Patriot Pirates (9 page)

The ventures often commingled, as in an order for “linens and other European manufactures” he quietly placed with William Bingham in Martinique. Agreeing to split profits rather than pay him a commission, Morris had Bingham tuck the civilian wares into a cargo of muskets aboard a Continental sloop bound for Philadelphia. With Congress footing the shipping expenses, including if the vessel was sunk or captured, the inside arrangement was advantageous, borderline legal, and typical.

Morris presented such deals to Bingham and to Silas Deane through paired sets of instructions. He outlined government purchases in what he termed “political” letters, while his private purchases came in accompanying “commercial” letters. The high rate of interception at sea required that duplicates be sent on multiple vessels; captains were to throw them overboard in sacks weighted with cannonballs if threatened by enemy patrols.

Most letters to Deane never reached him—another instance of his consistent bad luck, since much of Morris’s communication with Bingham and various European merchants got through, a matter of mere chance which nevertheless stirred Deane’s paranoia about being ignored by colleagues in America. If he was not the right man “to solicit in your behalf,” he complained after an extended silence out of Philadelphia, “let me entreat you to tell me so and relieve me from an anxiety which is become so intolerable that my life is a burden.”

Certainly Morris, through letters sent if not received, tried to include Deane in “so fair an opportunity of making a large fortune since I have been conversant in the world.” Citing huge markups on “every kind of goods” and also on the ships that delivered them (by 1777 merchants and privateer investors, who sought to convert them to warships, were paying £4,000 for vessels that months earlier had gone for £1,000), he urged Deane’s “utmost exertion” in dispatching European cargoes “2/3 ds on account of Willing, Morris & Company and 1/3 d on your account.”

Lest his seriousness be unclear, Morris hinted at big paydays ahead thanks to the power of his position. “I shall be ever mindful of you while I hold a seat in the public councils and ever after in my private capacity.”

That tantalizing promise, combined with a growing confidence among European exporters that the profit potential of American markets more than compensated for the high risk of seizure by the Royal Navy, heightened Deane’s frustration at being unable fully to participate in the boom. Ever short of personal funds, he proposed a partnership to Morris whereby he would arrange shipments to America entirely on Morris’s account; when the cargo arrived, Deane’s one-third stake would be deducted from the proceeds before he took his share of the profits. It was a fair deal since, as Deane noted, “I shall have the principal charge of the affair here,” and Morris likely would have accepted it but for another lag in transatlantic mail that opened a major rift between them.

The financier had set up his younger brother as Willing & Morris’s representative in the French port of Nantes. Contrary to Robert’s fond view that his brother was merely “frolicksome,” Tom Morris, apart from his financial ineptitude, was known to drink and whore “at least twenty-two hours of every twenty-four.” Deane, when Robert requested an honest report of his brother’s behavior, was wary that “men in such cases are prone to be offended” by unpleasant truths, in this case the consensus opinion that Tom was one of “the lowest reptiles of human society.”

Unfortunately Deane’s discreet hint that “pleasure has got too strong hold of him” took six months to reach Philadelphia. In the interim Robert appointed his brother “Superintending Agent” for the Committee of Secret Correspondence, a post empowering him to arrange government arms deals and to supervise privateer prizes once French ports began receiving them. Tom’s slide into deeper debauchery soon forced Deane and Franklin to petition for his dismissal, a recommendation Congress adopted in a public pronouncement that left Robert, having not yet received Deane’s gentle warning of Tom’s decline, shocked and humiliated.

At once he terminated his friendship with Deane on grounds of betrayal and maintained the estrangement through 1777, until testaments of Tom’s dissolution poured in from so many quarters that he could no longer deny their truth. Tom died of alcoholism in January 1778. John Paul Jones, in Nantes refitting his Continental sloop, honored him with a thirteen-gun salute. But by then Robert had loudly renounced all ties to his brother (“the worthless wretch”) in order to preserve his own reputation. He would do the same with Deane in time.

In late 1777 Deane learned from a months-old newspaper that his wife Elizabeth had died in Connecticut. She was the correspondent to whom he’d expressed his hopes and fears most candidly. Moreover, losing connection to her aristocratic family further spurred his quest for the status wealth confers, a quest driven as well by concerns about supporting his son and by glittery reports from home that his younger brothers Barnabas and Simeon were making fortunes in private trade. As a result he grew more prone than ever to impulsive schemes of moneymaking and war meddling, schemes that in addition to dabbling in privateers included speculation in the London stock market on the basis of war headlines from America and, most bizarrely, backing an attempt to burn down the Royal Navy shipyards in Portsmouth, England.

Deane’s cohort in these ventures was a thirty-three-year-old American expatriate named Edward Bancroft. A member of British science’s Royal Society, Bancroft was a physician, a botanist of tropical plants specializing in natural poisons, and an expert in the chemistry of dyes. Like Deane’s garrulous French partner, Beaumarchais, he enjoyed money and luxury. Unlike Beaumarchais, he was indifferent to American independence, a frame of mind which freed him to play both sides of the conflict with astonishing facility.

Sixty years after the Revolution it would emerge that Bancroft was a British spy. Purely in it for the money (he received a lifetime pension of £500 a year for his services), he tracked the secret negotiations between France and America under the pseudonym “Edward Edwards.” He befriended John Paul Jones when the captain was feted in France after his great victory over HMS
Serapis
in 1779, and as Franklin’s personal secretary he had access to the old diplomat’s correspondence. But Deane was his most valuable asset.

A double agent, Bancroft passed British secrets to the commissioners in Paris almost as often as he passed their secrets to London; much was deliberate misinformation meant to plant mistrust between the Americans and French, but some was accurate and helpful, such as his warnings about Royal Navy deployments outside French ports to intercept supply ships and privateers. His British spymasters regularly opened his mail out of suspicion that he was double-crossing them, and though George III had purchased his allegiance, the king called him “entirely an American” and held that “no other faith can be placed in his intelligence but that it suits his private views.” Bancroft’s countrymen, on the other hand, trusted him completely. The Committee of Secret Correspondence even had suggested him as a desirable overseas contact in its original orders to Deane.

By coincidence, Deane’s first job after college had been to tutor the young man, so their rapport was fast renewed. Bancroft instantly grasped his former teacher’s value as a source, and volunteered to be his interpreter in meetings with Beaumarchais and French officials. Thus he learned about the ruse of Hortalez & Company and about Vergennes’s clandestine support of America, information he promptly gave the British ambassador to France, David Murray, Lord Stormont.

Vergennes’s subsequent denials of collusion to Stormont in the face of detailed evidence gathered by Bancroft mirrored those of French authorities in the West Indies disputing the presence of American ships in their harbors. The denials were patently barefaced and hollow, yet there was little Britain could do beyond issue threats it couldn’t carry out.

Before long Deane and Bancroft were addressing one another as “my dear friend.” Together they imbibed the Parisian nightlife and chased every type of financial gambit from real estate to privateers in “an indissoluble partnership in infamy launched on a sea of claret.” Deane’s esteem for his American friend wasn’t unreserved, however. “Doctor Bancroft has been of very great service to me,” he wrote in December 1776, “but it costs something.”

Though he questioned the speed with which Bancroft had cultivated his trust, their dealings increased as Deane’s diplomatic chores were taken over by Franklin and his ties to Morris deteriorated due to distance and misunderstanding. By the end of 1777 Bancroft was his primary confidant and business partner, and any doubts he’d had about the man’s integrity had yielded to blind dependency.

Historians have speculated that Franklin knew Bancroft was crooked and that he retained him as secretary on the sly bet that information leaked to Britain would compel the French foreign ministry to hurry up and tie the knot with America. His word on the subject was typically blithe. “If I was sure, therefore, that my
valet de place
was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if for other reasons, I liked him.”

Edward Bancroft was brilliant, charming, ambitious, and lethal. The expatriate American scientist was Silas Deane’s closest confidante in Paris. When Deane wrote in 1776 that Bancroft’s friendship “costs something,” he had no idea how much.

Deane’s relationship with Bancroft ran on similar lines: affection trumped suspicion. They were friends, and when Deane’s career later collapsed Bancroft alone stood by him, supporting him emotionally and financially in what would seem an anomaly in a spy’s usual relationship with his victim but which squares with Bancroft’s oddly humane approach to betrayal. Though a cynical manipulator, he cared for Deane even as he exploited him; cared for him even as, evidence suggests, he plotted his murder.

M
eanwhile young William Bingham was having a good war on Martinique. A bustling way station for France’s Caribbean and South American trade, the island, located three hundred miles north of Venezuela, was a placid backwater compared to the political hotbed of Paris. His official reception there in July 1776 had carried none of the cautious diffidence Vergennes had shown Deane three months earlier. Indeed, the community’s support for America was evident even before Bingham’s vessel,
Reprisal
, dropped anchor.

Its captain, Lambert Wickes, carried a bitter grudge. A month earlier in Rhode Island, he and his younger brother Richard had helped unload more than a hundred barrels of gunpowder off a stranded American blockade-runner. As British longboats approached, the Americans had abandoned ship after furling fifty pounds of powder inside a canvas sail, creating a time-delay fuse, which they lighted near the vessel’s remaining cargo of unloaded ammunition. Redcoats from two of the longboats “soon boarded her; one was close under stern, the others very near. Those on board had given three cheers and fired their arms after our people when the fire took effect on the powder and sent 30 to 40 of them into the air.” The transport was blown to bits. Body parts and debris rained down on the water. In horrified rage the British frigate standing offshore fired several volleys after the fleeing Americans. These were ineffectual save for one shot that pierced Richard Wickes “through the arm and body” and killed him instantly. Lambert wrote their family, “I have lost a dear brother and a good officer which I know not how to replace.”

He got a chance to settle the score while bringing Bingham into Martinique’s port of Saint-Pierre. After a Royal Navy sloop approached to inspect
Reprisal
, Wickes lowered a dory to put Bingham ashore and then wheeled about to bring his guns to bear. “He struck us three or four times,” the captain of HMS
Shark
reported, “one of which came through the quarter and wounded a marine with the splinter.” People onshore flocked to watch the battle. They cheered when the fort overlooking the harbor opened fire on
Shark
and sent a cannonball through its sails, forcing it to withdraw.

Bingham watched wide-eyed as Wickes was “complimented and caressed beyond measure” by the crowd when
Reprisal
docked. He described his own feelings with the same precision he would bring to his job as congressional agent. “Never did I feel the sensation of joy in a more lively degree.” He sent
Reprisal
home with a mixed load of weapons for Congress and housewares for Willing & Morris. The transaction earned him £742 and set him on course to become, on his return to Philadelphia four years later, one of the richest men in America at age twenty-eight.

Success didn’t come easy. Bingham was constantly hampered by his government’s laxness in sending commodities to exchange for military supplies, repay loans, and cover his expenses. Making matters worse, Congress maintained a head-in-the-sand blindness to the pressure its fiscal irresponsibility placed on its agents, at one point abdicating entirely and telling him to send his overdue bills to the commissioners in France. Since they were strapped themselves, this prompted Franklin’s demand that “a stop be put” to Bingham’s attempt “to draw upon me at pleasure to support his credit under the idea of its being necessary to do so for the honor of Congress.”