At the same time he yearned to be a statesman like Franklin. This was the same thing as asking France and Spain to declare immediate war against Great Britain. As the American who best understood both sides of the Atlantic, Franklin had carried much of that burden, and for a long time to come would carry all the responsibility for getting maximum aid from the neutral powers without compromising the future of the new republic. (One factor, the actual fighting on land, would make up the bulk of future histories. Bancroft belonged to the American patriot group in London and wrote able papers defending the cause of the thirteen colonies. He gave Franklins courier a verbal message: due to Mr. Lees unflagging labors with the French embassy in London, Versailles had been persuaded to send goods worth 200,000 (Hortalez had said 25,000) to the Caribbean as an outright gift. A little pressure on Vergennes would do no harm. It also meant that mainland meat and fish would spoil for lack of salt. French ships engaged British vessels almost immediately after Britain declared war on France in March of 1778. A disguised British vessel at Dunkirk had alerted the warships, and as soon as the Revenge was in the open sea she was chased by several British frigates, sloops of war, and cutters. The commissioners had written privately to Robert Morris that his brother must be removed, but their letters were not received for months. By April American privateers had taken so many British seamen prisoner that the British fleet was not half manned, and Stormont hinted to Vergennes that peace could not last much longer if France continued to arm the United States. He had corrupted his government from Lord North down in the hope of buying security for himself. Franklin resolved to break through any limitations put on his mission by Congress. However, Izard and Arthur Lee let no day pass without earnest efforts, and on January 2, 1781, a move was made in Congress for Franklins recall. This move had been made after Franklin left Philadelphia, and the bad news would not reach Paris for months. France, wretchedly poor at the bottom of its society and jaded and apprehensive at the top, was rushing towards its own revolution, and the violent emotions which would ruin the French Revolution were tripped off in wild demonstrations of welcome. He made this gesture impressive by sending two sloops of war to Dunkirk to take the captain and his men and deliver them to the local jail. In the last months the King had relinquished his illusion that war could be avoided, and he approved his ministers memoir the day it was presented. He was the unifying force of the Revolution, the one man who could understand and use effectively the complex elements which composed it. The idling envoys to Vienna, Berlin, and Tuscany not only buzzed around Passy day after day but tried to rewrite Franklins treaties. The first British protests were made to the French ambassador, Noailles, who blandly replied that in a great nation there are many turbulent spirits eager to run after adventures. He did not attempt to have his turbulent compatriots released from prison. Stormont then delivered to Vergennes threats only a step removed from war. These prospects were bleak enough in December, 1775, but Franklin sent Bonvouloir back with such a rosy report that they immediately improved. Then he captured the Kings packet, England registered the expected sense of outrage; the whole country seethed with the news. Deane was in and out of the Passy house, keeping his hotel quarters for business and the entertaining of transient sea captains and a horde of friends. In 1776, Louis XVI was just 22 years old and had been king for only two years. He went back to London in a fury. But Beaumarchais had already outlined his plan for Hortalez & Company in a memoir to the King, and he persuaded Vergennes that this was the perfect device for concealing the Bourbon conspiracy against Britain. As a fellow commissioner, Deanes prodigious energies and devotion to Franklin would help to pull them both through the stormy year ahead. Just a year after independence was declared the Americans lost Fort Ticonderoga to Burgoyne, and on September 26 Howe entered Philadelphia. The powder was stolen; Bermuda was fed. The greatest suppressed scandal of the war was the British trade with the enemy on Statia. On the land, if Washington finally got enough men and guns, he might wear down British troops far from their home base. As was demonstrated at the Battle of Yorktown, the French alliance was decisive for the cause of American independence. But the accident was symbolic: Hortalez & Company had suffered a. But once these two great steps in the right direction were made, it was easy to push through resolutions for negotiating foreign alliances. He made for the English Channel, where he took four small merchantmen, which he sent to Lorient under prize masters. Inequality of Rights. During the last eighteen months Conyngham had been in and out of the port, always hull down before the British realized he had vanished, and this time they were determined to get him. Conyngham lusted for his fine new cutter, which mounted 14 six-pounders and 22 swivels, and would have a crew of more than a hundred American and French seamen. He gave the Doctor the unsigned letter from Eden, which said that Britain was ready to fight for another ten years rather than grant American independence. This theft was not discovered until the pouch was opened in America and proved to contain nothing but the blank paper substituted by Hynson. This was a bitter blow to Vergennes and a calamity to the Americans. The American Revolution. Native American groups had to choose the loyalist or patriot causeor somehow maintain a neutral stance during the Revolutionary War. Late in October, 1776, Benjamin Franklin sailed for France to direct the foreign sector of the extraordinary war into which his young country had been plunged. After Lees visit he proffered no more aid and listened to Floridablanca. In their eyes she was still colonial, an outlying province of Europe. how did the french alliance contribute to the american revolution. Discovering that point at which the common interests of France and the United States diverged would be a delicate task, and also an enjoyable one since he was matching wits with Franklin. He insisted on holding the conferences on Spanish soil at Vitoria; he wrote an ungracious memoir to Grimaldi and crossed the border. And so the man who believed that there never was a good war or a bad peace, old Dr. Benjamin Franklin, a man laden with the worlds honors who might easily have pleaded age and weariness, set out for France in his seventy-first year to secure these necessities for his country. The chief results of the mission were the snuffing out of Prussia as a potential ally, and the theft of Lees papers by a professional burglar hired by the British ambassador. He closeted himself with Silas Deane, who had now been in France for six months on a dual mission for the two secret committees and had a tremendous budget of news. Join, or Die, the first political cartoon in America, was created by Benjamin Franklin and was published in a newspaper on May 9, 1754.The cartoon later became a symbol of colonial unity during the American Revolution and remains popular. Though still reeling from the loss of its American colonies at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the country remained a global power with a strong army and navy. He refused to sign the final peace treaty with England until all American prisoners were released. Franklin found that the American stock had lately plunged to its lowest point. No charge was made against Deane, but for two years Congress kept him in Philadelphia at its pleasure while the press vilified him. The dramatist became a whirlwind of activity. What was the intended purpose of the Albany Congress in 1754? Conyngham shook them off and began the most spectacular cruise of the war. He had never outgrown some early drive to make the blacksmiths son a great gentleman. By late June the captain and his men were released from jail, and the Revenge was loaded with powder and arms. To the citizens of Nantes the alliance was not merely a commercial bond, but a blend of credos and enthusiasms which they shared with their friends overseas. As the French Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution, it is easy to determine that the two must have similarities. Franklins experiment had been a complete success in the laboratory sense; the sea raids had brought England and France to the verge of war. During 1775, in London on a royal errand, he was in close touch with the American patriots. These crucial French contributions exemplify the global character of the . These were proposed by your friend [A. Lee], evaded by his colleagues.. The dreadful thing is that Arthur Lees nightmare was accepted by perfectly sane men and that it not only outlived the Eighteenth Century but has persisted in a shadowy form into the Twentieth. was a war only between the French and the Native Americans. American colonists hoped for possible French aid in their struggle against British forces. In order to make the war effective he reminded Vergennes of things Vergennes could do. But the, In a few swift parries Franklin suggested what his technique of dealing with the ministry would be. Franklins most pressing assignment was to buy or borrow eight battleships from France and to urge both Bourbon powers, France and Spain, to send fleets at their own expense to act in concert with these ships. The fact that he was a genius, and a genius of such multiple gifts that he might easily inspire alarm or jealousy in others, had early taught him the art of using screens and disguises. Morris was as stubborn as George III about refusing to believe bad news, but when he was finally convinced of his mistake he was full of contrition. As for the French islands, the Cape developed into a prime source for munitions, and Martinique became an American privateer base before Franklin sailed. And Spanish concurrence in the alliance must be won. By a supple turn of the wrist, Franklin transformed Franco-American relations. The commissioners drew on it for their expenses, for the purchase of war supplies, for building three frigates in Holland and France, and for keeping up the maritime war in European waters. On February i he urged that France enter her unavoidable war at once, and the next day gave Vergennes the personal pledge of the commissioners that if France entered the war the United States would not make a separate peace with Britain. When Deane arrived in Paris in the summer of 1776 Arthur Lee rushed over from London. For diplomatic reasons, he always pretended a vast ignorance of Hortalez & Companya feat like hiding an elephant in a hat. He had a large family and expensive tastes, and needed and loved money. The two men had been on fairly close terms in Congress, where Deane had sat from the first day as a delegate from Connecticut. He had come to the point where he must drop his perilous but always enjoyable collaboration with Franklin and play for France alone. The involvement of France in the American War of Independence (1775-1783) was not only significant in the progress of the war itself but also as a critical moment for France. Revolutionary leadership of George Washington Head of the colonial forces. His new cutter, the Revenge , had been bought by William Hodge of Philadelphia, who had also obtained Conynghams first ship. Carmichael, who was still the liaison man between Passy and Dunkirk, found an obliging British subject as the ostensible purchaser of the Revenge , and while he was about it he sold the Surprise to a French buyer and sent her around to Nantes to join the privateer fleet. Friends, and in French, amis! Arthur Lee was rewarded by memories of turmoil, which he loved and which he was expert in creating. For 70 years, American Heritage has been the leading magazine of U.S. history, politics, and culture. Between 1775 and 1825, revolutions across the Americas and Europe changed the maps and governments of the Atlantic world. However, Franklin had boarded the, But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the, In later reports Sir Joseph drew such an alarming picture of Dutch gunrunning, especially to the Caribbean, that the British sent a Navy sloop and cutter to spend the winter at Texel Island near Amsterdam. There were sixty-odd American merchants established in Nantes, and when Franklin considered that all this activity was being repeated on a somewhat smaller scale in Bordeaux, Lorient, Le Havre, and Dunkirk, he felt that the Franco-American alliance was already a reality. The French Revolution began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. Every step in preparing the lugger for a cruise was watched by the British in Dunkirk. The end of 1799 may be conveniently taken as the . Franklin soon warned Congress not to enlarge its connections with this questionable pair. The Battle of Saratoga was an extensive and punishing conflict and a key victory for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. As a past master in the art of making the other man feel that he was acting solely for him, Vergennes recognized this basic technique in diplomacy. Too much depended on Franklin. It could not supply Washington gunpowder in 1775 nor cope with the enlarging task of war procurement. As Americas sole diplomat Franklin had done all that one man could do to influence the ministries of Europe. Hortalez & Company now became what it had always pretended to bea private concernand he kept on sending supplies to the United States until after Yorktown. On the surface Deanes rapid rise might seem the result of clever opportunism in marrying and winning the friendship of the right people. He radiated reassurance like one of his own stoves; the warmth and charm of his personality masked his Merlin powers. One of his parts was acting as confidential agent for the King, for his circumspection was as profound as Franklins. A courier was on his way to Madrid, and the decision of Charles III should be known within three weeks. Little Benny Bache would be put in school to learn French, and Temple Franklin would act as his grandfathers unpaid secretary. One result of the raid by the Dunkirk Pirate was the fact that British merchants no longer trusted the Admiraltys ability to protect British ships. Some of them were British merchants; others were American sea captains who could be trusted to deliver letters or verbal messages to people on the Continent. It is significant that while the Americans and French trusted Bancroft implicitly, the British were always suspicious of him, had his letters opened at the post office, and watched his movements. War profiteering was pandemic. It happened that Americas greatest Spanish friend, the merchant Don Diego Gardoqui of Bilbao, was in Madrid at the moment, and he was called into consultation. Franklin and Deane now wrote the committee urging action in every sea where British carried on commerce. Spain had suffered less, but she was tied to France by the Bourbon Family Compact. E . In mid-November George III, who had no intention of starting a war with France, decided it would be useful to know the Spanish plans and sent Paul Wentworth to Paris to find out how Charles III stood. Delays which were not the fault of Deane and Beaumarchais held up most of the fleet for months after lading. France had 26 battleships ready, and by spring Spain would have thirty. He seemed to be everywhere at once, a nightmare figure. Though facing insurmountable odds, the underdog naval forces of the young United States proved their savvy by helping to defeat Great Britain in the War for Independence. Franklin, bobbing a thermometer over the Reprisal s rail to take the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, could think about the life of the sea, this western Atlantic and warm Caribbean which nature had chosen as the home for the new race of Americans. One traditional characteristic of the French diplomacy of alliances has been the "Alliance de revers" (i.e. Due to the fantastic time lag in communications with Congress, Alderman Lee was about to take up his assignment as joint commercial agent for France ten months after Congress had canceled that assignment and appointed him envoy to Prussia and Austria. Yet, it represented much more to those individuals who proposed the gift. The alliance of France with the American Patriots started on February 6, 1778, when the King of France signed a treaty with Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. However, when Franklin arrived in Paris, Bancroft was in an ideal position to watch the Kings most dangerous enemy, and he made a good bargain with the secret service. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. The country had no President and Cabinet, no executive departments, no constitution. By a natural process the activities of the mission were divided. In his contract Bancroft agreed to a long list of particulars. As a result of Lees carelessness in leaving his portfolio in his room when he went out to dine, the commissioners had to abandon the building of a great frigate in Amsterdam, and she was sold to Louis XVI at cost. He could not punish Conyngham, who was in parts unknown, so he had William Hodge arrested and sent to the Bastille. The defeat was so ugly for France that it led them to lose all the colonies in the Americas. He raided in the North Sea and the Baltic; he sailed around England and then around Ireland, everywhere taking prizes. Conclusion. On the very day the French ministry decided for the alliance, Paul Wentworth was back in Paris. In November Congress resolved to recall Deane for questioning, and sent John Adams to take his place in the mission. Long before it got into feeble action, eleven of the colonies had started their own navies, and several of them commissioned their own privateer fleets. Through English friends Franklin raised funds to give the prisoners warm clothes and blankets, food, a chance to bathe and wash their clothes, and spending money for small comforts. Their difficulties in shipping out supplies to America were also greatly increased, for Lee had set down everything he could learn without coding it. As a weapon of war the British secret service was remarkably effective. Williams, now 27, had been trained in the Caribbean trade; he spoke French and was capable of dealing with accounts, which always baffled his granduncle. George III was delighted and directed Lord North to stress in Parliament this proof of Frances intention to keep appearances. The next step would be to force France to deliver Conyngham to Britain for hanging as a pirate. Before Deane and Wentworth met, he sent word to Passy that France would after all not wait for word from Spain but would conclude the alliance independently, on one condition: that no separate peace be made with England. Floridablancas policies prevailed; he wanted to keep the United States too weak to threaten Spanish possessions in America. However, over time divisions of opinion became apparent between federalists and anti-federalists. Vergennes decided that honor was preferable to peace, faced down an ultimatum from England, and got the two Navy ships safely to sea, where they would have to take their chances with the British warships waiting for them. The American victory secured critical financial support from the French. The man who believed there was never a good war or a bad peace was about to use all his powers to sweep the Bourbon nations into the War of Independence. Thus he was the perfect performer in maritime histrionics that Franklin needed for his plan of implicating France in a conspicuous insult to England. Later Congress backed up this pledge and authorized all tenders necessary to get Bourbon help. He decided that Jonathan Williams, the soul of probity, should be drawn into the Lee crusade against all rivals, and soon Congress was hearing about Williams embezzlements of public funds. Franklin prudently released his grandnephew from his post as special agent for the mission, and he remained in Nantes in private business. It was February, and the ominous shift in the ministry from the friendly Grimaldi to the hostile Floridablanca was taking place. In 1758 Britain found a new strategy. A disguised British vessel at Dunkirk had alerted the warships, and as soon as the, By the middle of July Vergennes had made up his mind to ask the King for armed intervention. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France supports U.S. engagement in the peace process. (We must remember that all this was happening before Lexington.). But Montaudoin and all Nantes had begun to increase clandestine trade with the thirteen colonies about 1770, long before Franklin decided on his personal break with England. But the accident was symbolic: Hortalez & Company had suffered a bouleversement . British spies were everywhere. 1783. It looked like a checkmate. Schooled in the Caribbean trade, he was ready for the ticklish work of running arms from Europe before the war began, and displayed such gifts for evading British snoopers in a highly spectacular way that their reports on Conyngham had the quality of a picaresque saga. There must be a breaking point somewhere in his patience. A smuggling mechanism had long since been perfected, to the general salvation. In making this special adaptation of her book for AMERICAN HERITAGE, she has re-created that less familiar but vital struggle behind the scenes which was necessary at Versailles before Cornwallis could march out, in defeat, at Yorktown while the drums beat for the birth of a new nation. By September, 1775, the crusader was back in Versailles, and with Vergennes intensified the campaign to draw the King into their dangerous project of largescale aid to the colonies. The prize crew of five Americans and sixteen Frenchmen were put in prison, and the prize master was forced to confess that Conyngham had made other captures. When Vergenness orders came through to sell the Revenge , nobody was alarmed. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. Anything known in Congress was apt to percolate to Whitehall. When Colonel Tucker told Franklin and Morris that there was a respectable supply of gunpowder in the royal arsenal at St. Georges which could be abstracted in a midnight raid, a bargain was struck. It was a long time before this contract with the Farmers General could be satisfied, since few ships could now run the British blockade of the American seaboard. Franklin and Morris could hardly have believed Captain Wickes news on his return to Philadelphia if a courier had not come back from Europe at the same time with even more wonderful tidings. The American Revolution was by no means a purely American-British conflict. Like Great Britain, France had a young king. Stormont was instructed to tell Vergennes that the Rebels game was up. They were the victims of their friends in Congress, who believed in promiscuous diplomacy as a device for distributing patronage. He was delighted to find his brother William waiting for him in Paris. Beaumarchais wrote masterly letters to Louis XVI, arguing that with timely secret help from France the Americans would win their war and clip Britains wings. Wickes got clean away, only to founder in a storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. Shipping was at a premium; in the last year the price of vessels had tripled. He already knew Deane, and wished not to know Arthur Lee, but he was consumed with curiosity about Franklin. This well-connected young man had been sent direct from Congress to buy two ships to serve as packets for the mission. only affected North America. During this period of watchful waiting, Franklin applied political pressure. On the last day of the year the bad news arrived from Spain: Charles III was unwilling to enter an alliance with America. Most of the supply was still down in the Caribbean, but the fact remains that there must have been more powder on the continent than the various colonies and the merchants were willing to release to Congress. Had France lost the race for American friendship? According to Doniol, Franklin dealt through Sieur Montaudoin of Nantes, a great shipping merchant, and the savant Dr. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. His first wife soon died and he married the daughter of a great political familyand switched to politics. Much of this trade was illicit, but it was based on realities and it bred a friendship between the West Indies and the mainlanders which was all-important to the Revolution. They were in the best possible hands; Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the few masters seasoned in the merchant fleet who had joined the Continental Navy. Wentworth reported to Eden that he had found Deane vain, desultory and subtle and indeed the commissioner must have had some difficulty keeping a straight face. During the Revolution this tiny island was the clearinghouse for American trade with the Caribbean and Europe, including Britain. The power which first recognizes the independence of the Americans, he said, will be the one to gather all the fruits of this war.. Vergennes sensed that the benign old Doctor was ready to fence with naked steel, that he perfectly realized France was playing the old game of power rivalry, and that he would co-operate in the gameup to a pointto keep France as an ally. America needed French aid of every sort: ships, supplies, loans, to begin with. From May, 1777, to May, 1778, Congress would receive no direct word from its mission in Paris. They were based on the Plan of 1776, drafted chiefly by Franklin, and they laid down his cherished, and essentially modern, principles of free trade and settled the wholly new problem of how a republic should conduct its relations with a kingdom. Nothing came of these appeals, and meanwhile Franklin and Deane had been working at a highly secret project which might prove more effective in precipitating a Franco-British war. Captain Wickes, who had been one of the picked men of Morris trading fleet, was chosen for the voyage. A number of ill-advised financial maneuvers in the late 1700s worsened the financial situation of the already cash-strapped French government. For all his enjoyment of high life and high-level intrigue, he was a seismograph about social upheavals and an intellectual who understood their necessity. took place in France and India. Even respected modern historians will repeat some of Arthur Lees calumnies about Franklin and Deane, Jonathan Williams, and William Carmichael, though they have been disproved over and over since their creation in a sick mind. As such is their miserable policy, it is our business to force on a war for which purpose I see nothing so likely as fitting our privateers from the ports and islands of France. Stamp Act of 1765. He was annoyed to find that Bancroft was in London, making contact with the mission rather difficult. But Beaumarchais was on a crusade for American independence, and he would not drop it until independence was won. (The third captain of that cruise was staying behind to take out one of the new American frigates built at Nantes.) Americans, for instance, were forbidden to trade directly with foreign countries or with the foreign islands of the Caribbean, except in a few commodities which could be sold under cumbersome and expensive restrictions. Captain Pearson of the, The islet of St. Eustatia, an international free port in the northern Leewards, was a fountainhead of what Samuel Adams called the, To the citizens of Nantes the alliance was not merely a commercial bond, but a blend of credos and enthusiasms which they shared with their friends overseas. These reports were written in invisible ink between the lines of love letters addressed to Mr. This was the germ of the deliberate policy Franklin and Deane pursued during 1777: to create such an open scandal about French connivance in American raids that it could not be effervesced in private conversations between Stormont and Vergennes. On the same day he wrote Richard Henry Lee: My idea of adapting characters and places is this: Dr. Franklin to Vienna, as the first, most respectable, and quiet; Mr. Deane to Holland; and the alderman [William] to Berlin. Revolutionaries were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment including individual freedom. It made the French . Miss Augur, one of many writers who have honored the great old man on his 250th anniversary this year, is the author of several other books, including Tall Ships to Cathay and biographies of Anne Hutchinson and John Ledyard. But if she should declare war on France, we conceive that by the united force of France, Spain, and America, she will lose all her possessions in the West Indies, much the greatest part of that commerce which has rendered her so opulent, and be reduced to that state of weakness and humiliation which she has, by her perfidy, her insolence, and her cruelty both in the east and the west, so justly merited.. But the early ratio of seven British merchantmen captured to one American lost was rapidly declining, and Britains patrol of the seaboard was making it difficult to maintain a supply line of military and civilian goods. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. The small matter was to be Conynghams capture of another British packet, this time the one plying to Holland. His jealousy of Franklin, which grew into a nightmare for Americans on two continents, had begun in 1770 when Massachusetts appointed Franklin its agent in England, and Lee his inactive deputy to replace him if he left England or if he died. France and Great Britain were cutthroat enemies. George III, faced with plain warnings from Bancroft and Wentworth that a French alliance was pending, would not believe them. There is a distinct anomaly in the fact that even with captures from British transports Congress scraped together for Washingtons use in 1775 only about forty tons of gunpowder.