Patriot Pirates (7 page)

The potential trade loss due to the war was estimated at £6 million annually. Little wonder, then, that the merchants’ response to their government’s rosy posturing was cynical and shrill. They peppered newspapers and politicians with dire alarms that “the precarious and defenseless situation of His Majesty’s servants will entirely ruin the people and trade of this government.” And despite admiralty claims of the rebels’ maritime impotence, they began collecting “private surveys and attestations” of rampant enemy privateers to absolve them from liability should their cargoes start disappearing at sea.

The Royal Navy captains “on cruising station” in North America privately shared the same foreboding about the enemy’s spreading ocean insurgency. “Time is drawing fast,” one of them wrote a colleague in August 1776, “that requires our presence in the English Channel.”

1776

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

His capture of
Nancy
in November 1775 made John Manley famous throughout Massachusetts. “As many towns contend for the honor of his birth as there did for that of Homer’s,” wrote one fan. A Salem pub was named after him, and he was the subject of a popular drinking song with the refrain, “And a’privateering we will go.” Washington gave Manley the honorary title of commodore so that it “could inspire,” he wrote, “the captains of the other armed schooners.”

The first to fulfill that hope was James Mugford, a twenty-six-year-old Marblehead seaman. In the final days of the British occupation of Boston he’d been pressed into service aboard HMS
Lively
, gaining release after his wife persuaded the captain that the newlywed couple should be reunited. He then talked his way into command of a Continental schooner,
Franklin
, on the basis of having overheard his captors discussing late-arriving British supply ships that were unaware of Boston’s recent evacuation.

Royal Navy frigates still patrolled Massachusetts Bay. Within sight of their anchorage just south of Boston’s main channel, Mugford intercepted
Hope
, a three-hundred-ton transport, and brought it into the harbor after threatening to execute its crewmen if they didn’t sail where he directed them. Its cargo of a thousand muskets, ten cannon, and seventy-five tons of powder made it the richest prize of the Revolution.

British frigates had been unable to prevent
Hope
’s capture due to “the wind being easterly.” Their commanders therefore were “intolerably vexed and chagrined that the above ship should be taken and unloaded in their open view” and were ready when
Franklin
and its crew of 16 returned to sea two days later.

Hugging the shore in order to elude capture, the schooner ran aground at the north end of the harbor. Five longboats carrying one hundred armed soldiers bore down from two frigates hovering in deeper water. According to the
Boston Gazette
, Mugford surprised “our base and unnatural enemies” by cutting his anchor cable to let the current swing his vessel perpendicular to their approach. He got off a broadside of grapeshot at point-blank range with “two boatloads killed” as a result. His men hacked with cutlasses as boarders climbed over the rail, strewing the deck with severed fingers and hands. Mugford himself was seen “righteously dealing death and destruction” to five redcoats with his pike.

Night fell. A small privateer,
Lady Washington
, joined the fight, in the darkness confusing the British into thinking they were outnumbered and prompting their retreat. The Americans claimed “fifty or sixty” enemy killed. British officers listed seven in their logbooks. Aboard
Franklin
, Mugford and one crewman lay dead. He received a grand burial in Marblehead complete with muffled drums and poetic elegies. “Don’t give up the vessel, you will be able to beat them off,” went down in local lore as the dying words of a fallen hero.

John Skimmer was
Franklin
’s next skipper. In 1777 he was upgraded to a fourteen-gun Continental brig called
General Gates
in honor of the victor at Saratoga. The last of his many sea battles was against
Montague
, a loyalist privateer.

Prowling the sea without international license, the loyalists feared that capture meant a pirate’s noose. Consequently, they fought “with ferocity rather than bravery” through three hours of beam-to-beam volleys. When
Montague
ran out of ammunition, its gunners jammed every available piece of metal down their cannon barrels, “including jackknives, crowbars, and even the captain’s speaking tube.” A double-headed shot (used to shred an opponent’s rigging) that had torn through its main cabin was retrieved, loaded, and fired back at
General Gates
. The shell struck a swivel gun and sent its shattered pieces through Skimmer’s skull, the happy sight of which inspired the loyalists to fight for two more hours until the last of them surrendered.

James Mugford captured the supply ship,
Hope,
from under the guns of Royal Navy frigates. His gallantry in defending his schooner made him a local hero. But the cutthroat maneuvering by maritime agents to profit from
Hope
’s sale would bring scorn from the privateering community.

Skimmer had seized twenty-two prizes in his career, yet few had paid out due to muddled prize procedures, leaving his widow and eleven children destitute. Their plight came to the attention of Robert Morris, who demanded of his congressional colleagues that “something must be done for poor Captain Skimmer’s family.”

In September the captain’s survivors were awarded an annual pension of $400, a generous sum. Wartime inflation would cut its value by more than 90 percent by the time the pension, for budgetary reasons, was terminated three years later.

Three

Those who have been engaged in privateering are making large fortunes in a most rapid manner. I have not meddled in this business which I confess does not square with my principles.

—Robert Morris to Silas Deane, September 1776

I propose this privateer to be one third on your account, one third on account of Mr. Prejent and one third on my account. I have not imparted my concern in this plan to any person and therefore request you will never mention the matter.

—Robert Morris to William Bingham, December 1776

T
he patriot expedition against Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, which secured the artillery pieces instrumental in driving the British from Boston a year later, had been financed with £300 surreptitiously drawn from the Connecticut treasury by Silas Deane, the colony’s thirty-seven-year-old representative in Congress. He left promissory notes for the money that later were honored, and any fallout from his disregard of proper accounting procedures vanished in the euphoria of the expedition’s success. But as an episode in which a desirable end justified dubious means, the affair exemplified Deane’s lifelong penchant for improvisation and hustle.

His Yale education had brought into tantalizing reach the advantages of status and wealth not always available to the sons of blacksmiths. Left sole guardian to six siblings while still in his early twenties, he added an
e
to the Dean name to distance the family from its middling roots. He engaged in constant legal disputes with relatives and business partners, and ascended in society via two “brilliant marriages” to women from prominent families. His first wife, with whom he had a son, died in their fourth year of marriage, his second while he was abroad in 1777.

Deane liked luxury and stylish company, and wasn’t one to cut his personal spending even when money was tight. He called it “a peculiar fatality” that he bounced from “one scheme and adventure after another,” but his expensive tastes and the expediency of many of his dealings made his fate by and large his own fault.

In early 1776 Deane was chosen to be Congress’s undercover emissary to Paris. He got the job through the influence of Robert Morris of the Secret Committee for trade and the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the latter a foreign relations group seeking to establish a formal alliance with France. Like Deane, Morris had no patience for bureaucracy. “How tedious and troublesome it is,” he wrote the new emissary, “to obtain decisive orders on any point wherein public expense is to be incurred.”

In observing that war’s chaos and devastation “are circumstances by no means favorable to finance,” Morris meant public finance. On a personal level he thrived, ascending from “a leading young merchant from Philadelphia” in 1775 to the so-called “financier of the Revolution” by war’s end. Early on he helped equip Washington’s army through his business contacts in Europe. Later as Superintendent of Finances he would keep the American economy afloat by stabilizing its worthless currency through a juggling act of monetary austerity, foreign trade, hat-in-hand international borrowing, and cash infusions from his own holdings.

In an era of widespread belief that all procurement officials speculated with government money and manipulated prices to increase commissions, Morris’s critics took little regard of his contributions. John Adams weighed his “vast designs in the mercantile way” against a “masterly understanding, an open temper, and an honest heart.” But others placed him among a supposed cabal of merchant-dignitaries whose public service disguised, in the ominous insinuation of Virginia-born diplomat Arthur Lee, “some deep design against our independence at the bottom. Many of the faction are, I know, actuated by the desire of getting or retaining the public plunder.” Such suspicions were fostered by the fiscal contrivances of men like Morris and Deane no matter the benefit they often rendered the cause.

Deane sailed for Europe in March. Three months later, Morris sent a second protégé abroad, this time to Martinique in the West Indies. The island was France’s gateway to New World trade and a booming hub of international commerce. Its inhabitants’ eagerness to sell weapons to the rebels under the protection of French neutrality was a magnet to the Secret Committee and a thorn to Great Britain.

Morris’s appointee, William Bingham, presented himself on Martinique as a private businessman. Born to wealth, Bingham was well educated and worldly, possessed a composed efficiency belying his twenty-four years, and displayed none of Deane’s compulsive personal and financial turmoil. He quickly secured military wares for shipment home on Congress’s account, disseminated American propaganda and upbeat war reports to French officials, and began monitoring activities of the French fleet in the West Indies “and whether they mean to act for or against America.” On Congress’s recommendation, he partnered with local merchants to promote his entrepreneurial cover and solicited “private adventurers” of any nationality to raid British shipping for profit.

The triangle formed by Bingham and Deane on each side of the Atlantic and Morris in Philadelphia became a busy backchannel of financial opportunism and patriotic zeal, elements never more entwined than in the men’s involvement in privateering. But Congress’s embrace of privateering’s quintessential “private adventurers” would sour when rumors arose late in the war that Morris, Deane, and Bingham had invested in warships with public money and skimmed the profits for themselves.

By then their circumstances had drastically diverged. Morris was still a financial colossus, though overambition was poised to undo him. Deane was ruined—scorned by his nation and friends. Only Bingham withstood the storm of indignation, for which he thanked the obscurity of Martinique. “If my services had been more conspicuous I might perhaps have had much to fear.” He didn’t mean fear from the British. It was an American “voice of calumny” that assailed him and his colleagues, “the pursuits,” Bingham said, “of the envious.”

Yet in Deane’s case at least, a cautionary note written before the war suggests he might have blamed himself as well. “I have known very honest men, when unfortunate, to suffer in their character and never retrieve their affairs only because of their being careless.” It was a prescient observation, for though Deane’s honesty remains debatable, his carelessness and misfortune are certain.

H
is assignment in France was twofold. First, he was to arrange weapons shipments from French suppliers on the promise of future remittance with American commodities, which is to say on unsecured credit extended to a lone agent who had few funds, no official title, no political power, and no authorization from the full Congress, which had been kept in the dark about his mission. Second, he was to parlay a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, internationally famous for his study of electricity, into face-to-face meetings with French officials in order to gauge their willingness to strike a military and commercial alliance with America.

The obstacles were considerable. Whatever social refinement Deane possessed was superficial and not indicative of a nuanced intellect suited to negotiate, in a language he barely spoke, the maze of indirection and subtext that characterizes all diplomacy, and which was the particular forté of French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most powerful and adroit statesman in Europe.

In Deane’s favor, however, was France’s bitter antipathy toward Britain. Its fall from world dominance resulting from defeat in the Seven Years’ War had been a point of national humiliation ever since the Peace of Paris was signed in 1763. The wish to get even in any way possible made Vergennes receptive to Deane’s overtures.

The French king, Louis XVI, was only nineteen when he’d assumed the throne in 1774. Cautious in his domestic rule, he was likewise skittish about provoking war and thus disinclined to push the limits of international neutrality agreements, which for many years had balanced the power in Europe between Britain and Portugal on one side and France and Spain on the other.

Vergennes held a bolder view. At fifty-eight, experienced and wily, he manipulated policy toward his objectives and then presented it to the young king as inevitable. There was no disagreement within France that a Britain shorn of its American colonies would be a fine thing. Out of deference to his monarch’s sensitivities, however, the foreign minister couldn’t yet openly back the American rebellion. But he was prepared, in his words, “to connive at certain things.”

Even before meeting Deane he’d approved a loan of 1 million livres (about $10 million) to Roderigue Hortalez & Company, a dummy firm created to funnel covert aid to America. Spain, as eager as France to see Britain beaten, matched the loan, as did a consortium of friends of the company’s founder, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.

A playwright (he later wrote
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Barber of Seville
) and political gadfly, Beaumarchais had a zest for capitalism, court intrigues, and American liberty. Vergennes designated him Deane’s unofficial liaison to local arms dealers, and beginning in the summer of 1776 Beaumarchais and Deane began acquiring military supplies to ship to the Continental Army. They took customary commissions and planned to replenish the Hortalez accounts once Congress’s commodity shipments, especially tobacco, began arriving from America.

The company’s funds were almost all gone when a letter came in late July from the Secret Committee apologizing “that we have been so unfortunate in our remittances to you.” The Royal Navy was raising havoc with American transports and the situation was getting worse. “Hitherto you will think yourself unlucky in these untoward circumstances,” the letter warned, adding brightly, “but this must not dispirit us.”

Deane panicked. Hortalez was a shell, after all, a fiction necessitated by neutrality agreements among the governments of France, Spain, and Britain. Loans ostensibly made to the company were in reality extended to Congress on the basis of its promise, certified by Deane, to deliver valuable cargoes as repayment. Delay could prove “a mortal stab to my whole proceedings,” he wrote. Beaumarchais, having promised Vergennes and others a multifold return on their investment, was no less exposed. In the shadow of disaster their friendship was cemented.

It was a remarkable collaboration of two incorrigible yet idealistic mavericks. Born into the watchmaking Caron family, the forty-four-year-old Frenchman had, like Deane, initiated his social climb by marrying a rich widow; later he added “de Beaumarchais” for noble effect. Along with self-invention he shared Deane’s romantic view of the role he might play in American independence. Deane relished his place “on the great stage of Europe” and the boost his supply deals could give the war effort; his initial sales pitch to Vergennes had included a vow that aiding America would bring forth between their countries “the most lasting, extensive, and beneficial commercial intercourse and connection that the world has ever seen.”

Beaumarchais was no less expansive in courting America’s trust and, he hoped, its exclusive reliance upon him as its arms broker. “Look upon my house,” he wrote Congress, “as the chief of all useful operations to you in Europe, and my person as one of the most zealous partisans of your cause.”

His characterization of himself as “useful” echoed Deane’s desire to be of “the greatest and most extensive usefulness,” and for each man the fulfillment of his wish proved a harsh blessing. Though they hoped to get rich through commissions and private ventures stemming from their government work, their devotion to American liberty was real and their belief that they were indispensable to its attainment honest if overblown. The recklessness with which they ran their operation—inflated promises, shoddy accounting—was excusable in their minds as incidental to the integrity of their intentions.

Historians generally rate Deane as little more than a “catspaw” or “venal dupe.” His early acquisition of French military aid is judged a minor feat in light of Vergennes’s predisposition toward any plan to take Britain down, and the self-interest so much on his mind tends to blight even his nobler moments. Yet during his first months alone in France Deane was a novice gambler at a high-stakes table with very few cards to play, who somehow stayed in the game for the good of his country.

His superiors in Congress were no help. Months went by without a word. “The want of instructions or intelligence or remittances has sunk our credit to nothing,” he anxiously wrote after spending millions of borrowed dollars on supplies for twenty-five-thousand troops. His partner, Beaumarchais, was undaunted (“this is depressing, but depression is a long way from discouragement”), but Deane agonized that French officials were getting “extremely uneasy” about the lack of positive news and financial reciprocation from America.

Unaware of the commitments already made in its name, the Secret Committee ordered him in October to entreat the French court for further loans “sufficient to dispatch immediately very considerable quantities of stuff.” As exactly how to accomplish this without collateral, “We hope you’ll be able to influence them by one means or other.”

Forced to find new ways of enticing suppliers, Deane relied less on Franco-American solidarity and instead fell back on his roots in market capitalism, a shift he admitted to Congress. “Politics and my business are almost inseparably connected.” His point was that mere salesmanship no longer sufficed. With zero credibility left, he had to provide instant rewards in order to attract money and materiel.

One of his ploys originally had been suggested by Arthur Lee, the Secret Committee’s representative in London. Young and ambitious, Lee had met Beaumarchais in 1775 and conceived with him the idea of a commercial front as a means secretly to aid American fighters and get rich to boot, an idea later put into practice (to Lee’s furious envy) by Beaumarchais and Deane through Hortalez & Company. Beaumarchais subsequently urged another of Lee’s proposals on Deane—to accept the many petitions of European aristocrats, “especially soldiers of fortune,” to become Continental Army officers.