Patriot Pirates (26 page)

Jones died in France in 1792 full of resentment at the ingratitude of his country. More than a century later his remains were brought with an escort of warships to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where his grave today is a national shrine. Manley, loathed by Jones but certainly his equal in furthering the American cause, died in Boston in 1793. The location of his grave is unknown.

Eleven

It’s such a busy road. Everyone fighting to get ahead, pushing, shoving, using their elbows and feet, every man for himself and anyone who gets in the way is trampled in the crush. That’s what you have to do. Personally, I’ve given up on it.

—Beaumarchais,
The Marriage of Figaro,
1784

A
fter four years of excelling at what he called “the art of uniting war and commerce,” William Bingham was anxious to leave Martinique and return home to Philadelphia. The signing of the Franco-American alliance had wrecked the island’s status as a haven for arms dealers and privateers. Its cloak of neutrality had fallen away. No longer were French bills of lading or the tricolor flag a defense against Royal Navy attack.

The autonomy with which Bingham had operated to such success made the twenty-eight-year-old coolly self-certain in communications with his superiors. When Benjamin Franklin was slow in sending him details of the French alliance, he scolded the elderly diplomat. “I humbly think I should be made acquainted with its contents. As agent for the United States of America in the West Indies, every circumstance that regards the country I represent and that forms a subject of controversy immediately falls under my notice and attention.”

His letters to Congress were likewise sharp with pique over its outstanding debt to him of more than $50,000 in hard currency for public advances he’d made out of pocket. In frustration, he tried to bill the Paris commissioners instead. Franklin’s pointed silence brought an icy note from the young man. “I am unhappy to find that I am deprived of any answers to the numerous letters I have done myself the honor of writing you.”

The brief stopover at Martinique of John Jay, on his way to Spain in 1779, persuaded the new ambassador that “our agent here is in high estimation and has done his duty faithfully.” Jay convinced Congress to appropriate £5,000 “to discharge in part the debt due to the said William Bingham.” Even so, with the island’s business squelched by British–French clashes outside its harbor, Bingham didn’t wait for an official release from Congress. Claiming “the state of my health absolutely requires it,” he declared his duties “happily completed” and sailed for America at the turn of the year.

Before departing he composed a long report to Congress summarizing his activities. He confidently listed “critical” achievements in buying arms and outfitting privateers. Not only did they aggravate the British, they gave Martinique’s military governor a perception of “reciprocal injuries” committed by Britain against French sovereignty. This provoked, Bingham wrote, “the ardent desire with which military men pant after war, and frequently inclined him to wink at my schemes.”

He noted the money owed him (“a very large sum”) and appealed for “justice towards a person who has been faithfully devoted to the public service.” Knowing Congress’s poor record of remunerating its agents, he closed with a resigned, almost cynical comment. “If I have undertaken a task beyond my abilities to accomplish I cannot expect to be honored with public approbation, which invariable in its decisions never consults anything but its own advantage. In that case, I shall be more afflicted than surprised.”

He left at the right time. Dutch-owned St. Eustatius soon became, in a perfect reprise of Parliament’s earlier denunciations of Martinique, the region’s premier “nest of outlaws selling provisions, clothing, and all naval and warlike stores to the rebels and enemies of Britain.” Some 235 American vessels had visited Martinique in 1777. In 1779, seven to ten arrived every day at St. Eustatius along with regular convoys of French merchant ships unable to approach the blockaded Martinique. The number of privateers launched from the American mainland more than doubled in the same period, with St. Eustatius now the handiest place in the West Indies to sell their prizes and refit.

In a vengeful rage, a British assault fleet under Admiral Rodney struck the island in February 1781, plundering its wealth and brutalizing its people, especially its established community of Jewish merchants and their families. Reports of the atrocities drew condemnation from British residents at nearby St. Kitts, sparked violent riots in Amsterdam, and fueled humanitarian protests in London. Petitions against Rodney circulated in Parliament and legal claims in excess of £300,000 were lodged against him by British merchants, whose goods his men had indiscriminately seized along with those belonging to other nations friendly and hostile.

Later in 1781, the incident had a profound strategic effect on the ongoing war in America. Preoccupied with protecting a huge convoy carrying to Britain the loot from St. Eustatius, much of it belonging to him, Rodney was derelict in intercepting the fleet of Admiral de Grasse on its way from the West Indies to Virginia, “where,” Rodney himself predicted, “I am persuaded the French intend making their grand effort.” That effort was at Yorktown, of course.

Bingham had been home for more than a year by then. Immediately on arrival he’d begun pressuring the person most in position to get Congress to pay up. Robert Morris had invested with him in privateers and trade ships throughout Bingham’s stint on Martinique, a mutually profitable partnership that nonetheless had concluded with an unresolved debt from Morris to Bingham of £13,000. Bingham’s habit of often bringing it up in his letters from Martinique had contributed to the testiness that entered their mentor–protégé relationship as the younger man grew in financial stature.

Engaged in myriad private deals on both sides of the Atlantic, Morris often committed his personal assets to expedite needed government purchases. This tangled overextension had been partly responsible for his difficulty in paying Bingham. There was also the practical challenge of slipping remittances past Royal Navy patrols. “You recollect,” he wrote the agent at one point, “that I sent the schooner
Hope
to your address for the purpose of discharging part of this debt out of her cargo, but she was unluckily taken. There are accidents I could neither foresee nor prevent. I do not, however, plead this as a reason why you should not be paid nor in excuse for delay of payment as you may suppose.”

United in Philadelphia, the men settled their accounts. Bingham next pushed Morris to back his claim against Congress. “You may well remember that the Committee of Secret Correspondence engaged the payment of my expenses and left any further compensation for my services to be settled at a future day.” Of the government funds due him, if he’d had use of them on Martinique, “I might have derived ten times the advantage that the advances to Congress will procure me.”

The argument was sound—but what most grabbed Morris’s attention was Bingham’s suggestion that only “a scrupulous attention to motives of delicacy” prevented him from enumerating still further monies owed. “Profitable private business,” he hinted, “enabled me to support a part of them.” Much of that business had been done in secret partnership with Morris. And given the climate of suspicion that now hung over all of Congress’s financial deliberations, airing it in public wouldn’t be good.

So Morris lobbied his colleagues on Bingham’s behalf, pressing arguments ranging from the high cost of living on Martinique to the shabby appearance that refusing to pay would give a government trying to bolster its credit after years of fiscal irresponsibility. In fitful installments each contentiously debated, Bingham received most of his money by mid-1783, during which time he’d married the daughter of Morris’s longtime partner Thomas Willing and parlayed his profits into a fortune in banking and land speculation that would become the largest in America.

He did endure one lingering irritation from the war years. The owners of
Pilgrim
, a Newburyport privateer whose capture of a cargo of flour he’d settled at Martinique in 1779, filed a lawsuit against him for $30,000 in unpaid prize money.

The legality of the capture had been in dispute at the time, and Bingham had credited the sale proceeds to Congress pending a proper ruling. By the time the vessel was proven to be British, the money had vanished in the thicket of wartime accounting. He was wealthy enough to fear the embarrassment of the lawsuit more than its cost, yet out of annoyance that Congress had reneged on an earlier promise to pay the owners, he fought it for more than twenty years, relenting only because he’d bought four million acres of land in New England and wanted no trouble with the Massachusetts court.

It was 1802 when Bingham’s lawyers finally settled the case with a compromise payment. He was abroad in Europe at the time, and two years later would die there at age fifty-two. He’d had little contact with Morris since 1798, when the former superintendent of finance had been imprisoned for defaulting on millions of dollars of debt.

Still driven to speculate at more than sixty years old, Morris had bet his fortune on massive land purchases across six states only to see it shrink to notes worth 15 cents on the dollar when the nation’s postwar economy stalled. Though Bingham had diversified his investments enough to withstand the recession, Morris’s collapse brought down many other of Philadelphia’s wealthiest men who’d been in partnership with him, a consequence as distressing to Morris as his own ruin.

Driven to near madness, the old man hid from gun-wielding creditors in the top floor of his mansion. “If ever I could have had a previous idea of such things happening to me, I would sooner have wheeled oysters all my days.” Going to jail was almost a relief, though he felt, he said, “like an intruder” in the crowded cell to which he was initially assigned, “sleeping in other people’s beds and sitting in other people’s rooms.” Always calculating, he clucked at the irony of his situation. “If my creditors were wise for their own sakes, they would not keep me idle here, when if I had my liberty I might work efficiently for their benefit.” He was released three-and-a-half years later.

In the Revolution’s immediate aftermath there were some commentators who ranked Morris at a level with Washington and Franklin. Beyond his efforts to finance the war, he’d led the way in persuading Congress to repay people and institutions for debts incurred in the cause. “That the payments of debts may be expensive, it is infinitely more expensive to withhold the payment,” he argued. “The former is the expense of money, but the latter involves the destruction of that source from which money can be derived when all other sources fail. That source is public credit. The country in which it may with greatest ease be established and preserved is America, and America is the country which most stands in need of it.”

Congress’s determination to pay its bills led to its demand of the often recalcitrant colonies to pay federal taxes. As Morris understood (and as Hamilton, his philosophical heir, put into practice in creating the Bank of the United States in 1791), nationalizing the debt and insisting on its payment would help unify the country behind a central government. “A public debt, supported by public revenue, will prove the strongest cement to keep the confederacy together,” Morris wrote.

One of Morris’s biographers suggested “fame looks acidly on financial failure” to explain the irony of a former titan living out his last days so obscure and downtrodden. Morris would have concurred. “Large fortunes do not always bring happiness,” he cautioned his daughter shortly before his death in 1806. “Misery to the possessor is frequently the result.”

Words he’d earlier written to Franklin summarize his legacy best. “There is a period in the progress of things, a crisis between the ardor of enthusiasm and the authority of law, when much skill and management are necessary to those who are charged with administering the affairs of a nation.”

Such a crisis had gripped America during the years of violent chaos that followed the Declaration of Independence. In that period Morris’s pecuniary improvisations helped his nation triumph. Though not for want of trying, they didn’t do the same for him.

S
ilas Deane died in Britain in 1789. Like Morris, he was broke—but unlike Morris he wasn’t so much forgotten as willfully purged from the Revolution’s honor roll of contributors.

After his bitter grilling before Congress in 1779–80, he’d returned to France in the naïve hope that he could organize his accounts sufficiently to persuade his antagonists in the Lee–Adams camp of the integrity of his public service and the justice of his claims for compensation. Rumored in America to have amassed a fortune (Nathanael Greene heard he’d founded “the greatest commercial house in Europe”), Deane learned on arriving in Paris of the total loss of his last $50,000 left with Edward Bancroft and others to invest in his absence. On the heels of this blow came the slow realization that Congress had no intention of paying him any money. “I can neither think nor write without dwelling on it. It lies down with me at night. It rises with me in the morning. I take up my pen and resolve not to write about it, but before a page is written I have referred to it.”

Disillusioned and vulnerable, Deane was tempted by promises, proffered through Bancroft, of a favored business relationship with the British government if the colonies rejoined the empire. He agreed to his friend’s request for a series of letters expressing his “private judgment” of the benefits of reconciliation. Pleased by Deane’s assessment that independence would prove “a curse instead of a blessing,” Bancroft’s spymasters in London arranged for the letters to fall into American hands in hopes their publication might soften the resistance.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. The letters appeared in a New York newspaper just as the nation was celebrating its monumental victory at Yorktown. Deane was vilified throughout the colonies with “the same infamy,” wrote James Madison, “as that of his friend Arnold.” His few remaining friends had no choice but to denounce him, though some privately conceded that he “writes many serious truths however unwilling we may be to admit them.”

The reaction stunned Deane. “Have I asserted anything for fact which is not such? I have said that it was not friendship for us, or regard for the liberties of mankind, which induced France to declare in favor of our independency, but solely to improve the favorable moment for humbling an ancient rival and enemy.”