by Sarah Vowell
At the advent of the American Revolution, Raynal’s proclamation that it is “an inalienable and natural right” for oppressed peoples to rise up against their overlords especially struck a chord with Lafayette. Raynal practically dared colonists to revolt, taunting, “Do not bother us with your complaints and learn to accept your unhappiness if you are unwilling to become free.”
Lafayette’s friend and fellow soldier Ségur accompanied him to various meals and diatribes with Raynal. Echoing Raynal’s equating freedom with bravery, Ségur wrote, “Liberty, whatever its language, appealed to us by its courage.”
Increasingly obsessed with the American rebels, Lafayette conceded that he “thought of nothing else but raising my banner and adding my colors to theirs.” Of course, an added incentive was that France was uncharacteristically and annoyingly at peace. Lafayette, a self-described “ardent lover of laurels,” was well aware that he wasn’t going to win battlefield glory without any actual battles.
Such was his craving for armed conflict that the birth of his daughter Henriette in December 1775 barely registered.
While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them. As Lafayette was trying to figure out how to go about ditching his family to head for the colonies and fame, a colonist who would help him do so was en route to Paris, unbeknownst to his own wife and son.
In March of 1776, Silas Deane, a delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut, wrote a letter from Philadelphia to his wife, Elizabeth, informing her that he would not be coming home. He asked her to keep taking care of the twelve-year-old stepson he stuck her with months ago, the offspring of Deane’s previous dead wife. Deane implored Elizabeth to “guard his youth from anything dangerous or dishonorable.” Surely a simple task, safety and decorum being the top priorities of the hormonal preteen male. “I can but feel for the pain I must give you by this adventure,” he whimpered, adding, “I wish as much as any man for the enjoyment of domestic ease.” One wonders how the words “domestic ease” came across to the beleaguered babysitter of a dead woman’s spawn. “I am about to enter on the great stage of Europe,” he boasted to the woman saddled with a boy about to enter the not-so-great stage of puberty.
I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy’s coming home. Elizabeth never saw her husband again, since she died while he was abroad—the wives of Silas Deane apparently enjoying the life expectancy of the male Lafayettes.
In its mission letter to Deane on March 3, 1776, the congressional Committee of Secret Correspondence correctly predicted, “There is a great appearance we shall come to a total separation from Great Britain.” Which is why Deane was to make haste to France. For France, said the missive signed by, among others, Ben Franklin and John Jay, “would be looked upon as the power, whose friendship it would be fittest for us to obtain and cultivate.”
Deane was charged with convincing the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, that a defeat for Britain would be a political and fiscal win for France. He was to hit up the minister for “clothing and arms for twenty five thousand men with a suitable quantity of ammunition, and one hundred field pieces.”
Deane was to pretend to be a merchant (which was in fact his profession) in Paris accumulating goods to trade with Indians as well as a tourist eager to see “so famous a city.”
The assignment demanded a certain finesse, and not just because, like most endeavors of the Continental Congress, it was an act of treason. France, still licking its wounds from the Seven Years’ War, was wary about antagonizing Great Britain. The court of Louis XVI could not afford to pay for another full-blown war so soon after the last expensive drubbing.
(By the way, neither could Great Britain, which was one reason it lost. The tax laws that triggered the colonial rebellion in the first place were meant to replenish Britain’s empty coffers after the Seven Years’ War. Or as it’s called in the United States, the French and Indian War. One of Parliament’s motivations was to make the colonists chip in on paying for their own defense.)
Besides being broke, the French did not want to risk agitating the “roast beefs,” as they called the British, when the American rebels were so clearly outmanned and outgunned.
And yet. While French financial resources were finite, France’s contempt for Great Britain was not. The national grudge was a bottomless, interminable, renewable resource of hate. As George Washington put it in his presidential farewell address of 1796, that kind of bad blood is a form of slavery. And George Washington knew from slavery. “The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,” he wrote. “It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”
Luckily for Washington, the French foreign minister Vergennes had already been conniving to secretly fund the Americans as a bargain-basement method of harassing the British when Silas Deane showed up at his door.
The shadowy figure who had been plotting behind the scenes with Vergennes was, of all people, France’s greatest living dramatist, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of the hit play The Barber of Seville. This came about, oh, the usual way, when the foreign minister enlisted the playwright to go to London and apprehend a vexing cross-dressing ex-spy. Vergennes was so impressed by the mind of Figaro, The Barber of Seville’s shrewd protagonist, that he figured Beaumarchais would have the wiles to ensnare such slippery prey. That and the author’s celebrity were sure to open doors.
The object of Beaumarchais’s hunt, the Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont, had previously served France as both a male soldier in the Seven Years’ War and a female secret agent who infiltrated the Russian monarchy, successfully befriending and convincing a Russian czarina not to become an ally of France’s enemy Great Britain. No one was entirely sure of his/her gender, and he/she kept them guessing. D’Éon had been extorting the government of Louis XV from his London home for years, threatening to turn over to the British some old French secret plans from the Seven Years’ War to invade England. After the death of Louis, the government wanted d’Éon and the documents returned home to France.
Beaumarchais easily scored an invite to a dinner party among the smart set that d’Éon was to attend. Confronting him—for he was dressed as a man at the time—Beaumarchais tried to convince d’Éon to return to France to sort out his problems with the regime. D’Éon said he would, but he was afraid of being locked up in the Bastille, especially since he revealed to Beaumarchais that he was a woman. Whether or not that was true—and technically it wasn’t, based on a postmortem examination of d’Éon’s anatomically male corpse years later—the professionally imaginative Beaumarchais concocted a theatrical solution. After handing over the invasion plans, d’Éon would be welcomed back to France and receive his military pension as long as he agreed to live out the rest of his life as a woman. Which happened!
Meanwhile, the host of the dinner party where Beaumarchais met d’Éon was none other than the man George III denounced as “that devil Wilkes.” John Wilkes, the rabble-rousing journalist, lord mayor of London, and pen pal of the Boston Sons of Liberty, was one of the most vocal members of Parliament who opposed the conflict in America. He denounced it as “an unjust, ruinous, murderous and felonious war,” predicting, “The whole continent will be dismembered from Great Britain, and the wide arch of the raised empire fall.”
At Wilkes’s house, Beaumarchais ended up befriending the Virginian Arthur Lee, then officially representing the colonies of Massachusetts and New Jersey in England whilst unofficially acting as an informant to the Continental Congress’s Secret Committee of Correspondence. Lee jumped at the chance to buttonhole a prominent Frenchman, making a case for
American independence as well as an appeal for aid. Lee also dangled the prospect of future riches, predicting a lucrative postwar commercial relationship with whichever nation helped the colonies become a country. Lee told him, “We offer France, as a reward for its secret aid, a secret treaty of commerce,” pledging “all the advantages of that commerce which for a century America has enriched England.”
Beaumarchais was hooked. He wrote to Vergennes, “The Americans will triumph but they must be assisted in their struggle, for if they lose, they will turn against us for not having helped them. We are not yet ready for war ourselves, but we must prepare and, while doing so, we must send secret aid to the Americans in the most prudent way.”
Running guns to the rebels would not only undermine Britain’s military and economic stability, it could also lead to a future windfall for France—and, Beaumarchais realized, the gunrunner. He penned a letter to Louis XVI imploring the king to secretly help the Americans, adding, “If your majesty does not have a more clever man at hand” to handle the logistics, then he would volunteer for the job. By that age, the playwright had already been a watchmaker, a failed businessman, and the harp teacher to the daughters of Louis XV, so he was game for moonlighting as a covert arms dealer, in between writing The Marriage of Figaro and publishing the complete works of Voltaire.
Vergennes was intrigued but not convinced, rebuffing Arthur Lee at Versailles and declining, for the moment, to pass along Beaumarchais’s gushy letter to the king. In order to make an informed decision, the foreign minister dispatched a clandestine fact-finder to Philadelphia, a former soldier who had been to America before, Achard de Bonvouloir. Bonvouloir was to assess the rebels’ chances at defeating Britain, and he was also asked to determine the Americans’ dedication to the rebellion, which was still uncertain in the summer of 1775.
Though the first shots of the Revolution had been fired in Lexington and Concord on April 19, followed by the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, it was nevertheless wise to question whether Americans were committed for the long haul to a war against their mother country. For one thing, there was a suspicious hopefulness in the way colonists still referred to the offending redcoats of the aforementioned dustups in Massachusetts as “Parliament Troops” or the “Ministerial Army,” which is to say the hired guns of Parliament and the prime minister, not the still-beloved George III.
On July 8, three weeks after Bunker Hill, Congress adopted the so-called Olive Branch Petition, a declaration of loyalty to George III from “your still faithful colonists” and “your American people.” Mostly written by the pacifist Pennsylvanian John Dickinson (to the objection of John Adams and the Massachusetts delegation), the petition beseeched His Majesty to stop the war by taking the colonies’ side against Parliament. In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world’s oldest constitutional monarchy, the great symbol and protector of British freedom.
From the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 to the Tea Act of 1773 and the Coercive, aka “Intolerable,” Acts of 1774 (conceived as punishment for the Boston Tea Party), it was increasingly vindictive parliamentary legislation that turned lawyers into traitors and farmers into insurgents. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774, “Scarcely have our minds been able to emerge from the astonishment into which one stroke of parliamentary thunder has involved us, before another more heavy, and more alarming, is fallen on us.”
In fact, way back at the beginning of the crisis in 1766, Benjamin Franklin gave testimony before Parliament regarding the furor in the colonies over the Stamp Act. When asked what Americans thought of Parliament before the act, Franklin replied, “They considered the parliament as the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges, and always spoke of it with the utmost respect and veneration.” To the follow-up question—“And have they not still the same respect for Parliament?”—Franklin revealed, “No; it is greatly lessened.”
The Olive Branch Petition came up during my chat with historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy at Monticello. I confessed that, as an American, I found it difficult to wrap my head around the idea that a king could be thought of as a welcome check on parliamentary power.
“Although Britain did not have a system of checks and balances as strong as the modern American system,” O’Shaughnessy responded, “there were nevertheless three parts to the British government: the king, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. So those were validly seen as some of the checks on the power of each other. That was what they were appealing to,” he said, referring to the colonists’ petition.
“It was a very curious and late argument being made by Jefferson and other Americans as well—that the king should intervene against Parliament,” he continued. “It’s bizarre because it really went contrary to their own beliefs. Essentially, the way Jefferson saw the British Empire was as an empire of equals in which the king would act as an umpire, but America would not be formally ruled by Parliament. He denied that had ever been the case. Which was a bit of a stretch—Parliament had been making laws for America for a century. They knew very well that the British regarded the authority of Parliament as critical to their own liberties, as a real check on royal power. So, in a way, it was a last desperate appeal.” The Olive Branch Petition, he noted, was the result of an attempt by “the moderates in Congress, who asked the king to intervene and umpire the dispute.”
The petition hit London on August 14, 1775. It didn’t help the American peaceniks’ cause that arriving at the same time was a captured letter John Adams had written to a friend in the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty. Printed in Tory newspapers, Adams’s letter complained that the petition “has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings,” followed by a promise to ship gunpowder soon.
Adams was right to attack the logic of the petition. Its arguments didn’t make much sense, but the motivation behind it did: preventing bloodshed, or at least putting it off. In the dustbin of history, John Dickinson and the moderates come into blurry view mainly as the dithering butts of jokes by official icons like Adams and George Washington, who complained a few days before the Declaration of Independence was signed (though not by the abstaining Dickinson) that the moderates were “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation.”
Dickinson was the son and husband of Quakers. Though he was a lapsed Quaker himself, he couldn’t help being influenced by that religion’s insistence on nonviolence, a doctrine inspired by Jesus’s not particularly popular admonitions to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek.”
Dickinson, who would go on to be one of the framers of the Constitution, was one of the colonial thinkers whose words had inspired the rebellion. As the anonymous author of the influential 1767 essays Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, he denounced parliamentary crackdowns against “the liberty of these colonies.” To rally the different regions in common cause, he clarified, “I say of these colonies; for the cause of one is the cause of all. If the Parliament may lawfully deprive New York of any of her rights, it may deprive any or all the other colonies of their rights.” He did not dismiss the possibility of armed revolt, pointing out, “English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force.” However, he cautioned that force “never can be justifiable, until the people are FULLY CONVINCED, that any further submission will be destructive to their happiness.” Eight years later, the Olive Branch Petition that Adams found so silly jibed with that cautious creed; Massachusetts was already at war, but Dickinson was still not fully convinced to an all-caps degree.
After Dickinson and Adams had it out over the Olive Branch Petition, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he and Dickinson “are not to be on speaking terms.”
How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public serv
ants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?
While the Olive Branch Petition is a useful tool for understanding the depth and sincerity of the rebels’ internal disputes, in practical terms it was a complete waste of time. George III refused to even read the thing. On August 23, the king issued “A Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition” in the American colonies, followed by his October address to Parliament calling for “a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” He wrote, “For this purpose, I have increased my naval establishment, and greatly augmented my land forces,” hastily adding, “but in such a manner as may be the least burthensome to my kingdoms”—because apparently it had finally dawned on him that sometimes his subjects could get a bit touchy about taxes.
When news of the king’s speech reached Massachusetts in November of 1775, Abigail Adams wrote to John, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our Brethren. Let us renounce them and instead of supplications as formerly for their prosperity and happiness, Let us beseech the almighty to blast their councils and bring to Nought all their devices.”
