Victory at Yorktown (3 page)

Since protection of the homeland was of paramount importance to the English, they decided to keep their main fleet in European waters unless an enemy squadron was detached to the West Indies or America, but only after assuring themselves that the ships were definitely bound for North America could they dispatch a detachment in pursuit. That meant, of course, that the French, sailing first, were more likely to have the advantage and beat the English across the Atlantic. But there were inherent uncertainties, one being control of the waters of the West Indies, where French and British each had valuable properties. This was the real center of the Atlantic trade, where the naval forces of England, France, and other European powers were on the prowl and where the best-laid plans could be undone in the blink of an eye.

European diplomacy in the eighteenth century was a mirror image of Niccolò Machiavelli's theory of practical statecraft. The end justified the means, and the end, as often as not, was the aggrandizement of the various monarchs and nobles. Not surprisingly, Europe's capitals swarmed with spies, who were a continuing problem for the more naive American envoys. Beginning in 1763, the goal of France's foreign policy was revenge—revenge for the humiliation it had suffered at the hands of England during the Seven Years' War. Crushed militarily and stripped of its colonies by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France lost its position as the first nation of Europe and was reduced to the unprecedented position of a second-rate power.

Since the French king Louis XV and his foreign policy had been largely in the hands of his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, from 1745 until her death in 1764, she deserved much of the blame for bringing on the Seven Years' War, so disastrous for France. One of her favorites was Duc Étienne François de Choiseul, who managed the foreign affairs portfolio through the Seven Years' War and obtained the best terms possible (meager as they were) at the peace table. It was Choiseul who perceived in Britain's disgruntled colonies a likely tool for humbling France's enemy across the Channel. In 1768 the monarch's amours again played a hand in the nation's diplomacy. That year the king took another mistress—one Marie Jeanne Bécu, who had until then performed the same services for Chevalier Jean du Barry while presiding over his gambling house. (It was a complicated life Madame du Barry led. She caught the eye of Louis XV and became his paramour while married to her former lover's brother, Comte Guillaume du Barry. In 1770 she dismissed Choiseul, and she retired from the court when the king died in 1774.)
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Fortunately for the American colonies, Choiseul's successor, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, saw their usefulness to France in precisely the same light as the duke. A clever, subtle statesman with experience in a number of the smaller European courts, Vergennes as early as the 1750s had observed presciently that if France lost Canada, “England will soon repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no longer in need of her protection. She will call on them to contribute towards supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her, and they will answer by striking off all dependence.” Vergennes was also a guileful man, who once wrote to the foreign office from his post in Turkey, “… we should hide from the Turks the real end toward which we are driving them.… let us appear to be occupied only with what concerns them, without reference to ourselves.…” All of which suggests how he viewed relations with the Americans. He was wise enough, however, to be content to humble England, while avoiding the impression that “we are seeking her destruction. She is necessary to the balance of power in Europe, wherein she occupies a considerable place.… We shall be feared less if we content ourselves with cutting off our enemy's arms than if we insist on running him through the heart.”

While Vergennes's foreign policy differed little from that of Choiseul, at first he failed to recognize the effect Britain's infamous Coercive Acts were having on the Americans in 1774, and this was brought to his attention by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who had risen from apprenticeship to his father, a watchmaker, to become a favorite at the French court. A man of many talents, he wrote the comedies
Le Barbier de Seville
and
Le Mariage de Figaro
, which later inspired operas by Rossini and Mozart. In 1775 Beaumarchais happened to be in England on a clandestine mission for Vergennes, and there he became acquainted with Arthur Lee, who represented Massachusetts as its agent in London. From Lee he heard how desperate the colonies' situation was, and the two discussed the possibility that France might assist the rebels with arms and other necessities of war.

On the heels of these talks Beaumarchais returned to Versailles, where he spoke with Vergennes and the slow-witted king, who was not yet twenty years old, urging them to consider covert shipments of weapons to the Americans. His notion, as expressed by Spain's cynical foreign minister, who had been approached by Vergennes to join France in providing secret assistance, was that the English and Americans should “exhaust themselves reciprocally,” enabling France and Spain to pick up the pieces. A resulting memorandum read by Vergennes to the king and his council set forth the reasons for supplying the colonial rebels with arms disguised as legal trade goods. First, it would diminish the power of England and increase that of France. Second, it would cause irreparable loss to English trade, while stimulating French commerce. Third, it would probably lead to the recovery of some former French possessions, such as the fisheries off Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “We do not speak of Canada,” the memoir concluded, indicating that any continental conquest would be up to the Americans, while the French would take over the prized British islands in the West Indies.

Vergennes argued further that the colonies—once they declared their independence—would undoubtedly form a republican government, which, by its very nature, would be weak and incapable of threatening European possessions in North America. (No one seems to have raised a question about the ethics of sponsoring a revolution. More astonishing, Vergennes and his master, Louis XVI, appear to have made no connection between a successful revolution against George III of England and the possibility that restive folk in another country might be encouraged to foment a revolution against their own ruler—especially in a land like France, whose shaky financial condition already contained the seeds that made future upheaval all but inevitable.)

As early as May 12, 1776, it was agreed that France would pursue a policy of secret assistance to the Americans, whereupon Louis XVI directed that 1 million livres' worth of munitions be delivered to the rebels from the royal arsenals. This was to be handled by a fictitious trading enterprise created by Beaumarchais, called Hortalez et Cie. Eventually, Charles III of Spain contributed an equal amount of money, as did a group of French businessmen, and this company—managed by none other than Beaumarchais—was the channel through which shipments of arms from French arsenals were sent to such entrepôts as Haiti and Martinique, where they were received by American agents and reshipped to the colonies.

For its part, Congress named five of its members to the Secret Committee on Correspondence, and that group began corresponding with Arthur Lee in London and Charles Dumas, a friend of Benjamin Franklin's who lived in The Hague, in an effort to ascertain the potential support for America in Europe. After the signing of the Declaration of Independence the Continental Congress dispatched an official mission to France, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane. When these three commissioners arrived in Paris, they notified Vergennes that they were “fully empowered by the Congress of the United States of America to propose and negotiate a treaty of commerce between France and the United States.” But such an agreement was a long time coming.

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WHEN FRANKLIN STEPPED
onto the scene in Paris, he was by all odds the best-known American in the world and one of the most politically knowledgeable. He had served on the most important committees in Congress and had unrivaled diplomatic skills as a result of dealing with British statesmen, plus a shrewd knowledge of human nature. The Paris into which he came as a conspicuous newcomer was seething with intrigue. The British ambassador, Viscount Stormont, was alert to every move the French made and had a host of spies (including one who was Arthur Lee's secretary) working for him, reporting what Franklin was doing, who his correspondents in England were, and even stealing some of his letters.

A thoughtful, witty, homespun philosopher, Franklin was a wise old owl who sensed immediately what the French thought of him and was more than willing to play the part. He was, after all, no backwoods bumpkin but an urbane gentleman who had lived among and corresponded with some of the world's leading scientists and scholars, politicians, clergymen, and merchants. The French who sought the primitive virtues extolled by Rousseau believed they were personified in Franklin, and he did nothing to disappoint them. He had debarked in Brittany wearing a fur cap that had warmed him on the November crossing of the Atlantic, and he kept it on, even in Paris. Writing to a friend, he told him, “Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty, only a few years older; very plainly dressed, wearing my thin grey straight hair that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down to my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris.” He wore an old brown coat, carried a stick instead of a sword, seemed to relish his outmoded clothes, and if this jibed with the image Parisians had of an American sage, leader of a natural state against a corrupt, sophisticated empire, so be it.

He was the toast of France, but since it was impossible for every French man or woman to see him, they must have his likeness, an engraving of him over the mantelpiece, his image in the lid of a snuffbox or set in a ring, plus busts, prints, copies—so many of them, he wrote his daughter, that they “have made your father's face as well known as that of the moon.…”

Inevitably, it was to Franklin that so many French and other European officers came, hoping to be recommended to the American army. By the first of March in 1777 he had moved to Passy, which he described as “a neat village on a high ground, half a mile from Paris, with a large garden to walk in,” and here he was all but overwhelmed by visitors and correspondents—most of them men whose imaginations had been fired by the idealism behind the rebellion. As one nobleman wrote of America's rebels, “Their cause was our cause. We were proud of their victories, we wept for their defeats.” And of course many of these young Europeans saw opportunities for glory and advancement in their chosen career as soldiers. Two men in particular who came to America with Franklin's blessing proved invaluable to George Washington. One was the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, eager to win fame by fighting against England; the other was the man who called himself Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. The latter had served on the Prussian general staff as an aide to Frederick the Great, but when he was introduced to Franklin he was an unemployed captain, and Franklin—to persuade Congress to accept another foreigner—raised his rank substantially, noting that he was “lately a lieutenant general in the king of Prussia's service.…” Captain or lieutenant general, the baron brought new life to Washington's army, making it over in a matter of weeks, drilling the men into soldiers, instilling real discipline in their ranks.

All that summer of 1777 Franklin and his fellow commissioners anxiously followed the progress of General John Burgoyne's army of British regulars, German mercenaries, and Indian allies, southward bound from Canada, heading for Albany, New York, and a rendezvous with General Sir William Howe's forces. News reached Passy that Burgoyne had captured Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, that Fort Edward had been taken, but none of these reports seemed to dim Franklin's optimism or alter his refusal to concede defeat. Then came reports of a battle near Bennington and the loss of a sizeable number of Burgoyne's German troops, but still no signs from the French about an alliance. In November the group at Passy learned that Philadelphia, Franklin's hometown, where his daughter and her young children lived, plus all of Franklin's property, had fallen to Howe. Even so, the old man was more determined than ever that the Americans would persist and win, even without French aid; nor would he agree to warn Vergennes that without a French alliance the Americans must come to terms with Britain. Since that “might make them abandon us in despair or in anger,” the commissioners would wait until the news was better, he announced, when they could argue for more favorable terms.

It was late in the morning of December 4 when a Boston merchant named Jonathan Loring Austin rode into Franklin's courtyard in the village. He had come ashore at Nantes with dispatches, and rumors had preceded him to Passy, where the commissioners waited anxiously, hopeful of news. Before he could dismount, Franklin asked, “
Is
Philadelphia taken?” To which Austin replied, “Yes, sir.”

Then, as the old man clasped his hands as if he had heard of a death in the family and turned to go into the house, Austin said, “But sir, I have greater news than that. GENERAL BURGOYNE
and his whole army are prisoners of war!”
Recalling the moment later, Austin said the effect was “electrical,” and throughout France the rejoicing over the rebel triumph at Saratoga was as enthusiastic as if it had been a victory by French troops. Beaumarchais, ever on the alert for an event that would enhance his stock market speculations, was in such a hurry to get to Paris that his reckless driving caused his carriage to overturn, injuring his arm.

During these past weeks the English had been on tenterhooks of their own, waiting for word about Burgoyne's army. They had been in the dark for more than three weeks, wrote the British man of letters Horace Walpole, who complained that “impatience is very high and uneasiness increases with every day.” On December 2 official news from General Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec reached Whitehall, announcing “the total annihilation … of Burgoyne's army,” prompting Walpole to say, “we are … very near the end of the American war,” adding that the king “fell into agonies on hearing this account.…”