Patriots (79 page)

General Washington resigning his commission as Commander in Chief before the Continental Congress, Annapolis, December 23, 1783, by John Trumbull

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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before the siege of Yorktown, Horace Walpole in London had been complaining that no significant battles were being fought in America. Walpole, who had served in Parliament during the Stamp Act riots, added that the war was not even entertaining; it would bore more people to death than it killed. Then, on November 26, 1781, London’s newspapers carried the terms of Lord Cornwallis’ surrender, and the public impatience
and indifference turned to a disgust with the war and its leaders. As Cornwallis had predicted, most of the scorn fell on Henry–Clinton, who was blamed for letting George Washington march secretly on Yorktown and for not reinforcing Cornwallis in time. The nation’s editors largely spared Cornwallis. His misfortune seemed even to rehabilitate John Burgoyne’s reputation four years after Saratoga. Editors granted that since Cornwallis, a hero to the
British press, had been forced to surrender, perhaps other men of courage sometimes had to do the same.

In Virginia, General Washington hadn’t yet taken in the full meaning of his victory. During the first days, he was distracted by the illness of his stepson, who had developed the fever that had swept both the American and British camps. But Jack Custis had insisted on traveling in a carriage to watch Britain’s soldiers give up their weapons. Soon afterward he died, and his stepfather was occupied with comforting Custis’ young widow and worrying over Martha Washington’s response to her loss.

Washington had not written to his mother throughout the war. Now, after Yorktown, he received a letter from Mary Washington. She didn’t mention the war or his victory, but she thanked him for five guineas he had sent, asked him to build her a house on his property near the Blue Ridge and indicated that her health was so poor she might never see him again.

After one week at Mount Vernon coping with family affairs, Washington was ready to strike again. He proposed sending militia from three states to Nathanael Greene, along with the available cavalry. Washington would lead the army to South Carolina personally, and he wrote to Admiral de Grasse, asking for French support in a campaign to retake Charleston. De Grasse, however, was far more interested in chasing a British squadron from the West Indies, and he pulled out his fleet and headed south. Washington was sufficiently annoyed to berate Lafayette for the admiral’s defection.

Washington considered America still at war, and George III was under that same misapprehension. Early in November 1781 the king had been momentarily buoyed by reports that Henry Clinton had sailed to Yorktown to reinforce Cornwallis. Otherwise, George had little reason to be encouraged. John Adams, who had returned home from Paris to help draft a constitution for Massachusetts, had then gone to Holland as an emissary in the summer of 1780. The result had been that the Dutch declared war on Britain and were adding their substantial fleet to the American cause. Catherine II of Russia was still operating under a cloak of neutrality, but she had engineered a pact with Sweden and Denmark closing the Baltic to warships, which hampered Britain from boarding vessels at sea and searching them for arms headed to America. Spain had entered the war and, with the French, was
picking off valuable British cargo ships around the Caribbean. The Earl of Pembroke, who had once served in King George’s household, wrote that everyone now pitied the king as they saw his vast powers crumbling away.

Parliament met two days after the stories of Cornwallis’ defeat appeared in the British newspapers. The speech Lord North had prepared for the king made only a passing reference to the American war, but North knew that the surrender had been disastrous for Britain. When he read the first dispatch, he had staggered around his chambers as though a musket ball had pierced his heart, crying, “
Oh, God! It is all over!” King George took the news more stoically and called for a new speech urging his subjects to redouble their efforts. The king told North that the war could still be won but if his ministers were despondent it was surely lost.

Within two weeks, hard political questions in the Commons were forcing North to admit that the war had become too expensive for Britain to send its soldiers deeper into the colonies. London seemed headed back to an earlier strategy, a naval blockade of the American coast, which had not succeeded even before the French Navy entered the war. Nonetheless, the king wanted to persist. Henry Clinton clearly couldn’t stay on as commander, and the man George wanted to replace him with, the hero of the Canadian campaign, Sir Guy Carleton, refused to serve under George Germain. That impasse was resolved when Germain resigned from the government. But by that time it was too late for another shift of command. On February 25, 1782, the king’s ministers, drawing on all of their authority, narrowly defeated—by a margin of one vote—a resolution in Parliament that would have ended the war.

George III felt that the House of Commons was running amok. He told Lord North that he would go on ruling even if the Parliament voted no confidence in his ministers. North was appalled and tried to resign, but George bullied him into staying. “
Remember, my lord,” the king said, “it is you who desert me, not I you!” Very soon it became clear that the opposition had the votes to unseat North, and he took the floor in Parliament to announce that his Ministry was disbanded.

“At last,” the king wrote to him, “the fatal day has come.”

In his depression, King George drafted a message of abdication: “. . . His Majesty therefore with much sorrow finds He can
be of no further utility to his native country, which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.” The letter was never delivered to Parliament. Instead, the king turned briefly to Benedict Arnold, who had come to England full of assurances that the war could still be won. But by then the House of Commons was on record that any Briton who advised continuing the war in America would be considered an enemy to his country.

Early in 1782, the British sent Richard Osborne, a retired merchant, to open negotiations with the Americans and, if possible, to separate them from France. But when Sir Guy Carleton wrote to General Washington that summer to assure him that George III had agreed to America’s independence, Washington suspected a trick and warned his countrymen not to lower their guard. “
The readiest way to procure a lasting and honorable peace,” he wrote, “is to be fully prepared vigorously to prosecute war.”

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John Adams had enjoyed serving as America’s sole minister in the Netherlands far more than reflecting Benjamin Franklin’s celebrity in France. He had pressed successfully for diplomatic recognition at The Hague and had asked bankers in Amsterdam for a loan for America. By June 1782 he had overcome the initial resistance and had arranged for a Dutch syndicate to advance the United States five million guilders. In case his countrymen failed to appreciate the magnitude of his achievement, Adams was prepared to tell them. His success in Holland, he wrote, “
was the greatest blow that has been struck in the American cause, and the most decisive.” When he returned to France someone remarked, “Sir, you are the Washington of negotiation,” and John Adams recorded the compliment in his diary just as he had heard it—“
Monsieur, vous êtes le Washington de la negotiation.
” He decided that the praise was “the finishing stroke. It is impossible to exceed this.”

Adams might have suspended his practice of reassuring himself about his reputation had he known that, in a shipment of state papers to America, pages from his diary would be mingled with the official documents and his private thoughts would be read aloud on the floor of the Congress to hoots of derision. As the laughter continued, delegates from Massachusetts protested that the
entries obviously hadn’t been intended for Congress to hear, and the diary was reluctantly laid aside.

In fall 1782, Adams returned to Paris to join the peace negotiations. He had been away from America for almost three years. His eldest son, fifteen-year-old John Quincy Adams, had gone the previous year to St. Petersburg as the private secretary to Francis Dana, who was trying to negotiate a treaty between America and Russia. Adams’ younger son Charles had come to Holland to stay a few months but had grown homesick and returned to Braintree. “
He is a delightful child,” his father had written to Abigail Adams, “but has too exquisite sensibility for Europe.”

Even before Yorktown, the Congress had named a five-man committee to go to Paris and wait there until Britain was ready to negotiate peace terms, possibly after the next military campaign. Besides Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, the list included John Jay, America’s representative in Spain, and Thomas Jefferson. Though Jefferson’s political fortunes might be low in Virginia, he was still admired in the Congress and was nominated for the delegation by a young member named James Madison. The prospect appealed to Jefferson because, after a prolonged illness, his wife had died, leaving him to a lonely exile at Monticello. He planned to take his two daughters with him to France, but first his ship was delayed and then the British would not guarantee him safe passage across the Atlantic, and it was too dangerous to go without such a pass. The commission’s fifth member, Henry Laurens, had been seized during his crossing and confined to the Tower of London. When Laurens was released, he went to Paris but sailed home soon after. Jefferson did not go at all.

That left America’s future to Franklin, Adams and Jay, who in June 1781 had been granted powers by the Congress that ran broad but not deep. They were to demand independence and sovereignty and to trust their own discretion on the details. In January 1782, with independence looking certain, Congress told them that any pact should spell out boundaries and fishing rights. But they were under specific orders to consult with the French and not to enter into an agreement without informing Vergennes and his ministers. Benjamin Franklin was amenable to that restriction because he knew that America’s victory would have been impossible without French money, ships and soldiers. But John
Adams had been in Holland during the climactic months of the war, and John Jay had been in Spain; both had distrusted France for much of their lives and felt that Franklin’s close ties to the French court made him suspect.

Franklin was aware that he would be criticized for favoring the French whatever terms he extracted from the English. Vergennes had already achieved one goal by opening American markets to French ships. But the French also wanted control restored to them over the port of Dunkirk, which the British had not let them fortify for seventy years, and Vergennes was committed to helping Spain regain Gibraltar, held by the British since 1704. Franklin drew up an eight-point treaty that dealt only with American issues. Four of the points he deemed essential: complete independence; settling boundaries for the colonies; moving the Canadian border north to its position before the Quebec Act of 1774, which had extended the line south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi; and freedom for American fishermen to catch both fish and whales in the waters off Newfoundland. Franklin termed four other conditions advisable: the British should pay reparations for burning American towns; Parliament should openly confess to its error in waging the war; each country should extend trading privileges to the other; and England should cede all of Canada to America.

John Jay had left his long and barren negotiations in Spain convinced that France had never truly promoted America’s cause with her Spanish ally. Vergennes in fact resisted the idea that the United States should totally control the American continent, and he backed Spain’s claim to territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. In Paris, Jay did not accept the restrictions Congress had laid upon him and his fellow commissioners, and he was determined that America, not Spain, would have all land to the Mississippi’s eastern bank. Jay couldn’t justify that claim by population, however. The new nation of the United States of America had only three million people, and France’s population ran to twenty-six million. Vergennes was not likely to regard Jay’s demand as growing out of an urgent need to expand to the center of an immense continent.

Vergennes began private negotiations with the English to protect France’s interests. John Jay did the same to argue for
America’s expansion. Spain had been violating a secret treaty with France and carrying on her own clandestine peace talks with England. Control of Gibraltar, at the tip of Spain and western entrance to the Mediterranean, was a high Spanish priority but so were West Florida and Louisiana and land along the Mississippi. Lord Shelburne, England’s new and unsteady colonial minister, decided the best safeguard for Gibraltar would be quick and secret dealings with America. He accepted Franklin’s first four points, plus one of Jay’s—both England and America would keep Spain out of the area east of the Mississippi by sharing unrestricted navigation along the river.

John Adams agreed with Jay about disregarding Congress’s instructions to include France in all negotiations. “
It is a glory,” he wrote, “to have broken such infamous orders.” When Adams first returned to Paris, nursing his old resentments against Franklin, he would not even pay him a courtesy call. Franklin had summed up his feelings about Adams during the Silas Deane affair: “
John Adams is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses.” When the three delegates met with a British agent, Franklin declared common cause with the others and agreed to bypass the French. “
I am of your opinion,” he said, nodding toward Adams and Jay, “and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting the Court.”

Although Vergennes was being subverted, even betrayed, he was not expected to raise the sort of moral objection that came naturally to John Adams. France had entered the war only to distress England. America’s liberty had been incidental, and possibly not even desirable. As Vergennes once said, relations between nations should never be governed by gratitude.