Patriot Pirates (11 page)

Robert Morris, the so-called “financier of the Revolution,” had a hand in funding most every significant strategic and logistical initiative undertaken by Congress during the war. His sense of propriety kept the Philadelphian from investing wholeheartedly in privateers—for a while.

B
efore he was dismissed under British diplomatic pressure, the commander at Martinique, General D’Argout, sent a letter to his superiors describing “exactly the real state of affairs” in America. It was December 23, 1776, and as he rightly observed, “the situation is almost desperate.”

Congress’s ill-planned operations in Canada had failed when the expected welcome by Canadians eager to become America’s fourteenth colony never materialized. A British naval force had seized Newport in early December. Congress had packed up and fled to Baltimore as British troops advanced through New Jersey. And Washington’s army, its retreat into Pennsylvania capped with the mass expiration of enlistment terms in November, had shrunk to less than three thousand men, a number soon to be halved when December enlistments expired. While Thomas Paine challenged “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” to persevere despite the hard times, Washington was confiding to his brother, “I think the game is pretty near up.”

In D’Argout’s opinion, the general’s “only resort” was to “gather as many troops as possible in order to fight a pitched battle with decisive results.” Three days later Washington did exactly that, crossing the Delaware River back to New Jersey and striking the Hessian garrison at Trenton. Buoyed by the victory, his men agreed to march against General Charles Cornwallis’s army at Princeton, ultimately forcing more than eight thousand British regulars to yield most of New Jersey before both armies settled into their winter quarters.

In addition to calling upon their patriotism, Washington personally pledged a new signing bonus to persuade his men to fight on. He begged Morris likewise to “strain his credit upon such an occasion,” and the financier spent a frantic night going house to house among his friends borrowing any hard money he could find, from English crowns to Spanish gold dollars.

Sending the money to Washington by horseback, Morris apologized for the delay due to no couriers being awake that early in the morning. He’d been the only member of Congress to stay in Philadelphia rather than flee the approaching British. Lukewarm on rebellion at a time when his peers had howled for it, he noted now that “many of those who were foremost in noise shrink cowardlike from the danger.” His commitment carried “a heavy heart” but was absolute. “I shall remain here until the enemy drive me away.”

D’Argout had contended in his letter to Paris that the Continental Army’s earlier defeats in New York and New Jersey were “far more injurious in their effects than they are in themselves.” The same was true of the victories at Trenton and Princeton. Their greater significance was psychological rather than tactical, providing a boost of optimism to carry America into another year of fighting. They brought an opposite reaction in Britain.

Edward Bancroft, in London in February when news of the two battles arrived, notified Deane that it “very much depressed the spirits of administration here.” He saw a chance to short-sell stocks on the London market in order to profit from their decline, an investment strategy enhanced by any tips on further bad news that Deane might provide him from Paris. “Stocks are beginning to sink, so that if France should act as if she intends a war, they will soon fall 8 or 10 percent.”

Deane’s financial frustration had deepened after Congress, despite his repeated pleas for blank privateer commissions to meet high European demand, had sent only “three sets of the papers we wanted. But we shall want more, and beg you will not fail to send them by several opportunities.” So in addition to Bancroft’s stock schemes, in early 1777 Deane took a percentage in a privateer,
Tartar
, whose captain carried a commission specially arranged in America by Robert Morris, one of the ship’s investors.

Two years later Congress would investigate an allegation that Deane had “misapplied the public money” to buy into the vessel for personal gain. Part of a barrage of charges brought by Arthur Lee against the compatriot who’d participated in Hortalez & Company without him (and, Lee suspected, profited hugely), it was based on the hazy recollections of Deane’s secretary in Paris at the time. Lacking any supporting evidence, the allegation could not have been expected to stand up against accounting records properly kept. But Deane didn’t keep proper records. Combined with his history of expediency and, in Lee, a relentless antagonist bent on revenge, his habitual carelessness made it hard to prove his innocence against the increasingly common presumption that government officials who flourished in wartime were thieves and possibly traitors.

But at the turn of the year between 1776 and 1777, more fervent than Deane’s involvement in privateers and London stocks was the project he and Beaumarchais had initiated more than half a year earlier—loading eight ships with two thousand tons of supplies for the Continental Army. The effort had been delayed at every turn by the interference of British authorities acting on Bancroft’s spy reports, but finally the largest of the vessels,
Amphitrite
, was launched, steering for New England once it cleared the port of Le Havre.

The next vessel,
Seine
left in late January and headed to Martinique, from where Bingham forwarded north its 350 tons of powder, tents, mortars, and blankets. The last transport got away that spring, concluding a tortuous process that exhausted Deane and Beaumarchais and bankrupted Hortalez & Company. The project cost $50 million, a tab that, as Deane understood the arrangement, Congress would repay as soon as possible.

Writing in his diary soon after launching
Amphitrite
, he described himself as a “humble agent” and credited those in France “whose exalted station gives them the ability and their greatness of soul the disposition of extending such relief to millions struggling under oppression’s heavy hands.” France’s generosity, he wrote, “would be equaled only by the endless gratitude of the numberless millions rising into existence in a new and extensive world.”

The supplies delivered aboard Deane’s vessels would figure significantly in the Revolution’s pivotal battle, the American victory at Saratoga the next October—a battle whose rout of the enemy’s attempt to sever New England from the other colonies profoundly shook the prevailing worldview that Britain was invincible.

Yet the great irony of Deane’s career is that, while his pursuits in war trade, stock jobbing, and privateers drew justifiable scrutiny, it was his role in dispatching those vessels—his finest contribution as a patriot—that ultimately turned his countrymen against him.

1776

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND

John Paul Jones, commissioned as a Continental Navy officer in December 1775, was disgusted by the privateering phenomenon. “The common class of mankind are actuated by no nobler principle than that of self-interest. This and this only determines all adventurers in privateers, the owners as well as those whom they employ.”

Though perfectly fond of money (in 1777 complaints were filed alleging that Jones wouldn’t pay his men their wages “without their first signing a power to him to be their agent”), he viewed it mainly as pragmatic motivation to fight. Thus he denounced a navy proposal to grant “joint shares” to the entire fleet for prizes seized by individual vessels. No other commander approached his aggressiveness in raiding enemy shipping, and he saw no justice in not keeping for himself and his men “all that they can take.”

He lamented that as long as navy men drew a “paltry emolument” in comparison with privateers, “in sober sadness we are involved in a woeful predicament.” He wrote Congress seeking to raise a crew’s prize share from one-half to two-thirds of its value (and 100 percent if it was a warship). Even after it was adopted, however, the increased distribution did little to slow the manpower drain. The navy did offer sailors a half-pint of rum per day and a $400 death benefit to families. And similarly to privateers, a man’s prize share doubled if he was first to sight an enemy vessel and tripled if he was first to board it. But the navy’s requirement to attend “divine service” twice a day and to discourage “cursing and blasphemy” had no place on a privateer. This moral leniency, together with privateering’s elective approach to battling the Royal Navy, its bigger signing bonuses, and better prospect of getting paid, made it by far the majority choice.

John Paul Jones despised privateers for draining manpower away from naval service. Yet there would come a time when privateering’s profits tempted him to become an investor.

Continental sailors, unlike civilian mariners who signed up for one cruise at a time, lacked leverage under their long-term enlistments to demand swift payment. By contrast, the market pressures of privateering forced owners to make good on prize awards regardless of bureaucratic delays if they wanted to attract crews in the future.

There were other advantages. Privateersmen could sell their shares in advance of a voyage, accepting a lump sum from buyers who hoped to redeem them for a profit should the voyage hit big. And creditors accepted sailors’ pledges of future earnings to settle debts. If earnings exceeded the amount owed, creditors kept the difference. In exchange for that privilege, debts were cleared even if the voyage came up empty. Many of these deals were unfair and probably coerced. One man, to pay off a loan of 42 shillings, sailed for eight months after granting his creditor “all my right and share of prize money that shall be taken,” signing his name at the base of the agreement and indicating under it, “Indian.”

Investors traded privateer shares at a premium or discount depending on whether, based on the quality of the ship and the competency of its officers, odds favored success or failure. Prize courts opened in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and the turnaround time between a prize’s arrival in port and its legal settlement narrowed from months to weeks, streamlining the efficiency of an already booming industry.

The frenzy was especially fierce in Providence. While stationed there with the five-vessel Continental fleet in the fall of 1776, Jones raged at those who “wink at, encourage, and employ deserters from the navy.” In frustration he took matters into his own hands, calling for the execution of deserters and employing surprise inspections to snatch away servicemen who’d jumped ship to private vessels.

Now it was the businessmen who howled. If the young captain didn’t desist, “Division, confusion, and frequent bloodshedding must be the inevitable consequence.”

He cursed their hypocrisy. “What punishment is equal to such baseness? And yet these men pretend to love their country!”

They in turn shot back with their British adversary’s favorite slur. “Captain Jones,” they said, “has been guilty of an act of piracy.”

Four

Trust not your happiness in the hands of Fortune.

—Nathanael Greene, August
1772

O
ne of Nathanael Greene’s first business ventures was to pay “an unheard-of” price of £300 for seven acres of supposedly silver-rich land near his home in Rhode Island in 1768. He was talked into the purchase by his younger cousin Griffin. That it turned out a flop didn’t discourage him from engaging in future projects with Griffin and other ambitious relatives.

Greene’s scornful contention that “merchants in general are a body of people whose god is gain” concealed an inveterate attraction to deals that might in one shot free him financially to devote his energies to his wife, children, and army career. Possessing neither confidence nor acumen when speculating on his own, he preferred to be a silent partner who contributed money and later his famous name to deals conceived and arranged by others.

He narrowly had avoided another £300 loss when his company’s rum was seized by
Gaspee
in 1772. His refusal to join in John Brown’s retaliatory burning of the sloop reflected the rivalry between their families, a rivalry characterized by personal dislike and, from the well-to-do Greenes toward the filthy-rich Browns, envy. Six years earlier the Browns had diversified from shipping and candlemaking into iron production, mining ore and blasting it into raw pig iron at their furnace in the village of Hope. When they added a forge to refine the material, they intruded on the specialty of Nathanael’s father, a Quaker minister whose foundry manufactured ship anchors and other wrought iron products.

The firms rancorously coexisted. The Greenes complained of overpaying for Hope pig iron. The Browns complained of having been sold poor quality anchors; in a power play indicative of their superior status, they successfully dictated the terms of reimbursement. The families also clashed over the relocation of Rhode Island College. Nathanael submitted a last-minute petition to build the school near his home in Kent County, offering to top any other bid. The Browns countered that Providence had more religious diversity, meaning fewer Quakers and more Baptists, an argument the Greenes resented not least because it prevailed.

Nathanael was no fan of Quakerism. Constrained by what he called its “superstitious” piety, his education was limited to Bible study. He didn’t attend college, and received instruction in Latin and mathematics only after pestering his father for a private tutor. Blaming his family’s business mania for his lack of scholarship (“very early when I should have been in the pursuit of knowledge, I was digging into the bowels of the earth after wealth”), he equally criticized his habitual indecisiveness as a factor in all his shortcomings.

Words Greene wrote in 1770, when he was twenty-eight, expressed a lifelong refrain. “I am at variance with myself and am continually distracted and torn with civil feuds of my own disturbed imagination.” A potentially crippling trait in a military leader, it hardly predicted his eventual emergence as George Washington’s favorite and most capable general. But if “tumult and uproars from the contention of opposite interests” didn’t hamper him on the battlefield, it filled much else in his life with anxiety.

Greene suffered from asthma and a congenital limp. The suddenness of his marriage in 1774 (it was announced days beforehand) to nineteen-year-old Catherine Littlefield suggests a preemptive strike against second thoughts on her part or his. “Caty” was pretty, feisty, and flirtatious—mistrusted by women, adored by men. When war later separated wife and husband, rumors arose of her infidelity, though a relative reported, “She confesses she has passions and propensities and that if she has any virtue ’tis in resisting and keeping them within due bounds.”

Greene described his marriage as “Venus’s War.” If there was friction between them, there were sparks as well. His letters to Caty convey a fond intimacy and also the pressure he felt to keep her content. Intimidated by sophisticated society, he fretted about her behavior and incurred her wrath for correcting her spelling, her dress, and her wine drinking. “Nothing but the affection and regard I feel for you makes me wish to have you appear an accomplished lady in every point of view.”

She enjoyed parties and expensive clothes, and was worldly enough to know what premium comforts lay just beyond their means. He hoped to change that through success in business, another reason why—given his desire to support Caty in style, his Quaker heritage, and his chronic self-doubt—his leap into an army career couldn’t have been more unlikely.

In the years leading up to rebellion, his fiery opinions about British “chains of slavery” contrasted with an almost paralyzing ambivalence on other matters. (One self-critique described a man “perpetually falling out with himself.”) Unwilling to defy his family’s pacifist faith in order to join the local militia, he provoked dismissal from the Society of Friends by visiting, with his cousin Griffin, “a place in Connecticut of public resort where they had no proper business.”

The year of his marriage, Greene joined a volunteer outfit called the Kentish Guards expecting to be designated a lieutenant. The members rejected him due to his limp, causing him particular “mortification” by doing so in a public announcement (“No one loves to be the subject of ridicule however true the cause”). But rather than resign he stayed on as a private.

After minutemen and redcoats fought in Lexington in April 1775, Rhode Island incorporated its scattered militias into a single army. In a mystifying move, the General Assembly named Greene, with only military book-learning and a private’s experience of drills and parades, to lead the unit after two colonels turned it down. Instantly elevated to the rank of brigadier general, his career would feature several such leaps when intangible qualities of character won him unexpected favor. Accustomed to his peers’ high esteem, Greene would, as a result, be painfully baffled when charges of ethical misconduct were later leveled and widely believed.

In June, Greene, not quite thirty-three, led 1,800 soldiers to join Washington’s army outside Boston. Caty soon discovered she was pregnant and hired a carriage for the day’s ride north to tell her husband after first stopping in Providence to buy herself a new wardrobe. During the next five years she bore four children, two in army camps. She alternately roughed it and “spent lavishly,” enduring hard travel and primitive quarters in order to be with her husband in the field, pampering herself with parties and luxury goods for the extended periods they were apart. Temperamentally at odds with her Quaker in-laws, her extravagance and buoyancy clashed with what Nathanael termed their fascination with “the black pages of human life.” But caught up in the war, he had little choice but to leave Caty in their care. He did the same with his finances.

He earned $125 per month as a brigadier general. How well it supported him is tricky to gauge in an era when Congress and each colony had its own currency; when foreign coins were legal tender at varying exchange rates; when debts were settled with gold or silver, with exchangeable bills of credit issued from local governments, with bartered goods, or with mutually agreed-upon services such as fixing your fence or plowing your land—and all this before war threw the economy into real havoc.

Clearly Greene’s salary was ample, almost twenty times what Continental privates earned (today a brigadier general makes eight times what a private does). Certain factors marred the picture, however. American officers, like their British counterparts, were obliged to provide for themselves while on campaign—pay for quarters, provisions, and a domestic staff commensurate with their rank. Combat performance eventually gave rise to standards of merit based on results, but even in the more egalitarian American service gentlemanly trappings conferred leadership status on officers who, in the early stage of the war, had little real claim on command. Wartime inflation of Continental currency was another huge drain on their income. Intermittent pay hikes nowhere near offset the plunging dollar. And Congress’s fiscal lapses increasingly meant the army didn’t get paid at all, reducing budget worries down to the soldiers’ grim joke that even something valueless was “not worth a Continental.”

Still, in the summer of 1775, Greene, who’d been prepared to go to war as a private if need be, was in a solid situation financially. He’d won his settlement from the
Gaspee
seizure. The iron forge was running full tilt under his brothers’ management, with Nathanael, per the terms of his late father’s estate, receiving a share of the earnings. His partnership in Jacob Greene & Company promised good returns through speculation in shipping and trade. And finally, though he was slow to realize it, his prestige as a general in Washington’s army gave him serious sway in Rhode Island business affairs.

The notion surfaced in correspondence received during his first months in command, a subtle, between-the-lines deference to a newly important person. A flattering note from his dour brother Jacob prompted Nathanael’s modest mention of “the great defects I find in myself.” Rhode Island Governor Nicholas Cooke, a former distiller and shipmaster (that is, smuggler), wrote in lavish praise of Greene’s role in a recent skirmish near Boston. The general countered that the British in fact had won the engagement, “though at too dear a rate for them to rejoice much at their success.”

Then came a letter from Providence that opened dramatically, “Having the cause of our bleeding country much at heart,” before going on to offer a business deal that required a slight favor beforehand. The proposition was for Greene to buy into a privateer currently under construction. The favor was for him to use his influence to obtain a commission to license the venture—not an easy thing to do, since the Rhode Island Assembly had yet to follow Massachusetts’s lead in authorizing private warships. But as a member of the Assembly, the letter’s author, Nicholas Brown, knew such authorizations were imminent, and, crafty as ever, he was looking to get a jump on the competition.

Greene declined. By that time, February 1776, Jacob Greene & Company was running powder voyages to the West Indies like most every trading firm in Rhode Island. Privateering was the logical next step. Nathanael was uneasy with the move, however. Legality wasn’t the issue. Rather, he cited a soldier’s priority. “It is necessary for some to be in the field to secure the property of others in their stores.” Aware of privateering’s reputation as a financial sure thing, he was wistful nonetheless. “Were I at liberty, I think I could make a fortune for my family.”

Nathanael Greene, despite an introspective and hesitant temperament seemingly ill-suited for combat command, would emerge as one of America’s greatest generals. Yet even as his battlefield prowess helped the Patriots to victory, his hefty speculation in privateers filled him with dread of personal ruin.

The combat Greene experienced in coming years made him rethink his position. By 1778—after bloody fighting in New York and Rhode Island; after Trenton, Valley Forge, and Brandywine—he’d grown embittered by reports of former associates who’d stayed home amid “domestic pleasures” and now were getting richer by the day.

Squeezed by his wife’s spending and the difficulty in even collecting his depreciating army pay, he wrote Jacob angrily, “Why therefore should a few zealous officers be made a certain sacrifice for the common good? What is to become of them after the war?” To persevere in the military while civilian businessmen prospered “must render the condition of the officers infinitely more wretched than other parts of society. Is it reasonable that men should be exposed to all the hardships of war, be constantly exposed to sudden death and broken bones without any compensation?”

Greene’s argument was mostly with himself—to rationalize his already-made decision to get involved in privateering. Beginning in late 1776 his letters to Jacob and Griffin increasingly inquired about “navigation,” “fishing,” and a seaborne “golden harvest.” These were coded references to privateer expeditions in which the family, including Nathanael as a discreet partner, owned shares.

The young general had found a way to participate in the wartime boom that met his standard of consistency “with the public good.” Honorable patriots throughout the colonies were daily making the same calculation to the benefit of their country, their families, and their pocketbooks. Surely now it was his turn.

T
he British occupation of Boston had been great for the Rhode Island economy. In the absence of competition from the larger port forty miles north, Providence became New England’s primary entry point for European goods imported via the West Indies and for commodities and foodstuffs brought in from elsewhere in the colonies, notably Philadelphia flour and southern tobacco. And because the British evacuation in March 1776 had left Boston in disrepair with a business community diminished by the departure of many wealthy loyalist families, Providence was able to retain its advantage through the remainder of that year—almost.

The December 6 landing of six thousand British troops at Newport sealed off Narragansett Bay and abruptly severed Providence’s route to the Atlantic Ocean. That area merchants endured and in some cases flourished during Newport’s subsequent three-year occupation testifies to their legendary ingenuity at overcoming trade obstacles. Boston’s long commercial dormancy had forced the development of land routes linking Providence to other New England ports, and new business relationships had sprung up throughout the region to replace those no longer centered in the Massachusetts capital. Merchants therefore were ready with alternate strategies after the Royal Navy imposed from its base in Newport a smothering blockade of the bay.