The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (88 page)

The decision to provide assistance was taken in secret and covered by reassurances of friendship to Britain. And at the same time Vergennes pushed forward plans to add to French naval and military strength. The supplying of munitions, he knew, could not be done without Britain's knowledge, and war would likely result. There were, however, compelling reasons to mask the aid. Britain would protest, even if the aid were concealed, but it would not immediately feel forced to fight over it. Face-saving fiction is often more acceptable than fact in foreign relations. The fiction in this case was that a private group, Roderigue Hortalez and Company, was providing the assistance. Beaumarchais himself was the bogus company. He and a number of colleagues organized the disbursement of monies for guns, ammunition, and other military supplies. A second American agent, Silas Deane of Connecticut, who had arrived in Paris in July, served as the American representative of Congress and worked closely with Beaumarchais -- too closely, according to Arthur Lee. The aid which the French government may have regarded as loans was soon confused in Deane's accounts with gifts. And both Deane and Beaumarchais while expediting the purchase of supplies, found opportunities to divert some monies into their own pockets.
⁶

Aid in the form of munitions and money was one thing, but as fighting continued thoughtful Americans began to consider the possibility of drawing France and Spain, Britain's traditional enemies, into the war. They did not expect these nations to join the fight out of admiration

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for America and American principles. They did expect, however, that France and Spain would regard favorably any opportunity to settle old scores and more importantly to redress the balance of power which had shifted in Britain's favor a dozen years before. There were dangers in appealing for too much from these old enemies: they might come into the war and, if they won, simply insert themselves into America as the new masters of the Americans.

Benjamin Franklin had reflected on this possibility and on how European states might be used by the colonies long before fighting began. Conflict over Parliament's authority had stimulated him to examine the tactics available to colonies adrift in a world of rapacious states. A lack of power, he had concluded in 1770, did not necessarily imply weakness, for big states, at the mercy of their own desires and interests, might well act in ways protective of the small. Big states seemed more interested in damaging one another than in exploiting faraway colonies in America in any case.
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Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and other close observers of the European seen were, of course, correct in their belief that America might draw France and Spain into the war against Britain. But they underestimated the difficulty of the task. And until late in 1776 they underestimated what France and Spain would expect in return.

Their calculations began with the fighting. With the war under way the thought of appealing for foreign aid came naturally. In the first six months of the secret committee's existence it concentrated on securing arms and money for the army. Much more than that would have been tantamount to declaring independence, and most in Congress were to resist that act until the last moment. Thus in February of 1776, when George Wythe, a delegate from Virginia, proposed that Congress study the right to enter alliances -- a right Wythe seems to have believed Congress possessed -- someone responded that doing so virtually amounted to proclaiming independence. Wythe's proposal was then quietly sent off to committee, where it was discussed but not answered.
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Independence freed thought, although it did not entirely end the

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confusion over just what sort of arrangements might be made with Britain's enemies. Not surprisingly, Congress received a good deal of advice on how to proceed. Much of it played on the theme of the importance of American commerce to Europe, a theme that in turn rested on the proposition that commerce should furnish the essential connection between the Old World and the New. At this time, and for a long time afterward, American statesmen held that trade should be free lest America be reduced to dependence upon a single trading nation in Europe. The long experience of such a dependence understandably was prominent in American minds. As for why European nations should welcome such arrangements, there was economic gain to consider: America bought and sold much. Eagerness to trade would exist, Thomas Paine remarked sardonically, so long as "eating is the custom in Europe."
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John Adams did not agree with Paine on many things, but he shared the conviction of Paine and others that for the young republic commercial policy should stand in stead of foreign policy. It was to Adams that Congress turned to draft a "model treaty" which would define the basis of America's relations with Europe -- and more immediately with France in the expectation that France might enter the war. Adams pondered the matter in spring 1776 not long before independence. His notes show that he favored a most cautious policy, one that assumed that France attributed immense value to American trade and would apparently welcome a chance to cut down her chief rival in Europe. "Is assistance attainable from F[rance]?" Adams asked himself. "What connection may we safely form with her?" The answer: "1st No Political Connection. Submit to none of her Authority -- receive no Governors, or officers from her. 2d No military Connection. Receive no Troops from her. 3d Only a Commercial Connection, i.e. make a Treaty, to receive her Ships into our Ports. Let her engage to receive our Ships into her Ports -furnish Us with Arms, Cannon, Salt Petre, powder, Duck, Steel." Under these conditions no "alliance," meaning a political union, would be made with France and Spain. Yet Richard Henry Lee had proposed alliances with foreign states when he made the motion for independence in June. Lee seems not to have intended a firm political connection with obligations and responsibilities, and surely not military obligations. "Alliance" had a rather elastic meaning in the eighteenth century and might be regarded as virtually synonymous with commercial treaty. In any case, Adams, and the "model treaty" that Congress adopted in September,

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offered little to any foreign state that would come to America's aid. The eighth article of the model treaty recognized that any formal arrangement might bring Britain into war with France. In such case the United States promised not to aid Britain in the war, a "commitment" that reveals as clearly as any statement just how little the Congress was prepared to offer in return for French assistance.
¹⁰

To be sure, in the next year Congress gave up this restricted conception of foreign policy. Military defeat, first on Long Island and then up the Hudson and in New Jersey, forced it to compromise these enlightened principles. The first major concession to new realities came in revised instructions at the end of 1776 to the American commissioners who were now empowered to offer France the British West Indies if France would enter the war. This change may have seemed more fundamental than it actually was. The Congress, in placing so much reliance on commerce as a force in foreign relations, did so convinced that power accompanied trade. The Congress admired political power as much as any European foreign ministry, but it did not believe that traditional arrangements were necessary to obtain it. The realities of war brought a change in perception.
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The commission sent to Europe seems to have shared the conviction of Congress that Europe's interest in American trade could be exploited. They knew, however, that the chance to injure Britain appealed more and that this opportunity provided the strongest card in an otherwise weak American hand.

The men Congress hoped would represent it to the French government included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson refused the appointment; his wife was sick and he did not wish to leave her. Franklin accepted and so did Silas Deane, who was, of course, already

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¹⁰
Butterfield et al., eds.,
Diary of John Adams
, II, 236 ( "Notes on Relations with France, March-April 1776"); Felix Gilbert,
To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy
( Princeton, N.J., 1961), chap. 3, especially 44-54, and Gilbert "The New Diplomacy of the Eighteenth Century","
World Politics
, 4 ( 1951), 1-38. For an important correction to Gilbert, see James H. Hutson, "Early American Diplomacy: A Reappraisal", in Lawrence S. Kaplan, ed.,
The American Revolution
and "A Candid World" ([ Kent, Ohio], 1977), 40-68. Hutson shows that Gilbert is mistaken in arguing that the philosophes influenced American thought on foreign affairs and in attributing free trade ideas to Americans. "The model Treaty [Hutson points out] proposed commercial reciprocity rather than commercial freedom".

¹¹
Wharton, ed.,
Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence
, II, 226-31, 240-41; Bemis,
Diplomacy
, 52-53.

in Europe. To replace Jefferson, Congress turned to Arthur Lee, who, like Deane, was in Europe on American business.

Lee had seen enough of Deane to know that he did not trust him. But Lee seems not to have trusted anyone. He had reason to suspect Deane, who was allowing French aid to fall into his own pockets. After the commission began its negotiations Deane did more than even Lee suspected -- passing American secrets to Edward Bancroft, the confidential secretary of the commission who was in the pay of the British government.

Franklin, unaware of Deane practices, arrived in France early in December 1776. The British government professed dismay that the French would receive him, the agent of rebels, and Franklin's correspondence reveals that he felt uncertain of his welcome by the French. He had reason for this uneasiness. The young king of France, Louis XVI, regarded the American Revolution with skepticism. No European monarch wished to see another rejected, action which might provide an unhealthy model. Others in France shared their king's anxiety -- French merchants, who questioned whether the nation could bear the expense of another war, did not want peacetime prosperity upset. Before Franklin's arrival Turgot, while still controller-general of finance, fed French suspicions with the prediction that Anglo-American trade would flourish even after independence.

Although Franklin did not directly dispel such doubts, he almost immediately captured popular affections. He stepped off the Reprisal, the ship that carried him across the Atlantic, with a simple fur cap on his head which he had worn for warmth against the chill November winds. The cap, his plain spectacles, which a man conscious of fashion would not have put on in public, and, most of all, his apparent simplicity and straightforwardness attracted the admiration of Paris. The French, full of illusions about the innocence of the New World, wanted a hero, and here in this American genius they found a simple philosopher, a wise and good representative of the best of the American wilderness. Franklin enjoyed the adulation but was too sophisticated to allow his head to be turned by it. Nor did he believe that popular feeling would bring France into a treaty with America. That would take careful preparation, and so he removed himself from the eyes of the public and set up operations in Passy, a small village in the suburbs of Paris. 12