How the French Saved America

by Tom Shachtman

  Deane had done nothing more untoward in mixing private and public business than had every quartermaster, procuring agent, and commissary chief in charge of securing goods for the Continental services. His pillorying by Congress was not so much about his perceived lapses of financial rectitude as it was a fight between Congress’s “Gallician” and “anti-Gallician” factions. Gérard became involved in it because the question was raised as to whether Deane and Beaumarchais had laid out money for supplies and were now owed for them, or whether these activities had been funded by Louis XVI as a gift to America. The emissary could not allow Congress to mistake the intentions of his sovereign. But he needed an opening to make his case, and Deane provided one in December 1778. After five months of being prevented from presenting his report to Congress, he decided to issue a public explanation to end the rumors of dereliction of duty. In the Pennsylvania Packet he accused the Lees of trying to destroy him and of being anti-French and of seeking reconciliation with Great Britain, and he charged Congress with partisan unfairness in its refusal to let him report. Congress then entertained a motion to condemn Deane. It failed by one vote. Asked in another motion to allow a rebutting letter, already printed in the Packet, to be read aloud, the members defeated that motion, too, by the same margin. These impasses upset Henry Laurens, who denounced Deane’s comments as derogatory to Congress and resigned as president. To replace him Congress settled on a compromise candidate, a former member from New York, absent for two years but just returning: John Jay.

  The brouhaha also occasioned a step over the line of propriety by Tom Paine. Writing in the Packet as “Common Sense,” in an open letter to Deane and in seven follow-up articles Paine cited supposedly secret letters to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, for which he served as secretary, to contend that “the stores which Silas Deane and Beaumarchais pretended they had purchased were a present from the Court of France, and came out of the King’s arsenals.”

  Such disparagement of France’s intentions spurred Gérard to enter the controversy. For him to remain on the sidelines would have allowed Congress to impute the wrong motives and actions to Louis XVI, so he asked Paine to retract his statements. Paine wrote back:

  My full opinion is, that whether Mr. Deane had been there or not, those supplies would have found their way to America.… It is my wish, it is my earnest desire, to lead the People of America to see the friendship of the French Nation in the light they ought to see it; they have deserved much from us of friendship and equal benevolence.

  For a day Gérard was relieved, but then Paine returned to the attack in a new “Common Sense” article that continued to muddy the distinction between Deane’s alleged improprieties and French goodness. The emissary’s formal protest quickly resulted in Congress summoning Paine and the publisher of the Pennsylvania Packet to testify. Morris, whom Paine had also taken to savaging in the later articles of his series, demanded that Paine be fired as secretary of the committee. Ten days of very public accusations and recriminations followed, in which Paine had cause to rail about precisely the sort of treatment that Congress had visited upon Deane, a refusal to permit him openly to state his case and have it debated. During this period, Paine indignantly refused a bribe of one thousand dollars a year to write articles lauding France. On January 16, 1779, Paine felt forced to resign to avoid being fired. Congress’s secretary then wrote to Gérard that the legislative body rejected Paine’s negative claims about the work of Deane, and reaffirmed the sanctity and generosity of the Franco-American alliance.

  Gérard took this acknowledgment as opportunity to successfully lobby Congress to pass a resolution, on January 7, 1779: “Resolved … these United States will not conclude either truce or peace with the common enemy without the formal consent of their ally first obtained.” Although this understanding had been implicit in the Franco-American treaty, to have it so baldly stated in an official congressional resolution was a notable Gérard accomplishment.

  * * *

  “Why was not Gen Washington pursued after Brandywine,” Carlisle had pressed the British generals in New York before departing for home. “Why was nothing done against him all the winter [of 1777–78] when he was so near with an inferior force. Why was nothing done in May when his force was dwindled and not above 4000.” Not receiving acceptable answers, when Carlisle returned to London he exhorted the government to action on what he considered the more perilous problem, “the French interference”:

  The Question is no longer which shall get the better, Gt. Britain or America, but whether Gt. Britain shall or shall not by every means in her power endeavour to hinder her colonies from becoming an accession of strength to her natural enemies, and destroy a connection, which is contrived for our main ruin and might possibly effect it, unless prevented by the most vigourous exertions on our part.

  That fitted well with the proclivities of George III. Despite the British public’s eagerness for peace with America so that British energies could be wholly devoted to beating the French, the king still wanted to crush the American rebels. The cabinet devised a way to do both. Great Britain would direct most of its military might toward the wider war, while utilizing in America resources already in place and shifting their focus to the South. Its “Southern strategy” was built on a pyramid of assumptions. The base was the belief that Georgia and South Carolina were full of Loyalists and therefore could be easily reconquered. Once the British were in control, the Loyalists there would readily take over the tasks of governing—a second assumption—freeing the troops for the next-level task, ousting the Americans from North Carolina and Virginia. The third assumption was that total control of the southern states would so substantially cut the Continentals’ funding that it would end the rebellion.

  In mid-December, taking advantage of the restored British naval supremacy along the Atlantic Coast from Nova Scotia to Florida, Clinton dispatched a convoy to Savannah bearing 3,500 New York Loyalists, Hessian mercenaries, and the Seventy-First Highlanders. Earlier in the war the British had tried and failed to capture Charleston, a similar coastal city one hundred miles north of Savannah. To avoid repeating the mistake of a direct assault on such a city, the British troops were landed south of Savannah and trekked through concealing swamps until they emerged within striking distance. The American commander spotted the British, realized he was badly outnumbered and outflanked, and ordered Savannah evacuated. The British forces marched in on December 28, and then pursued the Continentals, killing 83 and capturing 483. A few weeks later, joined by other British forces that had been roaming north Florida, they marched almost unopposed to Augusta and took that state capital. Modest numbers of Loyalists did apply to join the British military ranks, which seemed to validate London’s “Southern strategy” for winning the war against the rebels and breaking up their alliance with France.

  * * *

  D’Estaing arrived in the Caribbean in January 1779 as he had at Philadelphia the previous July—too late to accomplish his mission. The British had already seized St. Lucia. He proceeded to engage Admiral Byron’s fleet in a series of battles. Each side sought to protect its most recent conquests, the British of St. Lucia, and the French of Dominica. In these encounters, d’Estaing was once more quite cautious, spurring Bougainville to complain to his diary, “What comfort our indecision, our endless delays and our wasted maneuvers are giving to the enemy!” In the naval encounters the French suffered seven hundred casualties, far more than the British, but there was very little net effect on either side’s control of territory.

  Once de Grasse came on the scene, however, Byron made no further successful moves on French possessions. Later in the spring, a small squadron under the Marquis de Vaudreuil and a larger one under La Motte-Picquet joined d’Estaing and de Grasse.

  The Caribbean was now well defended by the French.

  The cost of doing so was high, but it was not the largest fraction of France’s naval budget, the bulk of which, many tens of millions of livres, was being sp
ent to protect French territory, a fact that finance minister Necker emphasized as he attempted to fill the treasury with lottery receipts. His appeal to the public to buy the tickets stressed that the lottery revenues would go toward protecting the patrimony and specifically not to underwrite the American partnership. Actually, figuring in the cost of the fleets and the bill for bivouacking twenty thousand French troops on France’s northern coast to protect it and for a potential invasion of the British Isles, the total amount of money committed solely to defending French territory dwarfed the amount of livres France was extending to supply the armed forces of the United States. Moreover, much of that latter sum was being spent in the place and in the manner that foreign aid almost always was, in the home country, in this instance to buy outmoded French armaments.

  * * *

  The importance attached by the American government to Lafayette’s return to France to obtain more help was emphasized by the resources committed to it—America’s largest warship, the Alliance, captained by Pierre Landais, a French naval officer who had been serving with the American navy. The voyage was not an easy one. Off Newfoundland the Alliance nearly foundered, and when it was approaching the European coast, Lafayette and Landais were threatened by a plot of some sailors and junior officers (none born in France or America, Lafayette would note) to take over the ship and deliver the famous passenger to Great Britain. “Only an hour before the plot was to be carried out, we called together the officers and a few trustworthy men and climbed, sword in hand, up to the deck while others among us seized the cannons.”

  On arrival in France Lafayette sped to Paris, where he was relegated to “the confines of the Hôtel de Noailles [which] were thought preferable to the honors of the Bastille, which was first proposed.” Still a criminal in the eyes of Versailles, he nonetheless held interviews with Franklin, Adams, and others on schemes to aid the United States and punish Great Britain, and assured Vergennes and Louis XVI, by separate letters, that he was his majesty’s “very humble and very obedient and faithful subject.” A slap on the wrist for his prior disobedience followed; there could be no harsher punishment because his popularity had become immense.

  Nor could Vergennes do much to punish Spain for its truculent neutrality or to move it toward the American alliance. “I will not dissimulate, Sire,” Vergennes wrote to Louis XVI. “The views and pretensions of Spain are gigantic.” When he had pressed the Spanish to name their price for war, he was told that Carlos III desired a large-scale, joint invasion and conquest of Great Britain, utilizing the combined Bourbon fleets. This was anathema to Vergennes’s vision of a war undertaken to reduce but not eliminate British power. However, since France had little to lose and much to gain from humoring Spain, he went through the motions of planning an invasion, down to advising Floridablanca that the combined fleets would have 107 capital ships to Great Britain’s 92.

  Spain, still playing the would-be-mediator card, had requested definitive bottom-line demands from France and Great Britain. France had only one, and it was furnished early and it was nonnegotiable: the guarantee of the independence of the United States of America—this, for France was “a point of honor,” as Montmorin told Floridablanca. The British demands, when they finally arrived, were that France must stop all aid to the United States, summon home d’Estaing’s fleet, and agree that Britain would continue to control New York, Newport, and other areas of America. There was not a word about American independence.

  The belated and inflexible nature of the British response finally convinced Floridablanca, in January 1779, that Great Britain did not seriously desire mediation. Accordingly, he told Vergennes, Spain would now negotiate the terms on which Carlos III would enter the war at the side of his nephew, Louis XVI, and only incidentally at that of France’s partner, the United States of America. Since Floridablanca refused to draw up a list of what Spain wanted as the price of alliance, Vergennes, Maurepas, and the king made one for them. It included plans for an invasion of Ireland by a combined thirty thousand Franco-Spanish troops, and a guarantee that neither Spain nor France would lay down arms until American independence was achieved.

  Floridablanca deemed the demand for American independence “useless” and “out of place,” and the invasion proposal insufficiently large. Vergennes continued to plan an invasion that he hoped would never occur: “If we succeed [by our preparations for invasion] only in interrupting Britain’s trade, you may depend on it that the resultant alarm and despondency will be as great as if we had landed in some part of that island,” he told a confidant. When he demanded that Spain provide half the troops, Floridablanca responded that Spain would pay more but would furnish no soldiers. Lacking enough troops to conquer England, Vergennes proposed to start with Ireland, where the Irish hated British rule. “They may be won with the bait of establishing that democracy which they worship so fanatically,” Vergennes noted. To hurry that plan along he sent over to Ireland, as a spy and emissary to rouse the Irish to revolt, an American in Paris who had Irish roots, and whom he and Lafayette agreed was perfect for the job: Dr. Edward Bancroft.

  * * *

  In February 1779 Gérard in Philadelphia had an unpleasant task, to put to Congress Spain’s insistence that America declare its willingness to accept a truce in which the opposing armies would remain in control of the territory they currently occupied so that Spain could negotiate a peace. He tried to position this demand as a de facto Spanish recognition of American independence, which it was not. Gérard stressed to Congress that the United States must prepare for peace even while waging war. A few days’ discussion should settle the American agenda for peace, he thought, and urged the Americans to constrain their demands to the physical boundaries of the original thirteen colonies, plus any additional land held when negotiations began.

  He was surprised when Congress embarked on a very protracted debate. The northeast states wanted Newfoundland and Nova Scotia included in American demands, while Virginia and Pennsylvania wanted the Mississippi River. Gérard worried to Vergennes that underlying all was a growing American dissatisfaction with the new country’s finances, as exampled by depreciating “Continentals” (the government-issued currency) and rising taxes. He forwarded a copy of a Maryland resolution in which that state refused to become a signatory to the Confederation so long as the tax moneys it would pay in were to be spent out of state. If France and Spain were to rescue the American Revolution, Gérard advised, they had better act soon, and together.

  By March 1779 Vergennes and Floridablanca were close to a deal but they fundamentally disagreed on an article in the compact that in Vergennes’s wording would have Carlos III declare, “He will recognize the independence of the United States of America, either by acceding purely and simply to the [Franco-American] treaty … or by some other pubic act.” Floridablanca crossed that out but substituted a pledge that Spain would procure for the United States “all the possible advantages” from U.S. conquests and not stand in the way of France fulfilling its treaty obligations to the United States. Other Spanish provisions called on France not to sign a peace treaty until Spain obtained Gibraltar, Minorca, and the American Floridas, and had kicked Great Britain out of all enclaves in the Gulf of Mexico.

  On April 12, in the royal palace at Aranjuez, south of Madrid, Floridablanca and Montmorin signed the alliance. Its existence was kept so secret in Spain that only the king and Floridablanca knew of it, and they persuaded Louis and Vergennes not to discuss the alliance with the French military, pending receipt of the British final response to Spanish mediation. Six days later Louis XVI ratified the treaty.

  Vergennes worried about the remaining hurdle, the Spanish ultimatum to Great Britain, because the Spanish proffer was so reasonable: separate cease-fires, one for Great Britain and France, and another for Great Britain and its former colonies, neither of which truce could be broken without a year’s prior notice; general and mutual disarmament on lands and seas; and a peace commission to negotiate changes in territorial boun
daries.

  In early May of 1779, Montmorin had good news for Vergennes: “Fortunately … England … has cut through all the difficulties” by rejecting the Spanish ultimatum. The signing of a treaty to end the Bavarian succession crisis cleared additional potential obstacles to joint Franco-Spanish action, as it freed the Bourbon powers to focus on a new enemy. Spain would now enter the war against Great Britain. It would not be directly allied with America, but its participation was expected to benefit the United States. As that news reached America, Washington learned from Gérard that d’Estaing would soon be returning and had requested suggestions as to where to direct his force. In response Washington invited Gérard and Spain’s representative, Juan de Miralles, to visit him at Valley Forge, promising that they would receive a thirteen-gun salute, review the troops, and with him plan for d’Estaing’s return.

  In the summer of 1779, while awaiting d’Estaing the American forces feinted and clashed with the British on land, mostly in small encounters. One had as its focus Stony Point, a dozen miles downriver of West Point, seized during the spring from Continental hands. The fort, on a promontory 150 feet above the river, was approachable only through an underwater marsh and a steep slope. Atop the British had added abatis—felled and sharpened branches—and redoubts whose cannons could rake climbing attackers. “I do not think a Storm practicable,” Wayne advised the commander, and Washington agreed. But a new series of provocative British raids changed his mind; he authorized a sally, put Wayne in charge of it, and assigned Fleury to assist.