanted except independence, conditional on their return to the Empire. Parliament was in recess but would take up the peace commission idea upon its return.
William Eden, the head of British intelligence, had already sent Paul Wentworth to Paris to tip those generous terms to the insurgents. A stockbroker who had once lived in America, Wentworth knew Franklin and Deane and had a convenient cover story for being in Paris—to visit a mistress. He sent Deane an anonymous mash note: “A gentleman who has a slender acquaintance with Mr. Deane wishes to improve it; but fearing objections to an Unexpected visit, asks the favor of a private interview,” and suggested a clandestine rendezvous. Deane responded drily that the next day at his rooms on the Rue Royale he would welcome any and all callers. On December 13, they spoke about the battle tactics of Roman emperors, Maurepas’s gout, and what treasures could be obtained in Parisian pawnshops, and made a date for a more serious tête-à-tête the next day at a café. Showing up for it, Wentworth found Deane seated with Franklin and Lee; at his approach the two pointedly walked away.
Undeterred, he offered “General Ideas for the Preliminaries of an Accommodation and Perpetual Union between Great Britain and the Colonies.” These included a “cessation of hostilities” on land and sea; the British vacating Philadelphia but not New York; “the king’s authority to be restored to the level of 1763” (before the Stamp Act); a general amnesty; and Congress to metamorphose into committees able to affect the deliberations of Parliament. Wentworth also verbally promised high honors to Deane and political offices for all the commissioners if they agreed to the proposal.
Franklin forwarded a copy of the document to Vergennes. The minister’s annoyance was exacerbated by the report of a friend of Wentworth’s, who at Vergennes’s insistence queried him about his contact with Deane: Wentworth said that he’d simply popped over to Paris to ask Deane to forward funds to his relatives in America. The patent falsity of this story forced Vergennes’s hand. On December 16 he sent his deputy Conrad Alexandre Gérard to assure the commissioners that Louis XVI would sign a treaty because “it was manifestly in the Interest of France that the Power of England should be diminished by our Separation from it,” as the commissioners reported.
“The destruction of the army of Burgoyne, and the very confined state in which Howe finds himself have totally changed the face of things,” the king would shortly explain to Carlos III. “America is triumphant and England abashed.” A Bourbon-American connection must be consummated soon or it might never be, he warned the Spanish king, given that Lord North’s government would shortly dispatch a peace-negotiating team to America authorized to do what Wentworth proposed.
While Louis’s uncle in Spain contemplated whether or not to join the proposed alliance, to help Congress reject the British peace initiative Vergennes agreed to dispatch a frigate to America with word of an imminent Franco-American pact. The information was deemed so secret that Simeon Deane, Silas’s brother, who was carrying the document, was instructed to sneak into the port and hide until embarked on the Belle Poule, whose destination was in sealed instructions to the captain, only to be opened at sea. Of course the British learned of it; Wentworth wrote Eden: “These dispatches contain the resolution to declare + support the Independency of the United Colonies.” Due to bad weather, during the holidays the Belle Poule remained in port.
On Christmas Day—Deane’s fortieth birthday—the American commissioners dined at their neighbor’s. Charles Hector Théodat, Comte d’Estaing, forty-eight, had recently been promoted to admiral after having spent decades in the army and then as a governor in the Caribbean, a position combining naval and army responsibilities, before switching into the navy. His rapid rise in the navy, it was said, was due to his being a favorite of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Much talk of the day was about the royal couple: in the wake of a summer visit by the king’s brother-in-law, who expressed surprise and annoyance that Louis’s and Marie Antoinette’s marriage had yet to be consummated; the young couple had then agreed to intimacy coaching, and rumor had it that the king and queen had since entered upon conjugal relations, producing the excited hope that their union would soon result in a new Dauphin. At the dinner Franklin proposed a toast: “To a perpetual and everlasting understanding between the house of Bourbon and the American Congress.” No objection arose from d’Estaing, whose animosity toward the British derived from an embittering year as a British prisoner of war.
On New Year’s Eve a friend of Franklin’s made an unexpected visit. James Hutton was a Scottish physician whose research into rock formations was earning him the title of father of the science of geology. Hutton had ostensibly come to ask Franklin’s help in protecting his religious Moravian sect brothers in Pennsylvania—but almost surely to discuss reunification. Chaumont advised Vergennes, “Je vois bien de l’Empressement à Ecouter les propositions et j’ai peur” (I observe much Eagerness [on the part of Franklin] to Hear the propositions and I am afraid).
Vergennes was also upset because Franklin did not report his meetings with Hutton, and because he met with Wentworth on January 6—when Wentworth read to Franklin, twice, a proposal for a peace treaty, and then remained for dinner with him, Chaumont, and other guests. That very evening Vergennes convened an emergency king-and-council meeting in Maurepas’s chambers, the first minister being abed with a bad attack of gout. Also affecting deliberations on the American problem was a new crisis brewing in central Europe. On December 30 the Bavarian ruler had died, leaving no direct heirs. His brother-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor of Austria, Joseph II, coveted parts of Bavaria and quickly marched in to occupy them. This rapidly deteriorating situation might soon entangle France. That was certainly the expectation in London; North hoped for a war, “provided it would completely occupy the French.” In Paris that same possibility caused Louis and the council to determine that even as they hastened an American alliance they would not publicize it, to prevent emboldening the contenders in the Bavarian succession from using France’s involvement in the New World as an excuse to rearrange the borders of the Old.
* * *
On January 7 the Belle Poule sailed. Not far offshore it was stopped by two British warships demanding its identity and to perform an inspection, which would disastrously have revealed the announcement of a forthcoming Franco-American alliance. Its captain, although outgunned, responded, “I am the Belle Poule, frigate of the King of France; I sail from sea and I sail to sea. Vessels of the King, my master, never allow inspections.” The British ships accepted this explanation and let it proceed. When the Belle Poule was well out to sea, its captain opened his sealed orders. Discovering that his destination was America, he realized that he did not have enough victuals for such a long voyage and returned to port. The message of a forthcoming Franco-American connection remained undelivered.
* * *
On the evening following the late-night Maurepas bedside council session, in Deane’s apartments Géra
rd opened the first formal treaty-making meeting with a surprise demand that each commissioner must pledge, aloud, to keep the proceedings absolutely secret. Met by silence, he explained that this demand had been made necessary by Franklin’s reticence in informing Vergennes about Hutton. That poke in the side evoked a reluctant assent. “Given the distrust in which the Doctor’s dispositions are held,” Gérard reported to Vergennes, “I think I have won an interesting point.” Deane and Lee also agreed to secrecy. Gérard then announced that he was authorized to convey that Louis XVI was fully committed to American independence and would do “what was necessary to achieve this goal.”
Gérard revealed more than he should have about France’s fears, however, when he pleaded that the commissioners consider “the necessity of immediately preventing the effect of all the snares and all the maneuvers which England is employing to seduce the Deputies.” The way to do so was through a military alliance in addition to the commercial one. Franklin, Deane, and Lee had no congressional guidance for responding to the prospect of a military alliance. And it was by no means certain that Washington would accept French troops serving alongside Americans. Franklin asked whether Louis XVI was ready to declare war on Great Britain. He was informed that such a declaration was not in the plan, since France wanted either to force Great Britain to begin the war or to achieve American independence without it.
Gérard then demanded that the deputies ratify the king’s promises as good enough to forswear further attempts at reunification, and left for an hour so they could formulate their answer. He returned to find Franklin writing: “The immediate conclusion of a treaty of commerce and alliance would induce the Deputies to close their ears to any proposition that did not have as its basis entire liberty and independence in both politics and commerce.” This satisfied Gérard. Franklin then asked for a draft of a treaty. He would have it within a few days, Gérard pledged. France desired no new territory, and he felt that it would be “good policy” for France and the United States to agree “not to halt the war until the English are expelled from the continent of North America.” The complete-expulsion component was based on what Deane confided—that Franklin still lusted after Canada. This strategy did the trick: These notions were “applauded … with a sort of rapture,” and Franklin “confessed that he saw nothing therein that was not noble and just.” A late-session problem arose when Gérard cautioned that France could not guarantee Spain’s participation. Franklin’s frown gave Gérard the opening to lay on the table an ace held for this purpose: that any Franco-American accord would contain a secret protocol enabling Spain to join the alliance when it felt able to do so. Smiles replaced the frowns, and the two sides parted, Gérard reported, satisfied at the outcome and its future promise.
How the French Saved America Page 11
