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. Bermuda, which barely escaped becoming the fourteenth state, had a large merchant colony on the Dutch island, and there sold her American friends the thousand fine cedar sloops she built or refitted for them. On January 6 Wentworth was closeted for two hours with Franklin and Deane, having stipulated that Arthur Lee was to be excluded. The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over . Both men were in Franklins confidence, and they worked closely with Vergennes. Despite having little experience in commanding large, conventional military forces, his leadership presence and fortitude held the American military together long enough to secure victory at Yorktown and independence for his new nation in 1781. France and Britain drifted into hostilities without a declaration of war when their fleets off Ushant off the northwest coast of France on June 17, 1778. He was a smaller copy of Robert Morris and aspired to become a great international merchant like his friend. He had made Saratoga possible. was part of a larger war between Britain and France. The American Revolution. Offered the bait of gunpowder, Congress swallowed the hook which Franklin had prayerfully included and ruled that any vessel bringing war supplies to the seaboard would be allowed to load up with produce. Later Lee developed this fantasy into a sinister engine of destruction against those he hated. 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. The foreign alliances of France have a long and complex history spanning more than a millennium. No man of his century could approach Franklin as a subtle and effective propagandist. When he arrived at Nantes Penet kept him drunk and hostile to the Paris commissioners. If General Howe had guessed that, he could have ended the war then and there. Deane and Beaumarchais were already fast friends, working in harmony to load the Hortalez fleet with war supplies. Before he left Philadelphia Franklin had written with Morris certain instructions for Captain Wickes: he was to cruise against the British in their home waters, and bring his prizes into a French port. A young girl began having strange fits. It also meant that mainland meat and fish would spoil for lack of salt. Besides, five British warships blockaded the harbor. By a natural process the activities of the mission were divided. Tom Morris was dragging out the last months of his wretched life, and Lee saw no point in beating a dead horse. With a fur cap on his unwigged gray head, Franklin took up his studies of the Gulf Stream where he had dropped them on his voyage home from England. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. Arthur Lee knew he was being kept out of important conferences, and yet within a few months he was writing friends that he alone had negotiated the French alliance, though Franklin and Deane tried to take credit for the work. Congress had little to do with Americas maritime war, which was a tremendous undertaking. Discovering that point at which the common interests of France and the United States diverged would be a delicate task, and also an enjoyable one since he was matching wits with Franklin. Conclusion. The Comte de Vergennes. The American people had shown their power. The United States, far from asking something for herself, was in reality advancing Bourbon interests and fighting their war. He gave Franklins courier a verbal message: due to Mr. Lees unflagging labors with the French embassy in London, Versailles had been persuaded to send goods worth 200,000 (Hortalez had said 25,000) to the Caribbean as an outright gift. A few hours later Vergennes warned his royal master that it looked very much as if Britain had at last offered America her independence, opening the way to an alliance with the motherland. The sacred British mails were rushed down to Passy, and then the storm broke at Versailles. As the French Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution, it is easy to determine that the two must have similarities. 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. Shipping was at a premium; in the last year the price of vessels had tripled. New York: Random House, 2015. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. As a past master in the art of making the other man feel that he was acting solely for him, Vergennes recognized this basic technique in diplomacy. They were in a rivalry to dominate the entire world. This wealthy and devoted young Marylander had been educated in England and was qualified for diplomatic assignments. It was with the greatest difficulty, he wrote, I persuaded them to insist on the recognition of our sovereignty, and the acknowledgement of our independence. He had connived in the Conyngham raid in the confidence that the next time Stormont came fuming into his Cabinet with threats of war, he could hand the pestiferous ambassador his portfolio and wish him a pleasant old age in England. Robert Morris had arranged Toms appointment under the delusion that the youth had reformed during a long stay abroad and was to be trusted with the public business. The Franco-American alliance was the 1778 alliance between the Kingdom of France and the United States during the American Revolutionary War.Formalized in the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, it was a military pact in which the French provided many supplies for the Americans.The Netherlands and Spain later joined as allies of France; Britain had no European allies. Nobody could find the prizes, which had been sold. Dr. Bancroft was an old friend of Franklins from his London days. America needed French aid of every sort: ships, supplies, loans, to begin with. Focusing on the British government and the problems it faced in 1764, explained why its ministers considered introducing a stamp tax in colonial America. As such is their miserable policy, it is our business to force on a war for which purpose I see nothing so likely as fitting our privateers from the ports and islands of France. Perhaps the greater part of Edward Bancroft was truly American. Sailcloth and shoes, embroidered waistcoats and fusils, cannon and wig powder were crated and piled on the docks for shipment to the country that needed everything. The dreadful thing is that Arthur Lees nightmare was accepted by perfectly sane men and that it not only outlived the Eighteenth Century but has persisted in a shadowy form into the Twentieth. In August, 1774, Sir Joseph Yorke, for years the British ambassador at The Hague, wrote his superior, the Earl of Suffolk: As the contraband trade carried on between Holland and North America is so well known in England I have not thought it necessary of late to trouble your Lordship with trifling details of ships sailing from Amsterdam for the British Colonies, laden with teas, linnens, etc., But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the Polly , Captain Benjamin Broadhurst, bound to Nantucket has shipped on board a considerable quantity of gunpowder. On February i he urged that France enter her unavoidable war at once, and the next day gave Vergennes the personal pledge of the commissioners that if France entered the war the United States would not make a separate peace with Britain. It caused many French nobles and clergy to move to the newly independent United States. However, when Franklin arrived in Paris, Bancroft was in an ideal position to watch the Kings most dangerous enemy, and he made a good bargain with the secret service. On February 6, 1778, Benjamin Franklin was in France signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance. The warehouses lining her one street, a mile long, were crammed with munitions, ships stores, bolts of cloth; sacks of sugar and tobacco covered the very sands, and the roadstead was packed with merchantmen. Q. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, under Franklin, engaged agents abroad to explore the possibilities of foreign alliances. It encouraged the French to adopt the government system of popular sovereignty. But he was quite happy to spend the year of 1777 in the humbler role of itinerant trouble shooter in the French ports. Like Great Britain, France had a young king. He had sent some of his baggage ahead to Florence, never dreaming that an Izard would not be received in the duchy. Arthur Lees secretary, Major John Thornton, was not only British but British secret service. He closeted himself with Silas Deane, who had now been in France for six months on a dual mission for the two secret committees and had a tremendous budget of news. All this was excruciating, since Lee had trumpeted in letters home that he had the ministry and Hortalez in his pocket. However, Franklin was a wizard at intrigue, and many secrets lie with him in the Christ Church burying ground. A sensible man would have liquidated Hortalez & Company at once. In 1865, Edouard de Laboulaye (a French . One of Conynghams prizes was recaptured by the British, who took her into Yarmouth. A new nation had emerged, and in time each individual would realize his new identity. Congress demanded impossibilities of him: a huge loan which France could not afford, French battleships and seamen, and the prompt entrance of the Bourbons into the war. By 1763, France had suffered a crushing defeat in the Seven Years' War (more commonly called the "French and Indian War" in the U.S.), losing all its claims to mainland Canada and the Louisiana Territory. He was the Edward Edwards of the secret service, the master spy of the century. A member of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1773 he was elected to the Royal Society under the sponsorship of Franklin, the astronomer royal, and the kings physician. However, Izard and Arthur Lee let no day pass without earnest efforts, and on January 2, 1781, a move was made in Congress for Franklins recall. Franklin and Vergennes, knowing that Arthur Lee was dangerous as well as disagreeable, kept him out of the treaty negotiations as much as possible. 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. Franklin knew that Vergennes, who for years had befriended America, would scuttle her the instant she ceased to serve his purpose. In his plain dress, still wearing his comfortable fur cap, he was the natural man Rousseau had taught the French to revere, and a symbol of Utopia. The Charleston move is part of a broader British strategy to hang on to the southern colonies, at least, now that the war is stalemated in Pennsylvania and New York. If Vergennes had any doubts about Franklins grasp of Bourbon aims, they were resolved by the Doctors masterly letter of January 5. The conversation continued with this sort of exchange, and Franklin kept it going for two hours. Modern as they were, and involving as they did a certain war with Britain, these treaties were provisionally accepted on December 12 by Louis XVI and his ministers. It could not supply Washington gunpowder in 1775 nor cope with the enlarging task of war procurement. Louis XVI was making a new advance of 3,000,000 livres to Congress. The prize crew of five Americans and sixteen Frenchmen were put in prison, and the prize master was forced to confess that Conyngham had made other captures. 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. Short as it was, the crossing was a godsend. 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. The United States fought all the way through the war without a government. If Conyngham was not punished, Stormont would resign, breaking off diplomatic relations with France. Franklin insisted that Arthur Lee was mad, and perhaps only a madman could have created a cabal of such malignity and scope out of nothing but his own emotions. He made for the English Channel, where he took four small merchantmen, which he sent to Lorient under prize masters. Shortly after this, Parliament authorized British privateering. 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. Americans, for instance, were forbidden to trade directly with foreign countries or with the foreign islands of the Caribbean, except in a few commodities which could be sold under cumbersome and expensive restrictions. The celebrated dramatist Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais now cast himself in his own best role, which he played without applause. He had spent years in Surinam and was an expert on tropical plants; he had written a natural history of Guiana and perfected new vegetable dyes for cloth. They provided ideological underpinnings. The Stamp Act riots were noisy on the land, but the seas were quiet and busy. The Secret Committee, dominated by the capable merchant Robert Morris, methodized the smuggling of war supplies from Europe, which had been going on for years. By September Congress lamentable trade embargo would include the West Indies, and no more mainland produce would be sent Bermuda, which meant a galloping famine. Beaumarchais wrote masterly letters to Louis XVI, arguing that with timely secret help from France the Americans would win their war and clip Britains wings. This was the same thing as asking France and Spain to declare immediate war against Great Britain. Conyngham shook them off and began the most spectacular cruise of the war. His jealousy of Franklin, which grew into a nightmare for Americans on two continents, had begun in 1770 when Massachusetts appointed Franklin its agent in England, and Lee his inactive deputy to replace him if he left England or if he died. Almost consciously Lee longed for that consummation. Athur Lees mission to Spain had done nothing to warm her heart to America. The French Revolution was one of the most senseless . 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. 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. Britain had acquired a massive debt fighting the French and Indian War. Deane, Carmichael, and Jonathan Williams were on the watch for daring and trustworthy captains for Admiral Franklins strategic naval force. 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. His widening circle of intimates included people of great influence: Masons, scientists and scholars, men and women of the aristocracy. He was also making them a gift of 375,000 livres. Bancroft is entirely an American and every word he used on the late occasion was to deceive; perhaps they think Mr. Wentworth has been sent from motives of fear and if that is Franklins opinion the whole conduct he has shewn, is wise and to me it [unravels] what other ways would appear inexplicable.. His new cutter, the Revenge , had been bought by William Hodge of Philadelphia, who had also obtained Conynghams first ship. Podcast: Libert, Unit, Egalit. Stamp Act of 1765. In their eyes she was still colonial, an outlying province of Europe. A week later she was halfway out of the harbor when a British sloop and cutter were sighted. The Reprisal was carrying a cargo of indigo worth 3,000 which was intended to pay the early expenses of the Paris mission. Much paper would be required for their letter campaign, and a spate of words would cover their omission of proofs. Both revolutions began due to the financial problems in their countries.
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