Patriot Pirates (8 page)

Though most of the applicants were vainglorious ne’er-do-wells seeking high commands to suit their egos, Deane, in taking up the idea, believed much of their braggadocio. A colleague in America sniped that he was “unable to say nay to any Frenchman who called himself count or chevalier.” Deane went so far as to affront Congress with a suggestion that placing all its forces under the command of a proven foreigner might “give character and credit to your military, and strike perhaps a greater panic in our enemies.” Its military detriment aside, however, his recruitment of foreign officers ingratiated him with influential European families (“the best ones of their class”) at a time when he had little else to offer.

Marquis de Lafayette, who joined the Americans through Deane’s auspices in 1777, was one success, but by and large the foreigners were dead weight and aroused only annoyance when they appeared at Washington’s headquarters waving generals’ commissions authorized by an American civilian a world away in Europe. “Harassed to death with applications,” Deane signed up almost twenty of these poseurs that fall. He surmised that their reception was chilly but believed his dire situation warranted the inconvenience back home. “I have made one excuse after another until my invention is exhausted.” He had to grant favors if he expected to obtain them. Informing Congress of one officer he accepted in November while negotiating a shipment of two hundred brass cannon, he acknowledged bashfully, “I hope the terms I have made with him will not be thought exorbitant, as he was the principal means of engaging the stores.”

Privateering posed another way of attracting support. From his earliest days in France, Deane had been beseeched by “persons of the first property” to license private warships to seize British prizes and sell them in America. (Neutrality agreements forbade French ports from receiving prizes.) Against a backdrop of worsening war news—in early fall the Continentals were driven at great loss from Long Island and Manhattan, and by November important bastions at Fort Lee and Fort Washington had been overrun by the British, setbacks Deane downplayed in Paris as “skirmish rather than battle”—a bright spot was the success of the privateers. Europeans following the war with intense interest agreed that “what is certain on the side of the Americans is their activity at sea and the ships of the crown they are capturing.”

Silas Deane, shown here at the height of his prestige as a freewheeling diplomat-entrepreneur in Paris, dabbled in politics, privateering, and anti-British terrorism. His compulsive leaps from deal to deal left him with many enemies and few friends when his fortunes took a fall.

With the same visions of wealth that dazzled the New Englanders, European shipowners offered Deane a piece of their privateering profits in exchange for his signature, but he was reluctant to act on his own authority. In frantic letters to Congress he proposed a series of schemes such as fomenting native revolts in the British West Indies, recruiting disgruntled British fishermen on the Grand Banks, razing the Scottish port of Glasgow “by a single frigate,” and sending Deane “curious American productions” such as insect collections or “a few barrels of apples” as gifts for whichever “certain personage” he was trying to woo at the moment; for the French queen he suggested saddle horses since she was “fond of parade, and I believe wishes a war.”

His repeated requests for blank privateer commissions came across as another mad notion at first, but he was adamant about their strategic potential and their efficacy in forging partnerships with potentially helpful Europeans. “You may have any number of recruits in Europe for such ships,” he wrote his superiors excitedly, “and by sending out commissions have individuals join you in the adventure under your flag.” Yet as 1776 wound down, no commissions came.

Frustrated on every front, he appeared powerless and out of touch to his French hosts. Underscoring that impression was the lack of Congressional confirmation, four months after the fact, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Rumors of the document had reached Europe in August, yet without a copy in hand he had no basis to refashion his requests for military aid as coming “from the United Independent States of America” rather than an outlaw band of British rebels.

He appreciated the legal significance of the Declaration overseas as Congress did not, for it directly related to his hope of unleashing foreign privateers against Britain. The point had been brought home earlier that fall when a Massachusetts privateer working the eastern Atlantic had entered the Spanish port of Bilbao to put its captives ashore. Britain had immediately demanded the skipper, John Lee of Newburyport, be handed over as a pirate.

Deane had realized at once that an important precedent hung in the balance. A Spanish decision to uphold Lee’s commission would implicitly acknowledge American sovereignty. “If the reverse, the only ground on which the determination can go against the captain is that the United States of America or their Congress are not known in Europe otherwise than by common fame in newspapers.” Official acknowledgment was key because privateers sailing without a legitimate flag were plain criminals fit for hanging, a fate few mariners cared to risk.

He sought Vergennes’s help and again found him sympathetic for reasons purely in France’s interest. The foreign minister earlier had praised “the order issued by Congress to its shipowners to chase indiscriminately all English vessels in all parts of the world. The desire to make captures more easily may attract privateers in the European seas where the English are less on their guard.” Vergennes knew that Spain’s support of Captain Lee would encourage anti-British privateers (of any nationality) to seek shelter in the ports of continental Europe, making evasion from the Royal Navy easier and prosecution by British courts harder. And short of a French declaration of war, anything that undermined Britain’s effort to subdue the American uprising was fine by him.

When Spain indeed decided, at Vergennes’s behest, to protect Lee from British justice, Deane called it “striking proof of what I have so positively asserted of the good disposition of both these courts.” Coupled with the arrival in November of a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the decision led him to predict that local ports would spawn dozens of privateers once Congress supplied the commissions. “Hasten them out I pray you,” he implored in a letter of December 3. By then he’d learned enough about Old World treaties to understand their fragility. “This is a capital stroke and must bring on a war.” The war he sought was between Britain and France. Mutual mistrust was the tinder to which privateers might apply a spark, especially now that their right to lay up in harbors just across the English Channel had been publicly affirmed.

On the day Deane wrote that letter, Benjamin Franklin landed in France with instructions from Congress to head up the diplomatic mission with Deane and Arthur Lee as his co-commissioners. With a keener sense of the strength of America’s negotiating position, Franklin took an artful, more confident approach. He knew that France very much wanted an alliance with America and simply feared committing too soon lest the rebellion fail and Britain, bruised but intact, turn a vengeful eye on those who’d meddled in its affairs. He also knew the French objective of a diminished, defeated rival carried a nightmare alternative of Anglo-American reconciliation and Britain’s subsequent rebirth as an invigorated power.

Franklin dropped Deane’s hard-sell style and let silence and feigned ambivalence draw France into making a move. In his first meeting with Vergennes, he listed the advantages to France that would result from American independence before dangling the possibility of rapprochement with Britain “unless some powerful aid is given us or some strong diversion is made in our favor.” Moreover, France had better act quickly if it wanted to be America’s preferred trading partner. “The opportunity of securing all the advantages of that commerce, which in time will be immense, now presents itself. If neglected, it may never return.”

Later he played the same angle when it became evident that British spies were passing to London inside information of his activities in Paris. He made no effort to root them out or avoid them, preferring to foster, for French consumption, an impression of collusion and potentially warming relations between the rebel leadership and the crown.

Such subtlety was part of Franklin’s character as it emphatically was not of Deane’s. At seventy, Franklin was not a man in a hurry. His wry, haphazard style exasperated his colleagues but confounded his foes. His seeming indifference to fashion and fame—all catnip to Deane—enchanted the French public and made him the perfect foil to the sophisticated, crafty Vergennes. “I rise at six, write until seven, dress and breakfast by eight,” Deane wrote, then work “until nine, then sup and go to bed by eleven.” Franklin would never have tolerated such an arduous schedule. But then, he was integral to American independence and French geopolitical gamesmanship whereas Deane was merely useful.

Franklin would shrewdly manipulate tensions between France and Britain to an eventual breaking point in 1778. His co-commissioner Arthur Lee, disliked by everyone who worked with him in Paris, skulked on the sidelines of the negotiations hatching theories of his colleagues’ financial skullduggery that Franklin attributed to Lee’s outright insanity, a diagnosis Deane thought “very charitable” given “the malignity of his heart.”

Meanwhile Deane concentrated on supply operations and the gathering presence in local waters of privateers emboldened, as Vergennes had foreseen, by Spain’s support of Captain Lee. He always had enjoyed socializing with seamen and shipowners. Now he happily immersed himself in maritime matters, which was where the money flowed with its rewards, temptations, and taint.

I
n May 1776 a transport flying Spanish colors had been boarded by patriots in Delaware Bay and found to carry strongboxes containing $14,000. The Maryland captain informed his colony’s leadership that the boxes “are marked W M from whence he thinks they belong to Willing & Morris, and that there may be more money on board.”

Willing, Morris & Company was a Philadelphia merchant house named for its founder, Thomas Willing, and for Robert Morris, the Liverpool-born financial wizard Willing had plucked at age twenty from the counting room and made partner in 1754. Concealing its money in the hold of a foreign ship caused no great surprise. The firm was known to engage in extensive trade on behalf of Congress, one-fourth of whose total cash disbursements between 1775 and 1777 went to one company—Willing & Morris. No one expected the breadth of that trade to be limited by the fact that Morris ran Congress’s procurement efforts through the Secret Committee, negotiating with himself in many transactions. People might mutter about conflicts of interest, but they accepted them as standard procedure.

Morris’s positive dealings with British merchants before the war had dampened his zeal for rebellion. Believing reconciliation still to be worthwhile, he’d voted against the Declaration of Independence but signed it once it was passed, a moment of hesitancy that neither his fellow congressmen nor his Pennsylvania constituents held against him. His political ambivalence later served him well when clear-eyed, unpopular measures were required to counter America’s wartime economic tailspin.

Congress, unable to secure large loans from foreign governments or to coerce the thirteen states to contribute significant funds to the national effort, had no way to raise revenue except by issuing more and more currency, a short-term remedy that caused the Continental dollar to lose 97 percent of its value by 1779. Bucking the same clamorous tide for fiscal expansion that had propelled the Revolution from the start, Morris pushed Congress to quit printing paper money, to abandon price controls and laws artificially upholding currency values, to demand that states contribute tax revenues to Congress, and to charter a centralized institution, the Bank of North America, to make loans and manage debt on a stringent, hard-money basis.

But while his pragmatism may have helped him make difficult policy decisions, it left an impression of flexible allegiances that would hurt him in the future. Morris was candid about preferring traditional European mercantilism to the unruly markets of the American democracy. He called common folk “vulgar” and “misguided,” and based his political and economic philosophy on belief that “the interests of moneyed men” went “hand in hand” with the public good. And despite personally funding decisive military campaigns at Princeton in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, he never accepted a government position without first stipulating that it not interfere with his private business.

As for privateering, whose exploding popularity he observed as a member of Congress’s Marine Committee, his opinion was mixed only insofar as it pertained to his own involvement. He extolled privateering’s strategic and commercial potential while refraining from participating out of loyalty to former business partners. Having enjoyed, he wrote Deane in September 1776, “extensive connections and dealings with many worthy men in England,” Morris “could not consent to take any part of their property because the government has seized mine.” Instead he made money on private trade and from commissions earned organizing supply voyages for Congress.