Conceived in Liberty (265 page)

Fortunately, the victory at Yorktown made Vergennes forget about betraying American independence. Peace negotiations began at the end of March 1782, as Shelburne sent the Scottish merchant and former Virginian Richard Oswald to France to confer with Franklin. Franklin secretly urged the sympathetic Oswald to cede Canada to the United States, a prospect France strongly opposed. But despite promises of immediate British recognition of their independence, the Americans steadfastly refused to betray their French ally by concluding a separate peace. Furthermore, Admiral Rodney’s defeat of de Grasse’s French fleet in West Indian waters in mid-April softened French demands and brought French and American goals closer into line.

On July 1,1782, Lord Rockingham died. His natural successor as prime minister was the charismatic Charles James Fox, the new leader of the
Whig party. But King George, who could not abide the strongly liberal Fox, instead chose Shelburne, and Fox and the Whigs went into opposition. Shelburne and his emissary Oswald were now in full charge of peace negotiations.

Fox had urged the ministry to grant American independence as a preliminary to the body of negotiations. By thus recognizing the United States unequivocally, a split might be created in the Franco-American alliance. For similar reasons, the wily Vergennes tried to delay such an immediate recognition of American independence; and it was John Jay who realized this while Franklin was being bemused—to put it kindly—by France. Both Jay and Franklin, however, quickly caved in on their demand for advance recognition of independence before negotiations, a recognition that Shelburne had finally been prepared to grant by early September. Shelburne was even willing to accept the American terms for freedom of fishing in Newfoundland. Had Jay and Franklin held firm, independence would have been gained on the spot with none of the American concessions that were eventually imposed. John Adams, indeed, was so incensed at the retreat by Jay and Franklin on advance recognition that he thought seriously of resigning from the peace commission.

Serious divergences between the allies also arose over America’s western boundary. Spain made clear to Jay its claim to the area of the Southwest east of the Mississippi, as well as its opposition to any American pretensions north of the Ohio, which it saw as more cogently in British or even Indian hands. France supported Spain’s position, and, what is more, it privately advised the British that it did not agree to America’s independent claims to the fisheries or to the lands around the Mississippi or north of the Ohio. It was these hints of French opposition that panicked Jay into abandoning the advance independence clause in order to launch peace negotiations rapidly. As a result, Jay and Franklin were naively content with Oswald’s authorization of September 19 to treat with the commissioners of the “thirteen United States” and to accept independence as part of the treaty. But this was not ironclad recognition of American independence prior to and separate from the treaty. Moreover, Britain was further emboldened at the peace table by the relief of the French and allied siege of Gibraltar.

With Franklin’s support, Jay submitted a preliminary draft treaty to the British, which included Franklin’s previous conditions plus freedom of navigation on the Mississippi. The latter clause was tied to a reciprocal freedom of trade for American shipping and commerce throughout the British Empire. Furthermore, American boundaries were supposed to include the Toronto peninsula of Canada as well as the Southwest down to the thirty-first parallel. They had not relinquished claims to Canada in order to push for British acquiescence to America’s attempt to grab the
lands in the West. For its part, Britain felt strengthened by the victory at Gibraltar, and raised the question of compensation of American Tories, as well as payment by the U.S. government of prewar private American debts to British creditors. Britain also let fall the idea of American trade obeying Britain’s own navigation act.

At the end of October, a veritable flurry of negotiations took place, negotiations which Jay, Adams, and Franklin, in defiance of their Congressional instructions, conducted totally without consulting Vergennes, and indeed against his advice to moderate their presumptuous demands for territory and fishing rights.

The peace treaty between the United States and Great Britain—one highly favorable for the U.S.—was tentatively signed between the American and British negotiators on November 5, 1782. After some weakening of American fishing rights in Newfoundland, the final treaty was signed on November 30, and Franklin informed Vergennes of
this fait accompli.
The Frenchman’s reaction was surprisingly mild, and he was placated by Franklin’s reassurances that the French would have to conclude peace before the treaty could take effect. Probably Vergennes was relieved that America’s signing a separate peace served to discourage Spain from trying to continue the war until she could recapture the now safely British Gibraltar. Collapsing finances also made France eager for peace, and parallel French peace negotiations were by now almost finished in any case.

Gibraltar was the final sticking point for the peace treaties with France and Spain. Shelburne was actually willing to concede Gibraltar, and a deal began to materialize for exchanging it for French-held Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Santa Lucia in the West Indies. But news of the American treaty as well as the tenacious defense of Gibraltar began to stir up a war fever among the British public, who were especially resistant to yielding Gibraltar. Finally, the Spanish ambassador to Paris, Pedro Aranda, decidedly unenthusiastic about a strong British presence in the West Indies, accepted a British offer of Minorca and East and West Florida; in turn, the Spanish sadly relinquished Gibraltar. All the obstacles to a general peace were now over, and both the Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish preliminary peace treaties were signed on January 20, 1783. A general armistice was proclaimed which included the Netherlands, even though a peace treaty with the Dutch had not yet been signed.

In February, Fox formed a coalition with his old enemy, Lord North, who was also in opposition, and together they pulled down the Shelburne ministry. A Fox-North coalition ministry was formed in early April, with both men as secretaries of state while the Whig Duke of Portland was the front man as ineffectual prime minister. This maneuver to bring the Whigs back to power proved to be tactically shrewd, but it was strategically
disastrous to Fox and the Whigs. Fox was never able to explain this unprincipled left-right coalition to his followers, and his radical mass base was split grievously and ultimately crushed as a result. Fox tried to reopen peace negotiations by insisting on a permanent military alliance between Britain and the U.S., but the Americans countered with their own demands for free trade, the protection of neutrals’ rights and other concessions. The peace treaty was conclusively signed between the United States, France and her allies, and Great Britain on September 3, 1783, with no change made from the 1782 Anglo-American draft.

This Treaty of Paris featured the following provisions: (1) U.S. independence was recognized; (2) hostilities were to cease and all British land and sea forces were to be evacuated “with all convenient speed”; (3) the United States was granted all the lands north of the Ohio River up to its present northern boundary, and the territory southward to thirty-one degrees south; (4) the Americans were given the right to fish, as they had during the colonial period, off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, but the clause granting them the “liberty” to dry and cure the fish on the coast was ambiguous and proved a source of trouble for many decades; (5) Congress would recommend to the state legislatures to restore all the rights and confiscated estates of Tories—a clause having no binding effect on the states; (6) no future confiscation or other action would be taken against Tories, and imprisoned Tories were to be set free immediately; (7) all debts between citizens of either country were to meet “no lawful impediment” to repayment; and (8) the navigation of the Mississippi would be free to both countries (the U.S. and Great Britain)—a meaningless clause, since Spain effectively controlled that river.

Congress, knowing full well that the Tory clause could be violated with impunity and that France was already placated, easily ratified the preliminary treaty on April 15, and unanimously ratified the final treaty on January 14, 1784, final ratifications being exchanged on May 12. The United States of America had at last definitely won their revolutionary war: they were now a new nation.

On December 14, in accordance with the treaty, the British troops completed their evacuation of New York, taking with them 7,000 Tories, making a huge total of 100,000 Tories who had fled America for Europe or Canada. George Washington ceremonially entered New York City with Gov. George Clinton, took leave of his officers at Fraunces’ Tavern, and resigned his commission as commander-in-chief before Congress on December 23.

England’s cavalier cession to the United States of the entire uncon-quered western lands was part of her maneuvers against France and Spain and was, of course, a gross betrayal of England’s Indian allies. The failure
of the United States to abide by the spirit of the Tory clause gave Great Britain the excuse to revoke, in effect, the cession of the Ohio lands, and to maintain its military garrisons intact. This appeased and strengthened Britain’s Indian friends and preserved Indian control of the Ohio lands while Spain and its allied Indians threatened to contest the Southwest.

And so the revolutionary United States of America threw off the British yoke and won the first successful war of national liberation against western imperialism. Many factors entered into the victory, but the most important was the firm support for the war by the great majority of the American people. It was that support which harassed, enveloped, and finally destroyed the proud British armies come to conquer and occupy in the name of traditionally legitimate government. It was a revolution fueled by fervent belief in libertarian natural rights ideology and by a cumulative reaction to growing British infringement on those rights, political, constitutional, and economic. Its victory was essentially a people’s victory, of guerrilla strategy in its broadest sense: not only of the small, mobile guerrilla bands of the Marions and the Sumters, but also of ephemeral and suddenly appearing militia who largely fought in their own neighborhoods and on their own terrain.

George Washington, the highly touted “Father of His Country,” had a military impact that was negligible or even negative. Setting aside York-town—which Washington was slow to grasp and which was the siege of a finally routed army whose destruction had been prepared for months by Greene and Lafayette, and whose finish was more of a French affair— Washington won only a single victory among his many battles: Trenton-Princeton, and that was precisely the only battle where Washington deigned to stoop to guerrilla tactics. The rest of the time, before and after Trenton, Washington was far too much the orthodox military leader yearning for a Prussian-style State army and a conventional victory in frontal confrontation. Hence his string of defeats and disasters in the New York and the Pennsylvania campaigns. The military victories in the war belonged to others: to Gates, to Morgan, to Greene, all of whom won by basically guerrilla strategy and tactics, and most of whom were either disgraced or placed in limbo by the jealous Washington. Not only did Washington fail to understand the purely military aspects of a people’s revolutionary war, but he also failed to grasp the importance of the free and inspired individual soldier in such a war, and hence he wrecked morale and brought about mutinies by his Prussian discipline. The war was actually won despite Washington rather than because of him. To a large extent, finally, it was the genius whom he broke and discredited—the almost forgotten Charles Lee—who discerned the true nature of a revolutionary
war and the way that it had to be won. The revolution was won because Lee’s type of war was able to set aside the kind of war that Washington tried—but failed—to create. As Shy writes:

Intellectual that he was, Lee tried to see the Revolution as a consistent whole, with every aspect in rational harmony with every other. It was a fight by free men for their natural rights. Neither the fighters nor the cause were suited to the military techniques of despotism—the linear tactics, the rigid discipline, the long enlistments, the strict separation of the army from civic life that marked Frederick’s Prussia. Lee envisioned a popular war of mass resistance.... He sought a war that would use the new light infantry tactics already in vogue among the military avant-garde in Europe, the same tactics the free men at Lexington and Concord had instinctively employed. Such men could not be successfully hammered into goose-stepping automatons and made to fire by platoons, but properly trained and employed, they could not be defeated.

Nathanael Greene’s campaign in the South... [was] to confirm Lee’s prophetic insight. But to Washington—a practical man not given to theorizing —this was all madness. He never seriously considered resorting to a war of guerrilla bands drawn from the militia. He would have recoiled with horror from such an idea.
*

*
Precisely
how
wicked, even Lee did not know. Cecil Currey has recently discovered not only that Franklin was deeply involved in the Morris-Deane embezzlements, but also that he served throughout his wartime stay in Paris as a conscious secret agent of Great Britain (code number 72 in the British intelligence archives). During the peace negotiations, he shifted to a pro-French role, probably related to his own speculations in western lands. Cecil B. Currey,
Code Number 72/Ben Franklin: Patriot or Spy?
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).

*
Shy, “Charles Lee,” p. 47.