Conceived in Liberty (264 page)

As peace negotiations got under way, it became clear that the diplomatic interests of the powers were drawing apart. France and Spain were less than enchanted about a potentially powerful United States that might eventually ally itself with England; and Spain understandably wished to keep its conquests in the American Southwest. For its part, England, already reconciled to American independence, began to see that a peace settlement favorable to the United States would weaken the dangerous Franco-American alliance and secure a well-disposed country instead of an embittered ex-colony.

After much effort by France, Spain, despite its antipathy to the Revolution, had been induced to enter the war against Britain in the spring of 1779 by the lure of recapturing Gibraltar. The Secret Treaty of Aranjuez between France and Spain in April 1779 had provided for Spain to enter the war, but violated France’s terms of alliance with the United States by not insisting on American independence as a condition of peace. Furthermore, Spain flatly refused to recognize the independence of the United States, although it did send an envoy to the States who masqueraded as an “observer.” And, as we have seen, Spain provided aid and supplies to the American cause.

The most advanced doctrines of international law, set forth most recently in the American plan of 1776 and the Franco-American treaty of 1778, made neutral shipping in wartime free from seizure except for contraband, which was strictly limited to munitions. England, however, insisted on a far more restricted view of neutrals’ rights, and especially on the inclusion of naval stores (e.g., timber) in the category of contraband. Goaded beyond
endurance, the major European neutral powers banded together in a League of Armed Neutrality. The league began on February 28, 1780, when the mercurial Empress Catherine II of Russia, after urging by France, issued a declaration setting forth the most advanced principles of neutrals’ rights and promising the use of the Russian navy to defend Russian rights. Even more important, Catherine invited other European neutrals to enter into conventions with her to enforce this code. Denmark and Sweden accepted by August 1780, and their bilateral conventions were forged into a tripartite alliance for protection of their common rights —rights, incidentally, which Spain but not England promptly pledged to accept. The Netherlands joined the Armed Neutrality in early January 1781. Britain, already enraged at the lucrative Dutch shipping and financial dealings with the United States, fell upon the Dutch at the end of 1780 in retaliation before Russian and other league ships could begin to protect the Dutch trade with America. At war, the Dutch were ironically deprived of the benefits of membership in the League of Armed Neutrality. Other powers joining the league later in the war were Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and the Two Sicilies. While the league did not exert armed weight against Britain, its very existence served as a useful deterrent to British depredations of their shipping, and it served to isolate and weaken Britain’s position in Europe and the world.

In July 1780, John Adams was appointed negotiator with the Netherlands, where he was able, in April 1782, to win Dutch recognition of the independence of the United States. Now minister to the Netherlands, Adams was able to negotiate a sizable loan from Amsterdam bankers, and, in October, a treaty of amity and commerce between the Netherlands and the United States. This agreement was modelled on the French treaty, and affirmed the libertarian principles of neutrals’ rights declared in the previous treaty and in many other recent documents (including the Declaration of Armed Neutrality).

Spain’s entry into the war in 1779 promptly highlighted an important problem with the future peace negotiations: What would be the territory of the new United States of America? East of the Appalachians there was no problem; the Americans would be recognized as holding the territory of the thirteen states. But what of the large and scarcely occupied lands of the West? Would America be granted these? Spain, with its vast empire over Central and South America, its large territory of Louisiana, and an acquisitive eye on Florida and the Southwest, was keenly—and negatively —interested in the possibilities of westward expansion of the United States. Rational principles of justice would have dictated that U.S. territory encompass settler lands and only a little more. This would have given to the U.S. only the territory east of the Appalachians and the settlements in Kentucky. Surely there was no valid reason for giving the Americans
the territory north of the Ohio, which was sparsely settled by Frenchmen, militarily controlled by Britain, and peopled by Indians; and the area south of Kentucky was also populated by Indians and now militarily occupied by Spain.

The other issue with Spain was a corollary to the western land problem: navigation rights down the Mississippi. If the United States had received little or no land in the West, as was its just due, the Mississippi navigation problem would have been academic, since Spain, at New Orleans, controlled at the very least the mouth of the river and there would have been little American use of the Mississippi. Even at its most pressing, however, any demand by the U.S. for freedom to navigate the Mississippi would be highly presumptuous; freedom to trade or navigate is pleasant and beneficial, of course, but any such demand is aggressive behavior when made of one State by another.

America’s first statement of its peace terms came in 1779 in response to a Spanish offer to mediate the conflict before she entered the war: an offer that failed because of the intransigence of George III. The urging of France to define peace terms brought the Congress to a spirited five-month debate (March-August 1779), at which Conrad Gérard, the French minister to the United States, used his considerable influence to try to induce the Americans to moderate their aggressive demands for the Mississippi as their western boundary and their old colonial right of access to the Newfoundland fisheries. Actually, the fishing rights spurred the most acrimonious debate, with New England and such radicals as Richard Henry Lee pressing an aggressive demand that war be pursued until the American right to the Newfoundland fisheries be guaranteed. France, of course, had no intention of fighting to the last for this arrogant claim, and neither did the southern delegates. Thomas Burke, himself a radical, spoke only common sense when he berated the New Englanders and announced his aim “to prevent any obstruction to peace but such as were unavoidable.”

The split between radical and conservative factions in Congress had, indeed, been precipitated by the establishment of diplomatic relations with France the year before. Shortly after ratification of the Franco-American treaty in the spring of 1778, the French sent Conrad Gérard as full-fledged minister to the United States, where he arrived in mid-July. America had been represented in France by a three-man commission. The commission originally consisted of Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, and there soon developed a bitter split: Connecticut’s ultra-conservative (and eventually Tory) Silas Deane and the opportunistic hedonist Franklin on the one side, and the radical Arthur Lee on the other. Lee was particularly bitter at Deane’s massive peculations at the public trough of war aid and war contracts. In particular, Lee insisted on telling
the truth that French aid through Beaumarchais was intended as a gift, whereas Deane and Franklin persisted in treating Beaumarchais as a legitimate merchant whom the Americans must repay. Lee cut to the heart of the matter in disclosing Deane’s and Franklin’s intimate business dealings with Beaumarchais, as part of their pattern of plunder of the American taxpayer.

When Deane was replaced by John Adams in 1778 and recalled to face Congressional inquiry, with minister Gérard ostentatiously siding with him, Congress rapidly split into two factions. The radical Adams-Lee “junto”—John and Sam Adams and Arthur and Richard Henry Lee—was pitted against Robert Morris and the conservatives. The major issue was whether Morris and his fellow oligarchs had the natural right to wax fat at the public trough, with little or no obligation to make an accounting to the public.

Gleefully entering the fray was Thomas Paine, who had been secretary to Congress’ Committee of Foreign Affairs, which in turn had evolved out of the old Secret Committee of Correspondence in April 1777. Paine blasted the peculations and irregularities of accounts of Deane and, beyond him, of Morris, and also attacked the system of interlocking public-private finance and of public officials engaging in private trade that made the financial irregularities possible. He accurately termed these officials “monopolizers,” and trenchantly added that

one monopolizer confederates with another, and defaulter with defaulter,... yet still these men will talk of justice.... That private vice should thus put on the mask of public good, and even imprudence in guilt assume the style of patriotism, are paradoxes....

Joining Paine in a press war over the Deane affair were Henry Laurens, the Lees, and the Pennsylvania radicals Timothy Matlack, David Ritten-house, and Charles Willson Peale, while Robert and Gouverneur Morris and William Duer defended Deane.

The result of this storm in Congress during 1778–79 was what all too often happens in such brawls: the decimation of the leaders of both sides. Grave irregularities being found in his accounts, Deane was implicitly repudiated by Congress and openly defected to the British side. Morris prudently left Congress and devoted himself solely to his commercial empire. Paine was forced to resign as secretary of the committee for disclosing state secrets in his zeal to expose the truth about Deane. France and Spain declared Arthur Lee persona non grata; His diplomatic career shattered, he became a congressman from Virginia and there led in the suspicion of France as an untrustworthy ally.

Characteristically, the one man who emerged from the fracas with laurels
was wily old Franklin. When Gérard was sent as the French minister to the U.S., America had to appoint its own minister to France. With Deane gone, the old opportunist was the favorite of the French court, and France put severe pressure upon Congress to appoint him. A wave of laudatory propaganda by France poured into Congress, and lavish loans were pointedly made by the French to the United States through Franklin. Richard Henry Lee slashingly and trenchantly announced his disgust at Franklin as a “wicked old man” who labored “under the idea of his being a philosopher.”
*
Nevertheless, in mid-September 1778, Congress appointed him minister to France, but by a slender majority.

During the crucial 1779 session of Congress, the Adams-Lee radicals led the fight for maximum aggressiveness in peace demands and opposed Gérard’s attempts to moderate these demands on behalf of French and Spanish interests. Finally, on August 14, after much squabbling among the factions, Congress agreed to the following peace terms as a
minimum:
independence, the Mississippi as the western boundary of the new nation, and the thirty-first parallel as the southern frontier of the American West. (It was assumed that Spain would demand East and West Florida, and the thirty-first parallel would grant the United States a large chunk of West Florida south of the mouth of the Yazoo River.) Gérard had been able to moderate the fishing and Mississippi navigation terms and the American drive to seize Canada and Nova Scotia to the status of conditional rather than absolute demands.

In return for moderating their aggressive demands, the radicals expected to be able to name the minister plenipotentiary who would have the power to negotiate a peace based upon these terms. The radicals wanted Arthur Lee, but his support was too slight, and they were forced to swing their strength to John Adams, whom they vastly preferred to his rival, conservative New York oligarch John Jay. Finally, on September 27, 1779, John Adams, an independent man strongly disliked by the French, was chosen by Congress as its negotiator for peace.

France now launched a quiet but effective campaign to pressure and suborn the American Congress, a campaign led in the United States by the wily new French minister, the Chevalier de La Luzerne. During early 1781, when the war news was gloomy for the allies, Vergennes quietly prepared to betray America by being willing to settle for a truce based on
existing military lines. He was prepared to use an Austro-Russian offer of mediation in the conflict to put this scheme into effect, and his pressure and quiet bribery weakened Congress’ stand. Much of his influence on Congress was exerted through the well-known Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire, who was on his secret payroll. La Luzerne’s pressure and quiet bribery succeeded, by late 1781, in getting Congress to name his friend, the conservative New York oligarch Robert R. Livingston, to the vital new post of secretary of foreign affairs. After a studied campaign of calumny against John Adams, the French were able to induce Congress to replace him with a five-man commission to conduct the peace negotiations. In addition to Adams, the commission would consist of Franklin, John Jay, who had been negotiating in Spain, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson was not able to leave for Europe in time, and Laurens was a prisoner in England, and so this left the conservatives Franklin and Jay as a majority on the commission.

La Luzerne’s pressure also succeeded, on June 15, 1781, in drastically modifying the American stance on peace. Congress rescinded its 1779 peace terms, and only independence remained as the minimum demand for making peace. Apart from independence, the commission had absolute discretion to make whatever terms they wished, with the amazing proviso that no action could be taken without the “knowledge and concurrence” of the French, whose advice should be ultimately followed by the commission. It seemed that America was binding itself to French dictation, and the composition of the new commission, as well as the identity of the new foreign secretary, confirmed this view. The stunned congressman James Lovell wrote to John Adams of these new instructions: “Blush, blush America.” After the Battle of Yorktown, Arthur Lee tried to get Congress to rescind these instructions, but it continued to cling heavily to an absolute trust that Vergennes would be ever vigilant in the pursuit of American interests!