For the first time since Britain was a maritime power, Deane wrote Morris, the River Thames and others of its ports were crowded with French and other ships taking in freight, in order to avoid the risk of having property captured.. He had written his own instructions for Commissioner Franklin to carry out. England registered the expected sense of outrage; the whole country seethed with the news. Introduction. To forestall a truce with Britain, the ministers had stipulated that the United States must make no peace that surrendered her independence. If Conyngham was not punished, Stormont would resign, breaking off diplomatic relations with France. During 1775, in London on a royal errand, he was in close touch with the American patriots. The glorious news of General Gatess victory at Saratoga reached Passy about the first of December, 1777, by a Charleston ship, and on the fourth it was confirmed by Jonathan Loring Austin, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of War, who had rushed to France in a specially chartered vessel. Then and then only did he dissolve his company, which had spent over 42,000,000 livres, mostly for America, and most of it never paid back. The man who believed there was never a good war or a bad peace was about to use all his powers to sweep the Bourbon nations into the War of Independence. It thus comprises the first seven years of the period of warfare that was continued through the Napoleonic Wars until Napoleon's abdication in 1814, with a year of interruption under the peace of Amiens (1802-03). Among the papers was Lees private journal with a log of his Spanish transactions and details of every move made by the Paris mission up to that June. Franklin, bobbing a thermometer over the Reprisal s rail to take the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, could think about the life of the sea, this western Atlantic and warm Caribbean which nature had chosen as the home for the new race of Americans. Vergennes may never have realized what had happened during that fateful year of 1777. Over the course of the war, France contributed an estimated 12,000 soldiers and 32,000 sailors to the American war effort. He went back to London in a fury. Vergennes himself could not have stated the Bourbon feelings about Britain more accurately. Franklin knew what he had won for his beloved country. Anything known in Congress was apt to percolate to Whitehall. This was the same thing as asking France and Spain to declare immediate war against Great Britain. He could not urge France into the war without Spanish support and without patriot victories to insure the survival of the young nation across the Atlantic. It was a delusion that cost him and the country dear and brought no profit to Tom Morris. This kept him out of personal debates and increased his potential. only affected North America. Islanders and continentals had worked out a prototype of the free trade which was one of Franklins major objectives. Franklin was a shrewd judge of men, and his unclouded confidence in Bancroft needs some extraordinary explanation. Franklin immediately got to work at this dismal situation. The traffic which had started about 1770 was very large. It meant only the familiar rite of changing the property on paper. Some of them were British merchants; others were American sea captains who could be trusted to deliver letters or verbal messages to people on the Continent. Now he must placate Stormont. Vergennes kept him safe in jail, for the minister was co-operating with Franklins policy up to a dangerous point. Apprehensive as he was about Britain, Vergennes risked war to release Captain Wickes and Captain Henry Johnson, who had sailed in company with him on the Irish cruise, from their long protective arrest in port. Finally, not daring to return to France, he made for Cap Ferrol in Spain. In 1758 Britain found a new strategy. Communications with Congress were rapidly being snuffed out by the capture of dispatches on the high seas and even more by the skill of British agents in intercepting letters, especially those bound for America. It was an entirely new sort of war because the United States was a new sort of country, whose survival depended less on land fighting than on a complex of factors in which Franklin was . The thirteen colonies were in the nightmare situation of trying to fight the strongest power in the Western world almost barehanded. A courier was on his way to Madrid, and the decision of Charles III should be known within three weeks. His widening circle of intimates included people of great influence: Masons, scientists and scholars, men and women of the aristocracy. William Lee was rewarded with office as alderman of the city, a title which he did not relinquish until the war was almost over and he knew which side would win. The colonies needed these things . He wrote home that in the fighting there had been good order and readiness equal to anything of the kind in the best ships of the kings fleet.. British Debt. On May 3 Vergennes wrote his royal master that he proposed to call in Sieur Montaudoin of Nantes and entrust him with forwarding funds and arms to America. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. As far as brains and ability went, Deane belonged in the first rank of the men doing the hard immediate tasks of the Revolution. (The third captain of that cruise was staying behind to take out one of the new American frigates built at Nantes.) Captain Conyngham had lost his ship on the last voyage, and was given command of the Surprise , a lugger newly bought for Congress. It was a long time before this contract with the Farmers General could be satisfied, since few ships could now run the British blockade of the American seaboard. In the matter of the Hortalez ships, it was Vergennes who had yielded. Hodge was not released until the last of the fishing fleet was safely home in France. Which French foreign minister and supporter of American independence convinced the French king to form an alliance with the Patriots? These prospects were bleak enough in December, 1775, but Franklin sent Bonvouloir back with such a rosy report that they immediately improved. Short as it was, the crossing was a godsend. They were sure that the men who were shouldering the executive functions of a nonexistent Administration were in the wrong: Washington, Franklin, Morris, Deane, John Jay, and their hardheaded allies. Support with a donation>>. Yet, it represented much more to those individuals who proposed the gift. Franklins hosts were the merchants Pliarne and Penet, who had little standing in Nantes, but who may have been subsidized by Vergennes. He could not punish Conyngham, who was in parts unknown, so he had William Hodge arrested and sent to the Bastille. He had a vital part in transforming the flow of war supplies from a too little, too late dribble into a steady stream which insured an American victory. Inequality of Rights. There was no good news at Passy. Patrick Henry delivering his famous speech on the Rights of the Colonies, before the . The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787. Congress had appointed Jefferson as the third commissioner, but he had declined to serve because of his wifes illness, and the Adams-Lee bloc in Congress rushed their man in as substitute. Contemporaries experienced the French Revolution as a set of interlocking changes or stages that seemed driven by some kind of mechanism or impetus. Naval affairs were stagnant; the privateers attracted all the able seamen. The small matter was to be Conynghams capture of another British packet, this time the one plying to Holland. On July 23 he wrote a memoir to Louis XVI declaring that the moment had come when France must resolve either to abandon America or to aid her courageously and effectively. He urged a closer alliance to prevent a reunion of Britain and America. Lord North had instructed him to explore the possibility of a truce on terms short of independence, and William Eden had given him an unsigned letter to show Franklin and Deane (the British too avoided Arthur Lee) which declared that England was ready to make great concessionsshort of independence. A generation after the end of the Revolutionary War, new revolutions emerged in nearly a dozen Spanish colonies in Central and South America. Even respected modern historians will repeat some of Arthur Lees calumnies about Franklin and Deane, Jonathan Williams, and William Carmichael, though they have been disproved over and over since their creation in a sick mind. His discretion was fathomless, and he may purposely have avoided emphasizing his old friendship with the man who carried out some of the ministrys most secret work for America. Moreover, importers of cannon and powder had to arm their merchantmen, and if their merchantmen were transformed into privateers, as many were, they needed a large supply of ammunition. The romantic era of secret aid was finished; there would be no more subsidies and loans from Versailles, and his company was already in financial straits. The choice of Washington as commander in chief of the military forces of all the colonies followed immediately upon the first fighting, though it was by no means inevitable and was the product of partly artificial forces. Nor had Vergennes, who was extremely cool in his calculations. Wentworth reported to Eden that he had found Deane vain, desultory and subtle and indeed the commissioner must have had some difficulty keeping a straight face. Later that year, the Franco-American army marched 700 miles south to besiege Gen. Charles Cornwallis' British army at Yorktown, while . He had reached an impasse: France would not help America unless America showed promise of winning her war, and America could not win without French help. On the very day the French ministry decided for the alliance, Paul Wentworth was back in Paris. At the moment, Nantes was all Frankliniste . To the citizens of Nantes the alliance was not merely a commercial bond, but a blend of credos and enthusiasms which they shared with their friends overseas. He waited until the Revenge was safely out of Dunkirk, and then he and the commissioners exchanged letters, purely to clear the record, about the necessity of France abiding by her treaties, which meant no more violations by American privateers. However, Deane had already made a magnificent contribution to the Revolution in helping France to help America. A first fleet under the orders of the Admiral d'Estaing was dispatched to . This period of conflict began in 1698 with the War of the Grand . There were sixty-odd American merchants established in Nantes, and when Franklin considered that all this activity was being repeated on a somewhat smaller scale in Bordeaux, Lorient, Le Havre, and Dunkirk, he felt that the Franco-American alliance was already a reality. Franklin and Deane were at the top of that long list. Carmichael, who was still the liaison man between Passy and Dunkirk, found an obliging British subject as the ostensible purchaser of the Revenge , and while he was about it he sold the Surprise to a French buyer and sent her around to Nantes to join the privateer fleet. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. Here we are too near the sun, and the business is dangerous; with you it may be done more easily.. With the appointment of the mission to France the affairs of the two secret committees were theoretically unscrambled; the commissioners were to take charge of foreign relations, and young Tom Morris of commercial matters. By early 1775 the British embassy in France estimated that war supplies worth 32,000,000 livres (about $6,000,000) had been shipped from that kingdom to the colonies. At last America would hear of the third Lee brother, hitherto a cipher, as its savior in Europe. This wealthy and devoted young Marylander had been educated in England and was qualified for diplomatic assignments. A young girl began having strange fits. Between them Beaumarchais and Deane amassed arms and every necessary article of clothing for an army of 30,000 men. The Revolution precipitated a series of European wars, forcing the United States to articulate a clear policy of neutrality in order to avoid being embroiled in these European conflicts. May 12, 1780. Vergennes sensed that the benign old Doctor was ready to fence with naked steel, that he perfectly realized France was playing the old game of power rivalry, and that he would co-operate in the gameup to a pointto keep France as an ally. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. The Battle of Saratoga was an extensive and punishing conflict and a key victory for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. He gave the Doctor the unsigned letter from Eden, which said that Britain was ready to fight for another ten years rather than grant American independence. Wickes took two small merchantmen which ran down their colors with alacrity. He left the rack ruined in fortune, health, and mind, and openly went over to the British. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. was part of a larger war between Britain and France. He made for the English Channel, where he took four small merchantmen, which he sent to Lorient under prize masters. Franklin had already urged that France and Spain conclude treaties of amity and commerce with the United States, and his letter went farther, offering these powers a firm guarantee of their present possessions in the West Indies, plus any new islands they conquered in a war growing out of their aid to the United States. The news of Howes occupation of Philadelphia arrived in November as the climax of an excruciating period in which Franklins own campaign had reached a stalemate. A year before the Declaration Beaumarchais wrote Vergennes that he was leaving for Flanders on a political mission, and that he had something tremendous to impart later. In mortal terror of discovery, Bancroft was always called Edwards or some other cover name in the secret files, and even in private conferences with Wentworth and Lord Stormont. That was its only point; Vergennes would soon learn of this long interview with the British representative, and he might be worried if Franklin neglected to tell him anything about it. If successful, France would get as her share half the Newfoundland fishery and all the sugar islands; Spain would be enriched by Portugal and the Floridas, and the United States would gain Canada, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France supports U.S. engagement in the peace process. 3. At once, on March 17, the commissioners sent memoirs to the French and Spanish ministries urging a triple war against Britain and her ally Portugal. Wickes got clean away, only to founder in a storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. Edmund Pendleton was, according to John Adams . Silas Deane was invaluable. He was the Edward Edwards of the secret service, the master spy of the century. Just a year after independence was declared the Americans lost Fort Ticonderoga to Burgoyne, and on September 26 Howe entered Philadelphia. If Vergennes had any doubts about Franklins grasp of Bourbon aims, they were resolved by the Doctors masterly letter of January 5. He was a young man of complete integrity and far from ordinary gifts, whom Franklin could well have used in Paris. In mid-November George III, who had no intention of starting a war with France, decided it would be useful to know the Spanish plans and sent Paul Wentworth to Paris to find out how Charles III stood. Stormont then delivered to Vergennes threats only a step removed from war. The southern states were crammed with tobacco, which could not even be sent up along the coast because of the British cruisers on patrol. Anthony Todd, secretary of the General Post Office, read Franklins letters to people in England. Free subscription>>, Please consider a donation to help us keep this American treasure alive. It turned out that the French warships had been sent with orders to protect not only the islands of Louis XVI, but also any American vessels in the area. How long could he continue? French involvement in the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 began in 1776 when the Kingdom of France secretly shipped supplies to the Continental Army of the Thirteen Colonies when it was established in June 1775. In 1865, Edouard de Laboulaye (a French . All George III had to offer his erring children, who would of course return to colonial status, was the repeal of the obnoxious acts since 1763, which had precipitated the war. England, Franklin said suavely, could hardly object to France sending the battleships with their crews, since Britain herself was borrowing or hiring troops from other states. John Adams once remarked that while Washington was to be respected as a private individual, in Congress I feel myself to be superior to General Washington. He objected to the commander being allowed to name his own generals and thought Congress should carry on every function of war except shoot down redcoats. In 1782, Benjamin Franklin rejected informal peace overtures from Great Britain for a settlement that would provide the thirteen states with some measure of autonomy within the British Empire. Nothing came of these appeals, and meanwhile Franklin and Deane had been working at a highly secret project which might prove more effective in precipitating a Franco-British war. The Bahamas, too, acted as allies. The joint conquest was proposed of Canada, the Floridas, and the British West Indies. 1. Yet Franklin had a high opinion of the human race and lofty hopes for his particular segment of it. On the surface Deanes rapid rise might seem the result of clever opportunism in marrying and winning the friendship of the right people.