Conceived in Liberty (225 page)

Meanwhile, Beaumarchais was strengthened in his purpose by frequent conferences with Arthur Lee, who had the verve and vision to ask for French aid on his own initiative. Beaumarchais pressed upon King Louis XVI a policy not only of permitting and encouraging private shipment of munitions to America by selling these munitions to French merchants, but of going beyond this to positive aid by the French government itself. This aid was to be secret, through a dummy private firm, so as not to provide Great Britain with a
casus belli.
Bonvouloir’s optimistic report on American plans for independence persuaded Vergennes to recommend, and the king to adopt, the Beaumarchais plan. On May 2, 1776, the king ordered the government to supply as a virtual gift to the Americans, one million livres worth of munitions through Beaumarchais, who emerged as a supposed merchant representing the fictitious firm of Roderigue Hortalez et Cie. As part of the active new policy, the king also moved to strengthen France’s army and navy. This gift was promptly matched by another one million livres supplied to Beaumarchais by Charles III of Spain, eager to join his ally in weakening their ancient foe.

King Louis envisioned French governmental aid as an outright gift to the Americans in the guise of a loan. But when Beaumarchais saw that Deane had come prepared to
purchase
the munitions, he saw an opportunity for a huge future windfall for himself. He drew up an agreement with Congress to supply munitions on credit, to be repaid in money or in tobacco at an indefinite later date. He also advanced government credit to French ships to carry the war supplies to America. Indeed, Beaumarchais was to send to America on credit many times the initial Franco-Spanish subsidy; by mid-October 1776, he had shipped over five and a half million livres of supplies furnished by the government (of which Spain refused to pay more than the initial one million), including powder, guns, cannon, cannon balls, and clothing for soldiers. After the war, Beaumarchais had the nerve to demand 3.6 million livres from the United States in payment for the supplies, but the perceptive Arthur Lee had early realized that Beaumarchais was simply a cover agent intended by the French government to give munitions in secret to the Americans. Congress properly paid Beaumarchais nothing.
*

As the Americans had foreseen, France quickly followed its encouragement
of private as well as its own secret trade with America by using its navy to protect that trade. France informed Britain in June that it would insist on full rights as a neutral under international law: to open its ports to American merchant shipping; to have its ships free from British search in French territorial waters (e.g., the French West Indies, especially Martinique and Cap François in Haiti, the entrepôts for the new trade); and to keep its trade with its own colonies inviolate from British interference. The French could then keep their shipments within their empire, and therefore inviolate until they reached the West Indies, thus protecting them most of the way to America. Furthermore, France greatly aided American privateers by secretly permitting them to fit out in French ports; British complaints were either ignored or the privateers would be seized officially and then allowed to escape without loss.

*
In 1835, however, the United States government paid 800,000 francs (livres) to the heirs of Beaumarchais as a deduction monies paid to the U.S. by the French government under the Treaty of 1831.

During 1775 and early 1776, as we have seen, the American conflict escalated and intensified step by step: as the military clashes widened on land and at sea; as the British cracked down bitterly on the revolutionaries; as militant measures were taken against Americans loyal to Britain; and as the Continental Congress opened diplomatic relations, organized the war effort, and opened the ports to foreign trade and supplies in defiance of the time-honored British laws of trade.

As the conflict got underway and for many months thereafter, most of the American leaders had conservative aims and goals. They aimed not at all at independence, but at intensifying the old pressure of the boycott to bring Britain to her senses and to abandon her recent policy of aggressive imperial domination. Others at least realized that Britain would adopt a hard-line policy of crushing the rebellion, inexorably pushing the Americans into greater conflict, but only a handful of the most radical and prescient leaders fought eagerly for the maximum goal: independence. They realized that France would only be interested in aiding an American movement that would aim for independence and not for eventual reconciliation and strengthening of the British Empire. Moreover, they saw that in the difficult war ahead only American independence would provide the necessary inspiration for waging the struggle. The radicals realized, as Curtis Nettels has written, that

the Americans had arrived at a crossroads of history. Backward the road led to monarchy, serfdom, oppression. Ahead was visible the trace of a new path leading to emancipation, freedom and self-government.... Should [Congress]
take the road backward to the oppressions of the old world or build a new road to the summit discernible in the distance...?

It was independence that “offered an inspiring prospect—nothing less than the creation of a new nation, a great republic, dedicated to rights of man.”
*

New England, the center of liberalism and democracy, with its traditions of virtual independence, had little difficulty in visualizing American independence. But as long as Massachusetts was the focal point of conflict with Britain, it and the rest of New England had to tread warily in Congress. “Levelling” New England was under enough suspicion as it was from the other colonies, and it would have been suicidal for it to take the lead in advocating independence—a most unpopular concept in 1775. Massachusetts and its chief radicals, the Adamses, had to lie low, waiting for the lead for militancy and eventual independence to be taken by Virginia, the foremost—and the most radical—colony in the South. This was a further consideration in the decision to give George Washington command of the Continental Army: he was an uncommon blend of impeccable conservative on social and political matters and yet a militant in the fight against Britain.

Yet the radicals had a difficult row to hoe indeed, for Congress began firmly in the hands of conservatives who would not consider independence: such leaders as John Jay, James Duane, John Alsop, Philip Schuyler, and Philip and Robert Livingston of New York; John Dickinson, James Wilson, and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; Thomas Johnson of Maryland; Benjamin Harrison of Virginia; Thomas Lynch and the Rutledges of South Carolina; and Dr. John Zubly of Georgia. Even New England had conservative delegates: Silas Deane of Connecticut, and Thomas Cushing and the waffling and petulant John Hancock of Massachusetts. Against such a formidable array the Adamses, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee could only fume in private and await the passage of time that they firmly believed would be on their side.

The superior insight of the radicals was partly due to their superior information on political conditions in Great Britain and on the formidable strength of the Tory forces. The prime source of this information was Arthur Lee, who was functioning as a one-man committee of correspondence from London from the late 1760s, sending his news and evaluations to the Adamses and other radical leaders. Lee and his other brother William, a merchant settled in London who had become important in London politics, reported clearly the feebleness and decline of the Whigs
and radicals, as well as the triumphal successes of the imperialists and Tories and the subservience of a corrupt Parliament.

The American radicals soon saw this estimate of the temper of the British government confirmed as the king brusquely refused even to receive Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition and issued the staunchly hardline Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775. The proclamation absurdly denounced the Americans as rebels and traitors who had now brought long-laid designs and “traitorous conspiracies” to open rebellion and war. The king announced that “he would bring traitors to justice... [and] condign punishment.” This was quickly followed by a royal order to seize the ships of Americans or all those trading with America, and the royal authorities expressed their determination to proceed against the Americans as “open and announced enemies of the State.”

In England the Whig and liberal cause had fallen to low estate. No mass protests of merchants or populace arose to block the determination of the North ministry to crush the Americans. Many English merchants were beguiled by the temporary expansion of markets in Europe, aided by the recent peace between Russia and Turkey, and by the lure of government war contracts. The mass of the people were seduced by a wave of patriotism as well as the desire to force the Americans to pay part of their tax burden. The aristocratic Whig leadership, always inclined to luxurious indolence, decided against the efforts of Edmund Burke to arouse them, and instead to give up and absent themselves from Parliament. Burke did his best to work for peace on his own and roused peace petitions from London and his constitutency in Bristol, but all in vain; indeed, more people in Bristol addressed their support of the government on the American war.

Burke’s persistent appeals to the Marquis of Rockingham and the Whigs to oppose the war vigorously was not simple impetuosity; it was based on profound insight into the proper strategy for a party truly in opposition to the existing regime. Vigorous opposition, though in a weak minority at the time, would not be at all futile. On the contrary, local opposition would inform people of the available alternative to which they might turn in anger when present policy became bankrupt. But for such an angry turn toward a radical change of the system, there must be skilled leadership and direction. There must be a vanguard. As Burke wrote: “To bring the people to a feeling... as tends to amendment or alteration of system, there must be plan and management. All direction of public humor and opinion must originate in a few.” He vainly urged on the Whigs a large and powerful nationwide petition movement, which would remain permanently in operation as a network of local committees of correspondence to serve as the lever of dynamic political change.

The eloquent young Charles James Fox, a son of Henry Fox and close
to the Whig party, also argued against the Britain’s war against the Americans. The Pittites opposed the war, too, but were enfeebled by the chronic illness of Lord Chatham. Leading individual Whigs did make their mark by refusing to serve in the armed forces against the Americans; and these came to include Lord Effingham, an army officer, and the great Adm. Augustus Keppel.

Meanwhile, the radical movement in Britain had fallen into rapid decline. John Wilkes’ triumphal entry into Parliament in 1774, as well as into London politics, marked the beginning not of new triumphs for the Wilkite movement, but of its collapse. In any age of Tory ascendance, Wilkes proved to have been a far better radical leader in disgrace than in positions of power or influence; in fact, “having realized his civic and Parliamentary ambitions, it seemed that he no longer sought or depended on the acclaim of the ’lower orders’ of citizens.”
*
He was still a liberal opposed to the war, however, and he warned that victory would be hollow, since the Americans could not be kept permanently in subjection, even by large forces of occupation. Soon to abandon the radical position, Wilkes was to remain for a while an undistinguished liberal member of Parliament; but he began to follow the classic ever-rightward path of the renegade radical, until, after two decades, he died “in the odour and sanctity of the new Toryism.”
**
The radical cause in 1776 had become moribund in Britain, a state aggravated by Parliament’s recent reimposition of a high tax on newspapers, crippling the cheap and popular press that had served as a vehicle for gaining support of the cause from the masses.

Of the radicals only the doughty Reverend John Home managed to remain active: he took up a collection in London in June 1775 for widows and orphans of the Americans “murdered” at Lexington by the British troops. He was promptly sent to prison for his audacity. It is significant of the decline of British radicalism that his arrest evoked none of the popular agitation generated by the imprisonment of John Wilkes in 1763.

In their desperate state, the various liberal and opposition groups began to draw hesitantly together and to become increasingly radicalized by the American crisis. They soon realized that their only hope lay in a drastic British defeat at the hands of the Americans. Openly favoring the American cause, they grew more radical in their proferred solutions. Burke, who habitually dealt in terms of utility and expediency, or else tradition, now acknowledged in part the validity of the Americans’ stress on their
rights.
Yet he was gradually being outflanked on his left. The Earl of Shelburne and the other Chathamites, along with the London radicals, called for
repeal of the Declaratory Acts asserting full parliamentary sovereignty over America, including the right of taxation; and Charles James Fox was calling for repeal of every British measure toward America passed since 1763.

With the liberal and radical movements weak and in disarray, the field was wide open for the hard-line apostles of force and suppression. Bunker Hill was characteristically taken, not as a signal to stop and think, but as a stain to Britain’s honor to be avenged as quickly and forcefully as possible. Only Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, stood out against the war policy of the cabinet, but with no success. So widespread was British support for suppression that the manufacturing centers of Manchester, Lancaster, Liverpool, and Bristol presented progovernment addresses. Driven on by the king and by the war party in control of the rest of the cabinet and of popular opinion, the equivocal prime minister, Lord North, was forced to press the war with vigor. He raised troops, relieved General Gage and Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, who were considered dilatory by the war party, and sent five Irish regiments to America. In the autumn of 1775, moreover, the two cabinet moderates lost their posts: the Whig Duke of Grafton went into opposition in bitter protest against the war, and Lord Dartmouth lost the key post of colonial secretary to hardline Lord George Germain, a man bitterly opposed to appeasement of the colonies.