Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  At last the British accepted a hollow compromise. The Congress would simply recommend—“earnestly”—that the individual states return Tory land and goods to their owners. The Americans explained that with Congress as weak and divided as it was, they could promise no more.

  With the preliminary treaty signed, it fell to France’s staunchest American friend to inform Vergennes that the Americans had made their own peace without regard to French interests. Benjamin Franklin delivered the news, and Vergennes responded with a letter asking how Franklin could justify his incivility toward Louis XVI. Franklin replied that France should ignore the little misunderstanding and not allow the English to believe they had divided America from France. In the same letter, Franklin ignored France’s severe economic problems and asked for the loan of another six million livres.

  Vergennes saw the value of France’s future relations with America and put aside his pique, even though he suspected that the ties between America and England were so strong, despite the bloodshed, that no other country could ever come between them. Benjamin Franklin got the money he requested and remained on good terms with the Comte de Vergennes.

  On the morning of September 3, 1783, the three American negotiators met in Paris to sign the definitive treaty. The Congress had approved it, but not without the grumbling that Franklin had anticipated. Charles Fox had replaced Shelburne as secretary of state for foreign affairs, and George III liked Fox even less than his predecessor. According to custom, gifts were to be exchanged at a signing, but when Fox asked the king what to give the Americans, George said only, “Give them whatever the French do.” Since the French usually offered a portrait of their king studded with diamonds, Fox decided that a purse of one thousand pounds sterling would be more appropriate.

  Vergennes waited until after the American ceremony ended to sign France’s treaty with England. Then he entertained Franklin, Adams and Jay at dinner in his residence at Versailles. Lafayette was also invited; John Adams found the marquis overly ambitious and insecure. At the close of the day, John Jay retired to his room and speculated on America’s future.

  “If we are not a happy people,” he wrote, “it will be our own fault.”

  —

  For Samuel Adams, happiness had never been the supreme goal. He preferred virtue. While other men in the Congress and the army had found ways to improve their fortunes, Adams had returned to Boston in spring 1781 even poorer than when he had left for the First Continental Congress. Since his own house had been damaged during the British occupation, the state allowed him to occupy, at nominal rent, a house once owned by a British ports commissioner. He used money due to him as clerk of the Massachusetts assembly to pay for bits of furniture confiscated from the Tories. As the peace negotiations went forward in France, Samuel Adams was elected president of his state’s senate and again aroused his countrymen by vowing to oppose any treaty that did not protect New England’s fishing rights. “No peace without the fisheries!” became the cry.

  Many of Adams’ followers had dropped away, and John Hancock was swept into the governor’s mansion in an outpouring of popular affection. Once installed, he hosted night after night of lavish fetes and balls. James Warren, married to James Otis’ sister, called them “more suitable to the effeminancy and ridiculous manners of Asiatic slavery than to the hardy and sober manners of a New England public.” In 1782 Adams ran against Hancock for governor, but the Adams campaign was desultory, and he finished a distant second. By now his tremors would disappear for long periods but return even more violently. As styles in dress grew opulent, he went on wearing the coats and breeches from the days when his revolution was young. Again Samuel Adams was standing alone, but this time the past seemed to hold more promise than the future. “I love the people of Boston,” he wrote to a friend. “I once thought the city would be the Christian Sparta. But alas! Will men never be free?”

  —

  Samuel Adams’ first ally was spared the disillusionments of peace. James Otis had lived for years on farms outside Boston, sometimes under restraint. Other times he was lucid, and he even ventured into Boston occasionally to plead a case in court. After many invitations, Governor Hancock persuaded Otis to come to dinner, but the evening proved too stimulating for him, and the family had to send him back to his retreat at Andover. Otis had become enormously fat on a diet of bread and honey, and although he wasn’t yet sixty he began to have premonitions of death. He was still fascinated by perishing in fire and told visitors he would like to be struck by a bolt of lightning. In March 1783, Otis drew up a will; to his daughter who had married a British officer he left only five shillings.

  Eight weeks later, when Otis’ family was visiting him at the farm, a heavy cloud arose in the spring sky. As the storm broke, the others ran inside the house, but Otis took his cane and went to stand in the open door and lean against the doorpost. First there was a glare, then a crash as lightning struck the chimney. It followed a rafter in the roof and grounded at a timber in the door. The casing of the door split apart, and Otis fell down dead.

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  Paul Revere’s rides had become legend, but his service as a lieutenant colonel in the militia had threatened to tarnish their luster. Once, when British ships arrived off the shore at Penobscot, Revere had led out a band of raw troops. America’s ships, commanded by Dudley Saltonstall, had refused to engage the enemy, so Revere had marched his men back to Boston. In order to absolve themselves of blame for the defeat, each commander had blamed the other. Captain Saltonstall was court-martialed. Paul Revere was accused of disobedience and cowardice and relieved of his command. Revere sought a court-martial to clear himself, but his request was not granted. Now in his midforties and angered by the slur to his name, he returned to silver engraving. After six petitions, Revere was given a trial in 1782. The court acquitted him on each count and ruled that Colonel Revere should be accorded “equal honor” with the other officers of the confused and failed expedition.

  —

  The peace had left John Hancock with little to complain about. As governor of Massachusetts, he reveled in his title, his entertainments, his independence from King George and from Samuel Adams. Hancock was the first citizen of the “mushroom gentry,” the new class of profiteers and speculators who had turned a profit from the war. Whenever he appeared in public, admirers ran beside his carriage to cheer, gape at his mink coat and scramble for the coins he tossed out to them. As the governor’s wife, Dorothy Quincy Hancock served so many rich sauces to visiting French nobility that she instructed her servants to milk every cow on the Boston Common, no matter who owned it. Before the war’s end, Dolly Hancock had completed her husband’s happiness by giving him a son; an infant daughter had died before she was a year old. Hancock used his son’s birth to demonstrate that he held no grudge from the day John Adams had risen in Philadelphia and nominated a commander in chief. He named the new heir John George Washington Hancock.

  —

  In Virginia, Patrick Henry had continued to surprise politicians who thought they could predict him. When Horatio Gates was defeated at Camden, Henry forgave Gates his role in the Conway Cabal and pushed through the Virginia legislature a tribute to the general’s past glories. Thomas Jefferson watched scornfully as Henry bought a ten-thousand-acre plantation and paid for it in depreciated paper money that Jefferson claimed was not worth oak leaves.

  Yet even his enemies acknowledged that the size of Patrick Henry’s family gave him unusual responsibilities. After his first wife died, he married the daughter of the Colonel Dandridge who had long ago introduced Henry and Jefferson at a house party. Dorothea, a cousin of Martha Washington, had been four years old at the time of the party. Henry’s first wife left him with six children. In time, Dorothea Henry would provide him with another eleven.

  While tending his financial interests, Henry did not lose his political touch. Thomas Jefferson might deplore his rapacity, but he never underestimated Henry’s hold over the state. The introduction o
f any legislation was hopeless if Henry opposed it. As the war ended, Henry tried to help Virginians avoid paying their outstanding debts to the British. At the same time, he also urged his state to permit the loyalists to return from abroad. Henry argued that Virginia’s prosperity depended on greater population, and he was willing to set aside personal resentments. For that matter, he hoped the merchants and farmers and artisans of the Old World would join the Tories. “Open your doors,” Henry preached to America. “Tell them to come and bid them welcome.”

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  After leaving the governorship, Thomas Jefferson found happiness most often in his library. Ever since the fire at Shadwell thirteen years before, Jefferson had been collecting books assiduously and, by the time of the peace treaty, had acquired more than twenty-six hundred volumes. He was also producing a book of his own. He had begun his Notes on the State of Virginia in the unhappy days after the fall from his horse had left him incapacitated. On behalf of the French government, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois had sent Jefferson twenty-three questions about Virginia. Jefferson’s answers grew into essays that ranged from natural history to moral philosophy. One quarter of the manuscript was devoted to detailed analyses of the vegetable, mineral and animal resources of his state. Jefferson wanted to refute charges that European wildlife had degenerated in America, and he wrote to experts for information on the weight of every animal from—as he put it—the mouse to the mammoth.

  Jefferson attempted the same dispassionate observation of social questions. When he began, he didn’t expect to publish the results and gave little effort to being politic. He once again exposed his anguished conflict over the question of slaves and slavery, deploring the way white children first witnessed despotism on a plantation and then grew up to imitate it. He thought only the rarest man could remain undepraved. But although Jefferson considered himself one of those rare men, he wrote about blacks as if they were another variation on the mammoth or the mouse. According to Jefferson, black people seemed to require less sleep than whites. He offered as proof the fact that after a day’s hard labor the slightest amusement could keep blacks up past midnight. Because black people secreted less by their kidneys than through their glands, he added, they could have a very strong and disagreeable odor. Blacks seemed to him more ardent, but he believed their love was more often an eager desire instead of the tender mixture of sentiment and sensation he defined as love. That was the romantic love Jefferson had lost—he thought forever—when his wife died. But after compiling his observations, his biases, his keen interest and his ignorance, Jefferson knew, as he had always known, the final truth about slavery:

  “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

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  In Britain, Sir Henry Clinton had begun a long and fruitless attempt to explain his failure as a commander. He wrote a massive reconstruction of the war that blamed Britain’s loss on the king’s ministers and his fellow generals, especially Lord Cornwallis. By that time, the public had moved beyond excuses. Sir Guy Carleton agreed to assume command in America, but only to oversee the British evacuation of New York. John Burgoyne and William Howe had both joined the opposition faction in Parliament, and in 1782 Burgoyne had been named commander in chief in Ireland. General Howe lost his seat in Parliament, but with the king’s personal support he had been appointed Britain’s lieutenant general of ordnance after Lord North left the government. Charles, Earl Cornwallis, did better still. Sent to India, he ran up a list of accomplishments that reduced Yorktown to a stumble in his long career.

  Benedict Arnold had not convinced Britain to pursue the war, but when peace came the king liberally rewarded Arnold’s family with an annual pension of five hundred pounds for Peggy Shippen Arnold and a hundred pounds each for their present and future children. Arnold’s three sons by his first marriage were given commissions in the British Army and lifetime pensions at half pay. The king eventually gave the Arnold family more than thirteen thousand acres of crown land in Canada.

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  The American generals who had crossed George Washington politically did not prosper as well as their British counterparts. When the peace treaty was nearly completed in Paris, Charles Lee died in a squalid Pennsylvania tavern. In his will, Lee requested that he not be buried near any churchyard. In America, he explained, “I have kept so much bad company when living that I do not choose to continue it when dead.” His last estimate of George Washington described him as a “puffed up charlatan.” All the same, Lee’s estate repaid the money Lee had borrowed at Mount Vernon before the two generals set out for Cambridge in 1775.

  Horatio Gates’s disgrace at Camden had endured for two years before the Congress repealed its call for an official inquiry and reinstated him as the second-ranking officer of the Continental Army. The same year the peace treaty was signed, Gates left military service to attend to his dying wife at Traveller’s Rest.

  General Washington’s indispensable partner at Yorktown, Admiral de Grasse, was defeated in American waters only six months later. In April 1782 the British Navy bested him in a battle off Saints Passage in the West Indies, and de Grasse was taken prisoner.

  —

  Silas Deane had helped bring de Grasse’s fleet to America, but with one action he ensured that his country would never honor him for it. In March 1781 Deane had offered his services to Lord North’s government and written letters from London urging Americans to end the war and to stop insisting on independence. His letters were printed in New York while the nation was celebrating Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. By 1783 Deane had moved on to Belgium, where he was living in cheap hotels and avoiding any face from home.

  Thomas Paine had been second only to Arthur Lee in attacking Deane, and Paine had also gone to Europe in 1781 to secure aid from the French court. He returned with a gift for America of two and a half million silver livres but reaped nothing from his achievement. After Yorktown, he had to remind George Washington that “the country which ought to have been a home has scarcely afforded me an asylum.” Washington contacted Robert Morris, America’s superintendent of finance, and arranged for Paine secretly to be paid eight hundred dollars a year for his future writings.

  Paine had planned to write the history of the American Revolution as Benjamin Franklin had once urged him to do, but the closest he got was reviewing a book on the war by Abbé Raynal in France. When the peace treaty was signed, Paine’s clandestine salary ended. He wrote one final Crisis: “The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” Over the following months, General Washington continued to solicit money for Paine—“He is poor! He is chagrined!” Washington wrote—but a bill in the Virginia legislature that would have awarded him a grant of land lost on its third reading. The Treaty of Paris was a year old before the state of Pennsylvania voted Paine a generous payment for his past services.

  —

  Francis Bernard had died of an epileptic seizure long before Yorktown, and Thomas Hutchinson had died of a stroke. Hutchinson’s last act was to reject a shirt that his servant had brought him. It was soiled, Hutchinson said, and he was determined to “die clean.” He didn’t live to hear that James Warren and his wife bought his estate in Milton and took delight, as Hutchinson had, in its lovely vistas. John Adams heard of Hutchinson’s death while in Europe and sent a letter to the Boston press that became the former governor’s obituary. Adams did not feel obliged to temper his judgment, and the words “ambition” and “avarice” figured prominently. But in his hatred Adams endowed Thomas Hutchinson with a sort of grandeur: “He was, perhaps, the only man in the world who could have brought on the controversy between Great Britain and America . . .”

  —

  As America had waited anxiously for peace, General Washington was still doing battle once more but this time with the officers and men of his own army. In January 1783 a committee of Continental Army officers went to Philadelph
ia to demand that the Congress release the soldiers’ back pay and benefits for the wounded. Their claims went back at least three years. Washington warned a member of Congress, “The temper of the army is much soured and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.” But Congress lacked the necessary funds. Unless the states amended the Articles of Confederation to allow Congress to collect its own taxes, the members could not meet the army’s demands.

  Some men hoped to use the discontent to shape a future government they preferred. Alexander Hamilton had been elected to the Congress from New York, and, along with such allies as Robert Morris, Horatio Gates and Henry Knox, he was pressing for a strong central government. Hamilton wanted the army to state that it would not fight again even if treaty negotiations failed and the war resumed, but that it would not disband if there was a peace. Washington suspected who was fomenting the army’s discord, although some participants, like Henry Knox, denied their role and seemed to agree when Washington called the army “a dangerous instrument to play with.”

  The plotters had first tried to enlist the commander in chief as the head of their movement. The previous year, a colonel had urged Washington to resolve the delays and frustrations of civilian politics by declaring himself king, but Washington viewed that idea with abhorrence. Now, because Alexander Hamilton had remained a colonel in the army, he felt he could lecture Washington on the mood within the general’s ranks. He wrote that if the army was not properly compensated after peace was declared, the soldiers would use their bayonets to procure justice, with or without General Washington.