1775 (54 page)

Popular perceptions in America, though, were molded by the Francophile hoopla surrounding the U.S. war entry in 1917. The most famous example was General John J. Pershing’s salute “Lafayette, we are here” upon arrival in Paris. In fact, the American Expeditionary Force commander could have more realistically hailed Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. It was he who started a cautious, sophisticated discussion of French aid to America and revenge on Britain mere months after assuming the post of foreign minister in June 1774.

American understanding, though, has been muddled. Just as an idealistic United States supposedly entered the First World War to repay France for its help in 1776 and 1777 (and to make the world safe for democracy), the motivations in France a century and a half earlier are sometimes said to have arisen out of idealism and liberal ideology. The French, if one follows this interpretation, acted on motivations akin to the romantic, pro-American comments voiced by the French playwright Caron de Beaumarchais, whose comedies—
The Barber of Seville
(1775) and
The Marriage of Figaro
(1784)—mocked European aristocracy. Even before he became the public “face” of French arms and ammunition shipments to America, Beaumarchais had enthused over the republican and democratic principles arising in the new world. Vergennes, a subtle diplomat, approved of casting French motivation in the Beaumarchais (and later Lafayette) mold because he understood that Americans would return their deepest gratitude for seeming empathy and admiration.
²³

This is not to doubt Beaumarchais’s relative sincerity and great importance. And because 1776 was the launch year of his public orchestration and delivery of French munitions and war stores through the government-sponsored Roderigue Hortalez et Cie, the seeming chronology also permits uncomplicated history. In fact, during 1774 and 1775, the playwright had been an agent for Louis XVI and Vergennes on other projects; his attention to powder and arms questions began in the summer of 1775. Some believe that his munitions machinations began in Flanders in 1774.
²⁴

The munitions trade was substantial in 1774, its great growth over three centuries a perverse tribute to the steady escalation of European-centered wars, progress in technology, the ballooning African slave trade, and the spread of high-stakes warfare into the Americas. Leading nations generally encouraged gunpowder mills, although the most sophisticated,
finest-grained product came from France. The advanced metallurgy essential to casting fine cannon and small arms concentrated in northern and eastern France, the southern part of present-day Germany, the Belgian and Dutch upcountry, and Sweden. Deposits of iron, water power, and forests for charcoal all determined location, as did proximity to Europe’s great battlegrounds and warrior nations. No commentator of the period coined a sweeping label like the “merchants of death” tag hung on international arms dealers after World War I. Still, lucrative 300 and 400 percent markups could be had on a 100-barrel powder shipment wending its illicit way from Amsterdam through Martinique or St. Eustatius to a Yankee Doodle welcome in some remote North American estuary.

A few particulars stand out. Traffic between Nantes, the burgeoning French port and slave trade center, and English North America had been rising during the 1770s. More and more commercial agents from the thirteen colonies were taking up posts in western European and Caribbean seaports. And the intensity of French
revanche
—court and ministerial ardor to see England eat humble pie—since 1763 might have been unmatched since the aftermath of Agincourt in 1415.

Seventeen seventy-four furnished two vital catalysts. The first was London’s seemingly irretrievable alienation of its North American colonies through spring’s Coercive Acts. The second, in France, was the death of King Louis XV and the succession in May of his youthful, inexperienced grandson, Louis XVI. The new ruler quickly named a new foreign minister, Vergennes, who believed that the time for reversing Britain’s 1763 gains might be at hand. Opposition Whigs in the British Parliament and insurgents in the American colonies baited Lord North’s regime with this same speculation: Do not the French and Spanish already see a unique opportunity to profit from aiding the rebels? Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, and William Pitt, now Lord Chatham, all dwelled on the likelihood.

By the late summer of 1774, French envoys and agents began to report a growing arms traffic to America. British ministers, generals, and admirals were receiving and penning similar accounts, notably including the recently appointed army and navy commanders. General Gage warned London that colonists were “sending to Europe for all kinds of military stores,” while Admiral Graves forwarded somewhat greater detail to the Admiralty in four August and September letters.
²⁵

In early August Sir Joseph Yorke, the British ambassador to the Dutch Republic, reported home that a Massachusetts vessel, the
Polly,
was loading
powder in Amsterdam. Three weeks later Yorke put the proposed cargo at 300,000 pounds—150 tons. Besides which, the overall flow of arms and gunpowder from Holland to St. Eustatius and America was increasing rapidly. Between January and September 1774, some 5,000 chests of bohea tea had been shipped to America, with some of the chests assumed to contain gunpowder.
²⁶
The Admiralty sent the sloop
Speedwell
and the cutter
Greyhound
to keep watch off Holland, and Dutch activities were part of what persuaded the Privy Council to act on October 19 and the Admiralty to follow up.

The watch over Amsterdam’s seaward access by the two warships kept the
Polly
in Holland that winter and inhibited another locally berthed American sloop, the
Nancy,
with a prior record of carrying powder for New York merchants. The
Speedwell
’s captain further advised his superiors that two Boston agents, Wallace and Dunbar, had spent the winter of 1774–1775 in Amsterdam buying arms and munitions.
²⁷
This quasiblockade by the Royal Navy soon had Dutch merchants opting instead for transshipment through Portugal.

In January, they sent to Lisbon a vessel with 200 barrels of gunpowder and 1,000 muskets. Five hundred chests of arms soon followed. When the brig
Betsy,
Boston owned, arrived in Holland with an illicit shipment of rice, it, too, was routed to Portugal to pick up the desired military stores.
²⁸
British officials had grounds for suspicion. During the first three months of 1774, only 22 British and North American vessels had cleared from Lisbon; during the first three months of 1775, five times as many did so.
²⁹

Further detail on the routing of Dutch munitions came from New York’s acting governor, Cadwallader Colden. In November 1774 he wrote to Lord Dartmouth that “the contraband trade carried on between this place and Holland prevails to an enormous degree, and has in every respect the worst possible effects. The vessels from Holland and St. Eustatia do not come into this port, but anchor at some distance in the numerous bays or creeks that our coast and rivers furnish, from whence the contraband goods are sent up in small boats. Dutch gunpowder has been in use in this colony ever since I came into it. How it was formerly imported I know not. I make no doubt that all we have now is brought in clandestinely.”
³⁰

Even so, some thought the flow of supplies from France was as large or larger. Helen Augur, whose controversial volume
The Secret War of Independence
was an evidentiary breakthrough in 1955, wrote that “by 1774 Vergennes was allowing every sort of illicit trade with the Americans in French
ports. But he was such a master of dissimulation that the British embassy in Versailles was kept guessing about the real situation all during that year. At some early period the French ministry also began giving subsidies to French merchants active in smuggling out war supplies for the Americans.”
³¹
Little of this has been precisely documented, but during a period in 1775 in which Lord Stormont, the somewhat gullible British ambassador in France, was absent, his second in charge ventured more candor, estimating that between mid-1774 and mid-1775, France had already furnished the Americans with war supplies worth roughly 32 million livres or 6 million dollars. Some of the matériel had entered through the minor port of York in the district of Maine.
³²

Some observers also questioned the primacy of St. Eustatius, the famed “Golden Rock” of the Caribbean. British Admiral George Rodney, who captured the island in 1781, growled that “this rock…has alone supported the infamous American rebellion.” However, reports to London from the British embassies in France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland identified more Dutch powder reaching America from French and Spanish ports, at least by 1776. From Amsterdam, it traveled in French holds to Nantes and Bordeaux, and in Dutch vessels to the Spanish ports Bilbao and Santander.
³³
Although these ports were where French historian Henri Doniol identified Benjamin Franklin as having secretly made contacts in 1774–1775, dozens of other merchants also had friends and acquaintances there.

Marblehead, for example, had been a dominant supplier of prime codfish to Spanish Bilbao since the late seventeenth century. The American-connected firm in Bilbao was Gardoqui and Company, whose patriarch, Joseph Gardoqui, was a longtime friend of Patriot merchant Jeremiah Lee’s, who named one of his vessels for Gardoqui. Lee was also colonel of the Marblehead militia and active with the Massachusetts Committee on Supplies. On February 15, 1775, Gardoqui wrote to Lee pledging support and whatever information came to his attention.
³⁴

Nantes, for its part, was enough of a commercial and political hotbed to attract both of the Philadelphians who soon dominated the Congress’s Secret Committee: Franklin and Robert Morris. The latter named his half brother Thomas as a congressional agent there in 1776, and Franklin inserted his grandnephew Jonathan Williams. In 1774, a Nantes firm bought five brigs from Dutch makers and gave them names including
Boston, Iroquois,
and
L’Américain.
³⁵
They may well have run war supplies to
York, on a Maine coast that French mariners knew well from mid-eighteenth-century wars.

Not coincidentally, Nantes was a port in which gunpowder and armaments were readily available through a connection at odds with freedom and liberty—the transatlantic slave trade. British slave traders operated from Liverpool, but Nantes played that lucrative role in France. The vessels involved were better armed than most merchantmen, and gunpowder—along with Yankee rum—was one of the most-desired commodities in West African slave ports from Senegal and Gambia south to Angola. Nantes accordingly had large quantities of arms and powders, but the quantities available on the Slave Coast transcended nationality. The Earl of Shelburne believed in 1765 that 150,000 guns had been sent to Africa from Birmingham alone.
³⁶
Muskets of a lesser quality were often shorthanded as “Guinea.” During the second half of 1774, an unusual 32 government letters of marque—permitting holders to sail heavily manned and armed—were issued to Nantes ships cleared for Saint-Domingue, France’s principal sugar island and slave market.
³⁷
In a new permutation of the Triangular Trade, some probably carried “Guinea” arms to Philadelphia and New England. The traffic was large enough that in the autumn of 1775, three British warships, HMS
Atlanta,
HMS
Pallas,
and HMS
Weazle,
were directed to “range” along the West African coast and seize American ships to prevent them from obtaining arms.
³⁸

Before 1774 ended, British embassies, agents, and consulates also passed along reports of shipments or possible shipments from Sweden, Denmark, and Hanseatic Hamburg, but these were relatively small potatoes. Belgian historian Marion Huibrechts, with recent research into not just English and French but also Dutch, Flemish, and Austrian archives, has notably enlarged the scope of documentation.
³⁹

“During the autumn of 1774,” wrote Huibrechts, “military supplies for the colonies were on the move in Europe. More and more notices of contraband trade reached London. A vessel from Belfast to Philadelphia stranded near Plymouth (Cornwall) was reported to carry gunpowder. Two ships from London were seized off Gravesend in October 1774 with warlike stores for America. The sloop
John,
David Fenton master, at Hamburg lately from America with rice and logwood, ready to return to New York with chests of tea and barrels, was said to contain ammunition under bills of lading for Saint Eustatius. The
Flora,
Thomas Wilton master, at Hamburg lately from America,
presumably on a similar errand. It was common practise for American vessels to carry contraband goods from Europe to the New York Sound.” Once they entered successfully at night, “they were safe to land the illicit cargo in one of the many inlets of the sound. Then they proceeded to New York in ballast.”
⁴⁰
Colden had identified Dutch use of much the same route.

Detailed as this may seem, that is exactly the point. Surprising detail is available for 1774, much more for 1775. We are not talking about one or two ships, one or two European arsenals, or one or two participating nations. This was before the arrangements of Beaumarchais; and hardly anyone in America had ever heard of a young marquis named Lafayette, and no more in Europe knew of a young Virginian named Thomas Jefferson. Both 1774 and 1775 were the little-noticed early stages of a flood—an Old World surge with great implications for New World destiny.

Munitions: A 1775 Preoccupation

If Lexington and Concord were about British hopes to stop a rebellion by seizing American weaponry and munitions, the weeks after Bunker Hill—a Yankee retreat obliged by exhausted ammunition—made New England’s challenge equally clear. Huge quantities of powder and other “warlike stores” would have to be obtained. Foreign purchases were essential, but Patriot leaders also expected to meet part of that munitions demand domestically. Modest preparations were under way but soon fell short.