Patriot Pirates (27 page)

But puncturing the image of French generosity was less offensive to his countrymen than the suggestion that they ought to reconcile with Britain. “Is it become treason in 1781,” he wondered in dismay, “to recommend such terms of peace and accommodations as are infinitely preferable to those unanimously proposed by Congress in 1774, before the war began, and repeated in 1775, after the sword was drawn?” The answer to that question, after Yorktown especially, was yes.

The one man who might have stemmed the tide of condemnation was Franklin. He’d always expressed “an exceeding good opinion” of his former colleague. But at seventy-five, never without ailments, and riding a crest of national acclaim, Franklin declined public comment “lest he should be led into a controversy he wished to avoid.”

The elusiveness that had served Franklin so well in the negotiations with France was no help to Deane now. Frustrated by his silence, Deane wrote him a long letter alleging “similar and greater concessions” to Britain that Franklin had advocated in the past. Deane, who’d once told Congress that he could endure any public scorn “if at the same time it be known that Franklin was my guide, philosopher, and friend,” knew he’d lost him as an ally when Franklin sent back a rebuke that, in a twist on the routine decorum with which gentlemen usually ended their letters, closed with a gratuitous jab that Deane’s revisionist views “make it impossible to say with the same truth and cordiality that I am your affectionate friend and humble servant.”

Yet even as he snubbed Deane, behind the scenes Franklin urged Congress to finish its investigation into his accounts. “Even between enemies,” he told Robert Morris, it was proper to pay a man his full due. When Deane learned of this gesture, he wrote Franklin a final reflection in May 1782:

“If America shall, on experiment, find herself happier and more free under the present system than she ever was under the other, I shall rejoice to find that I have judged erroneously. I will trespass no further on your time,” he went on, “than to assure you that, however greatly your sentiments may have changed, I retain the same respect and esteem for you as when I had the honor to be numbered among your friends.”

A year later Franklin went on record as having “never known or suspected any cause to charge Silas Deane with any want in probity.” This incensed Arthur Lee, still rabidly trying to bring down his imagined rivals. “I am strongly inclined to believe that Silas Deane receives a pension from Dr. Franklin and Robert Morris, as hush money. The evidence which he must have of the frauds and wickedness of these two men is such as would ruin them.”

Deane, now penniless and living alone in Britain, where he’d fled after his anti-French opinions became known in Paris, did indeed have a secret benefactor: Edward Bancroft. His friend’s generosity was, in Bancroft’s typically two-edged way, both a lifeline and a prison sentence. The “charitable subscription” and small flat “a little way out of town” that he provided were useful in keeping Deane under watchful control.

The former spy had much to lose these days—wife, children, a large pension for his wartime betrayals, and a good probability that Parliament would grant him lucrative “monopoly rights” stemming from his laboratory studies in the chemistry of color, his area of expertise before he’d taken up spying and speculating. He didn’t need Deane resurfacing to blab about their pursuits during the war, particularly their encouragement of James “John the Painter” Aitken’s bid to torch the Portsmouth shipyard. Deane had supported the act as a legitimate attack on the enemy’s navy. Bancroft had supported it, after placing his bet with his broker, to drive down the British stock market—not exactly something to commend him to the London society to which he aspired.

Thus Bancroft wasn’t pleased when Deane began slowly to rehabilitate his image. He published essays in America that recast his support for reconciliation in commercial rather than political terms; even as an independent nation America’s most compatible trading partner was its former adversary, he argued. He then contributed to an influential British pamphlet,
Observations on the Commerce of the American States
, suggesting that the loss of its colonies might actually benefit Britain, leaving it the advantages of American trade without “the burdens of colonial administration.”

Some British lords presented to the king Deane’s plan for a canal between Quebec’s Lake Champlain and New York’s St. Lawrence River; called “practicable and useful both in a commercial and political view,” the canal was built fifty years later. And in America, businessmen showed interest in partnering with him to build steam-powered grain mills based on British models Deane had studied.

Bancroft responded to his friend’s resurgence by moving him still farther from London and monitoring his mail. But encouraged by Robert Morris’s observation that “resentments toward our disaffected daily subside,” Deane prepared to return to America in 1789. In June he sent George Washington a letter via Jeremiah Wadsworth saying that in his ten-year quest for respect and recompense, “my hopes are revived that I shall no longer solicit in vain.”

Three months later, hours before departure on a homebound vessel booked by Bancroft, he ate “a hearty breakfast,” took ill at mid-morning, and died at two that afternoon. Bancroft arranged an immediate burial near the town of Dover. (“There is no gravestone but interment is believed to have been in St. George’s Churchyard,” was the notation in the parish’s Register of Burials). He then anonymously composed an obituary suggesting Deane had committed suicide. The act was understandable to British officials who knew Deane had suffered “the most abject poverty in the capital of England, and has for the last few months been almost in danger of starving.” And it made sense to those Americans who believed him “unconscious of rectitude yet not uncallous to remorse” and therefore, by killing himself, inclined to “expiate a treacherous desertion of the cause of his country.” But it was less understandable in light of the rise in spirits evident in his last letters.

The possibility that Bancroft killed him is strong. He had a motive: fearing to lose control and influence over the unstable, indiscreet American who knew so many damning details of Bancroft’s past. And he had the know-how, for the specialty of his medical studies in South America as a young man had been natural poisons—their chemistry, symptoms, and use.

Curare, made from a jungle vine and which causes death by slow asphyxiation (Deane was said to have gasped “inarticulate sounds” as he died), was his favorite. In a scientific paper written on the subject in 1769, Bancroft had admitted to bringing a quantity of curare powder back with him to Britain. He explained that natives in Surinam, where he’d studied, usually administered the poison in a drink “to revenge past injuries that have long been neglected and are thought forgotten. On these occasions they always feign an insensibility of the injury which they intend to revenge, and even repay it with services and acts of friendship until they have destroyed all distrust and apprehension of danger in the destined victim.”

The facility to be both cynical and sincere that Bancroft displayed as a double agent and as a friend constitutes the last piece of circumstantial evidence in the case for thinking he murdered Deane. He once observed that news of Deane’s sudden passing may have caused “his best friends to rejoice most at the event.” The reason would have been their concern that Deane’s rejuvenation was doomed and all that really awaited him in America was disappointment to himself and discomfiture, to put it mildly, to his family and friends.

Princeton historian Julian P. Boyd, in his 1959 dissection of their relationship, “Silas Deane: Death by a Kindly Teacher of Treason?” articulates Bancroft’s rationale: “Self-preservation as well as compassion might serve to justify an act that would deprive the world of nothing and Deane of little except time to experience further pain and humiliation.”

In other words, a mercy killing.

D
eane’s partner Beaumarchais never got his money either. The Frenchman calculated that Congress owed him more than 2 million livres (about £80,000) for the military supplies, integral to the victory at Saratoga, that Hortalez & Company had sent to America in 1777; the sum made him Congress’s largest individual creditor. But Arthur Lee’s groundless assertion that the supplies had been a gift from the French government had created a nagging sense of what Robert Morris called “a mysteriousness in this transaction.”

The French courtier, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, shared his partner Silas Deane’s combination of idealism and incorrigibleness in the quest to promote American liberty while getting rich through privateering and gunrunning. Unlike Deane, the collapse of his financial ambitions didn’t diminish his faith in the Patriot cause.

Beaumarchais’s case wasn’t helped by his past ties with the now despised Deane. But rather than renounce their friendship, Beaumarchais expressed “compassionate feeling for a man worthy of a better lot.” The sentiment held even after Deane’s criticisms of France were published. “I will always do him the justice that he is one of those men who has contributed most to the alliance of France with the United States.”

In 1784 Congress was on the verge of approving Beaumarchais’s claim when a review committee led by Arthur Lee ruled that its entire basis was invalid because “Mr. Silas Deane was not authorized to settle the accounts” with Hortalez.

In 1788 Beaumarchais tried again. This time rather than reject the claim, Lee’s committee worked the numbers to show that, instead of deserving a payoff, Beaumarchais in fact owed Congress almost a million livres. And so it went, back and forth, for twenty years.

In the interim, France reaped consequences of supporting American liberty that were as contrary to its expectations as those that befell Beaumarchais. Debt incurred in the war broke the French treasury. Meanwhile Britain remained America’s main trading partner and so retained its prewar power. Vergennes died knowing his machinations had bankrupted his country, while Louis XVI died on the guillotine knowing that the citizens howling for his head were inspired by the distant revolution he’d financed.

B
eaumarchais’s postwar plays are full of political cynicism whose source isn’t hard to guess. “Playing a role well or badly,” he wrote in
The Marriage of Figaro
(1784), “sending spies everywhere and rewarding the traitors; tampering with seals, intercepting letters, and trying to dignify your sordid means by stressing your glorious ends. That’s all there is to politics, and you can have me shot if it’s not.”

In the play’s sequel,
The Guilty Mother
, his skepticism extended beyond the hypocrisies of government. “Chance, the hidden god! The Ancients used to call you destiny. Nowadays, we’ve got another name for you.”

Beaumarchais’s family renewed his claim against Congress after his death in 1799. Even the absence of Arthur Lee, dead since 1792, didn’t hasten the process, which took until 1818 before a report was delivered. In an indication of how times had changed, Robert Morris, who’d died in penniless obscurity, was cited in the report as the “great revolutionary financier” whose insistence on the sanctity of a nation’s fiscal integrity was the basis of its opinion “that the heirs of Mr. Beaumarchais are creditors of the United States.” Still, almost twenty more years passed before the money was paid—800,000 francs, about a quarter of Beaumarchais’s original claim.

Silas Deane got a similar reprieve of a sort when Congress reopened his case in 1841. Determining that previous audits of his Revolutionary accounts were “erroneous, and a gross injustice,” Congress awarded Deane’s heirs $37,000—about $1 million today.

1782

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In the spring of 1781, Christopher Vail had set sail aboard a privateer only two days after returning home from voyages, sea battles, and British imprisonment that had kept him away from his Connecticut home for more than two years. “We were out 25 days,” he wrote of the subsequent expedition, “took nothing.” Undeterred, he promptly joined the sixteen-gun
Jay
in a venture that bagged eight small prizes “all of which we got safe into New London.”

While refitting the sloop as a more powerful brig, Vail was present when “the notorious Benedict Arnold,” a British commander now, led a raid against New London in September to destroy the port’s privateering capability. Dozens of Americans were massacred in cold blood. The commander of the local fort was fatally run through with his sword as he gave it over in surrender. “I know of one man,” Vail wrote, “who told me they put the muzzle of a musket to his mouth and fired down his throat. The ball came out about three inches below his jaw.”

The attackers sailed away the next morning. Vail was right behind them, crewing again on a privateer. Captured days out of port, he wound up on the prison hulk
Jersey
in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay. Eleven hundred Americans festered there amid disease and filth (“for 12 feet around the hatches was nothing but excrement”). The death rate averaged eight per day. “They were carried on shore in heaps, then carried to the edge of the bank where a hole was dug one or two feet deep and all hove in together.”