Authors: Robert H. Patton
Admiralty courts in Britain, Antigua, Halifax, and British-held New York were flooded with applications for privateer commissions and letters of marque. Estimates of the war’s total number range as high as 2,600, with New York’s Tories leading the way in vengeful expeditions against the patriots who’d so disrupted their lives. Though “in no way authorized to run down ships of other powers,” the abundance of armed vessels on the prowl for plunder vastly increased the likelihood, as Ambassador de Noailles fretfully put it, of “hostility toward neutral flags.”
The degree to which the Atlantic now teemed with international vessels at cross-purposes of trade and predation is evident in an amazed report from a loyalist skipper sailing in convoy from Bermuda to Barbados later that spring. Sighting more than 150 ships along the way, he found the sea “alive with privateers” trying to pick off straggling transports like wolves circling an animal herd. “One son of a bitch ran amongst us but was too small to attack our convoy.”
A British slave ship,
Derby
, was similarly beset as it entered West Indian waters, no sooner driving one off one marauder than finding itself targeted by another. The vessel’s hard voyage (its first mate reported leaving Nigeria “with 349 slaves, and buried ninety and ten white men on the passage”) ended with capture near Barbados by two American privateers,
Fly
and
St. Peter
.
The ship and its human cargo were sold “at Martinico” under Bingham’s direction. Island officials skimmed a few slaves for themselves in what had become a customary payoff—though the agent was said to be “dissatisfied at their taking so many,” because, he told a colleague, “he should not be paid for any of them.” After
Derby
’s settlement, some of
St. Peter
’s men used their prize money to purchase the vessel and convert it to their own privateer commissioned, of course, by Bingham.
M
arquis de Lafayette, writing from shipboard en route to America in May 1777, acknowledged the heightened perils of sea travel in a letter to his wife. “At present we are in some danger because we risk being attacked by English vessels.” But once ashore, he assured her, “I shall be in perfect safety. The post of general officer has always been regarded as a warrant for long life. Ask any of the French generals of which there are so many.”
Meanwhile in Europe the shoe was on the other foot when it came to privateers. In 1776 the French foreign ministry had shrugged off British complaints about American “pirates” with barely concealed amusement. “Shall we say they are pirates? They do not commit any acts of piracy against us.” But by the fall of 1777, Ambassador de Noailles was regularly sending the admiralty furious accounts of British privateers harassing French transports.
The admiralty, to say the least, was not quick with sympathy. “We may venture to assure you that none of the vessels complained of are ships belonging to His Majesty. There is great reason to believe they were some of the piratical vessels fitted out by His Majesty’s rebellious subjects in America. Unless you can furnish us with names or a more minute and circumstantial description of those vessels, it will be impossible for us to cause those enquiries to be made which you have desired.”
De Noailles relayed this unhelpful response to Vergennes in Paris. The foreign minister was neither surprised nor alarmed. France’s naval buildup was almost complete. Its fleet in the West Indies had been expanded and modernized. With just a little good news from the American mainland, France would throw off the veil and enter the war. He told his ambassador not to worry. “We are going to put things aright.”
1779
N
EW
L
ONDON,
C
ONNECTICUT
Christopher Vail was seventeen when, in his eagerness to join the Continental Army, he secretly assumed the place and name (Paul Pain) of an acquaintance eager to desert it. He subsequently found himself on Long Island in 1776, cut off from retreat by William Howe’s redcoats. Ferrying Vail’s unit under fire across the Sound to Connecticut were the Essex County watermen commanded by John Glover, who a year earlier had leased Washington the ill-fated armed schooner,
Hannah
, and installed his friends and relatives as its officers and agents.
When Vail’s enlistment ended nine months later, he joined the crew of
Mifflin
, a Continental warship based in New London; and then
Warren
, one of Congress’s original thirteen frigates that later would be Dudley Saltonstall’s flagship in the disastrous assault on Penobscot.
In January 1779 he headed for the West Indies on the privateer
Revenge
. Capturing a transport bound for Halifax, he went aboard as one of its prize crew. Two days later a British privateer engaged them with the particular viciousness of combat between civilian warships. Outgunned, Vail’s vessel struck its sails in surrender. Even so, the enemy pumped several more volleys into its hull before boarding “with drawn swords in hand.” The Americans were herded to the side of their vessel and forced to leap the span of water to their captors’ ship. “I think the distance I jumped was 12 or 14 feet to avoid a cutlass.” Vail and his mates were then delivered to the Royal Navy prison at Admiral Young’s base on Antigua.
After five failed escape attempts (ignorant of Britain’s “Pirate Act,” he’d been shocked to learn “there was no exchange of prisoners”), Vail was shipped from Antigua to Britain. En route, warships under the command of Sir George Rodney pressed them into service. Vail manned a cannon on HMS
Suffolk
, seventy-four guns, against the French fleet off Martinique in April 1780. The initial bout was a “ship to ship slogging match” involving almost forty battleships and lasting three and a half hours. The British suffered eight hundred casualties, the French at least twice that number.
In the midst of the fighting, Vail’s ship had “an accident. A number of cartridges took fire and blew up 36 men.” The British flagship was no less hammered. “Our ship was next to Admiral Rodney in the action. I counted 24 shot holes that went through his ship between the two tiers of guns, and so many above that I could not count them.” Its decks later were washed with seawater that ran out the scuppers. “I saw plenty of blood on the Admiral’s ship’s side after the action.”
For several days the fleets maneuvered for advantage. The French were arrayed in a battle line, and Rodney decided to strike its rear section in order to cut off those vessels from the main force and destroy them piecemeal. His captains misunderstood his signals, however, and instead attacked the heart of the enemy’s strength. Vail’s ship led the way. “At 6 p.m. our ship struck the center of the French line but found it impregnable and bore away with the loss of nearly 100 men as she took the fire of four ships at once. The second came up in the same manner and was repulsed as the other.” In all, fifteen British ships in succession tried vainly to break through.
The enemy counterattacked the next day. “The French brought their whole force of 23 sail of the line to fight 16 of the English.” After another slugfest in which opposing warships mingled “all much together” as they blasted one another, each fleet withdrew, rendering the battle “inconsequential” in history’s view. “We lost a great many men and our ships very much damaged,” Vail wrote. He noted, too, that the battle considerably changed the attitude of his Royal Navy shipmates:
“The first time that we were going into action with the French, the whole crew seemed elated, being sure of success. They told me two English ships could take three Frenchmen any time. I really must acknowledge that the English fought well in the action, but came off second best. After this I heard no more said about the French not fighting.”
The next time the crew was called to quarters, Vail and the other American conscripts refused to report. The captain threatened to flog them but didn’t carry it out. Vail overheard one of the ship’s officers grudgingly commend their resistance. “Damn them, I like them better for their conduct.”
Transferred to HMS
Action
, the Americans again refused to fight. It drew only scorn from the British this time. As an example to his comrades, one was selected for flogging. He was stripped and given ten lashes. The resistor, Ebenezer Williams, still wouldn’t serve. “Damn him,”
Action
’s captain snarled, “whip him until he will do duty.” More lashes followed. At last Williams relented “after being cut into jelly.”
First chance he got, however, the captain unloaded the stubborn captives onto a passing transport. “Our living on board this ship was horrible beyond description,” Vail wrote. Its provisions, “condemned six months before,” consisted of “black beef, yellow pork, sour oat meal, and blue butter.”
His next stop was Falmouth, England, where he snuck away and joined
Amazon
, a British privateer hunting French and Spanish prizes. One incident during the cruise was particularly evocative of privateering’s mortal uncertainties. Off Portugal’s Cape St. Vincent, “We chased a large ship one day, and at 8 p.m. came alongside and hailed her but received no answer.” The vessel’s sails lay slack against the mast. He and some others rowed over in a longboat. “She mounted 20 guns which was all loaded and the matches lighted and a barrel of brandy opened on the larboard side of the deck. There was not a man on board.”
At Lisbon, Vail jumped ship and made his way to Cádiz, on Spain’s southern coast. There, Richard Harrison found him a place on a French warship. Harrison had been Congress’s agent at St. Eustatius early in the war. One of William Bingham’s business partners, he’d gone there undercover as a sufferer of venereal disease seeking a tropical cure. He’d left the island after political change in Europe killed its commercial advantages.
Vail’s vessel hailed a privateer flying American colors—false colors, it turned out. He fired his gun twenty-four times at the British impostor before both ships sheared away “completely cut to pieces.” During the fight some of his shipmates had “run from their quarters. I hollered to them to stick to it like good fellows. Every time I fired I was very careful and took good aim, and when I fired the captain says, ‘Huzza for the American 12 pounder!’” Afterward the relieved French captain “gave every man a bottle of wine.”
While in Cadiz to make repairs, Vail found a Massachusetts privateer,
Thomas
, preparing to head home to Salem. The four-week journey was disagreeable in one serious respect. The captain was a teetotaler, denying his men “one drop of spirits of any kind to drink nor even did he thank us for our services.”
From Salem, Vail returned to New London in May 1781, “which makes two years, four months, and five days absence.” Two days later he hopped another privateer and took off again to sea.
Eight
It is our business to force on a war, for which purpose I see nothing so likely as fitting our privateers from the ports and islands of France. Here we are too near the sun, and the business is dangerous; with you it may be done more easily.
—William Carmichael to William Bingham, June 1777
I have by no means neglected what Mr. Carmichael so strongly recommends in regard to precipitating a war betwixt France and England. I have always been fully convinced of the policy of irritating the two nations, of affording them matter for present resentments, and of renewing in their minds the objects of their ancient animosity. The attempt has not been altogether unavailing.
—William Bingham to the Foreign Affairs Committee, October 1777
O
ne of the excuses France offered Britain for its treaty violations was that its people were “turbulent spirits eager to run after adventures.” Since “adventure” meant both financial speculation and personal thrill-seeking, the characterization was dead on. Money above all drove Frenchmen and other Europeans to join, as crewmen or investors, still-illegal privateer expeditions. But the excitement of tweaking the British “lords of the ocean” was clearly part of the draw.
Most Americans in Europe at the time likewise operated with mixed motives, combining their patriotic endeavors with capitalist ventures in privateering and the export home of munitions and trade goods. Though Benjamin Franklin (and later John Adams, who replaced Silas Deane as a commissioner in the American mission in 1778) was an exception in his business indifference, men like Deane were typical in working for fame and fortune along with American liberty. Deane told his partner Caron de Beaumarchais that he preferred “not to live” if the Revolution failed. If that was to be his fate, however, his incessant wartime speculation shows he meant to go out rich.
William Carmichael was rich already. The young Marylander’s family wealth enabled him to join the staff of the commissioners in Paris as an unpaid volunteer. A self-described dilettante “covetous only of reputation, and now and then a pretty woman,” he took a position as Deane’s secretary to be “near the sun” of great events unfolding in Europe. Carmichael was a minor figure historically. Yet along with many others of similar background he occasionally wielded no little influence thanks to the presumption of authority that often attached to socially connected, wellborn gentlemen despite their lack of demonstrated merit.
France in 1777 was full of such Americans. Chronicles of the period blur with the names of businessmen, maritime agents, Continental representatives authorized or self-designated, and assorted relatives, wanderers, and hangers-on, most of whom were split into bitter factions over money, access to French officials, and the comparative purity of one another’s allegiance to the patriot cause.
Some fifty or sixty gravitated to the port of Nantes on the Loire River where many mercantile houses with ties to the colonies were based. The preeminent American there was Tom Morris, younger brother to Robert, the member of Congress said to chair “all the committees that can properly be employed in receiving and importing supplies.” Tom had represented Robert’s firm, Willing & Morris, since the start of the war. His nepotistic promotion to the post of Congress’s top commercial agent in France, which should have cemented his high stature, coincided with the terminal phase of his alcoholic tailspin.
When Tom left Nantes on a binge in the summer of 1777, his brother sent John Ross, a Scotsman, to rescue the company books from chaos. Described as “puritan” in his ethics, Ross clashed with another upstanding accountant, Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams. Williams’s assignment from his uncle to cull any Continental receipts from among the cargoes and prizes Tom Morris had over-seen inevitably put him at odds with Ross, who was there in the interest of Willing & Morris. They were driven into an uneasy détente, however, by charges of graft leveled at them and at many others by Arthur and William Lee of the powerful Virginia clan of soldiers, statesmen, and planters.
William Lee had relocated from London to Paris after his brother became Congress’s third diplomatic commissioner. That each today is labeled “troublemaker” in the scrupulously benign
Encyclopedia of the American Revolution
constitutes some consolation to anyone who hopes villains will be called to account in the historical record if not in their lifetimes. The fact that they aimed to murder reputations rather than lives hardly mitigates nastiness committed in an era, and among a social set, in which the two were more or less equivalent.
The Lees’ relentless slander of their fellow expatriates furthered a lust for prestige more than profit. Arthur, angling to be Congress’s sole delegate to France, wanted his brother posted to the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, Franklin sent to “respectable and quiet” Vienna, and Deane removed to Holland. He was jealous of the stature accorded Franklin by France’s government and the affection he enjoyed from its people, a feeling aggravated by the distaste and rebuff Arthur engendered on various congressional errands around Europe. But his loathing for Deane was personal.
Having conceived with Beaumarchais the original idea of a dummy firm to funnel arms to America, he believed Deane had usurped what should have been his role in Hortalez & Company. Deflected by Franklin from participating in diplomatic talks, he was similarly kept in the dark about Deane’s efforts to obtain arms and outfit privateers on behalf of Congress. Certain that Deane was making a secret fortune, Lee decried his “faithless principles, dirty intrigue, selfish views, and wicked arts” in countless letters to influential contacts in America, including his congressman brother, Richard Henry Lee, and Richard’s friends, John and Samuel Adams—“the L’s and the A’s,” Arthur termed them.
Ultimately he hoped to implicate every American in France “through whose hands the public money has passed,” he wrote Richard. “If this scheme can be executed, it will disconcert all the plans at one stroke, without an appearance of intention, and save both the public and me.”
William Lee chimed in, promising “proofs to come” to verify the brothers’ sketchy but ominous charges. To their voices was added that of Ralph Izard, another scion of southern wealth hanging around Paris in hope of advancement. “The three men gave themselves great airs,” writes Helen Augur in
The Secret War of Independence
, “and misdirected attention from the fact that they were doing nothing but adding to the witch brew.”
The trio did little damage to those able to defend themselves. Williams and Ross kept impeccable records of their work in Nantes and so were never seriously jeopardized. Franklin, repeatedly accused by the Lees of embezzling funds, was untouchable by virtue of his years, experience, and established record. “I have been a servant to many publics through a long life,” he wrote in answer to one “malignant” attack. “There is not a single instance of my ever being accused before of acting contrary to their interest or my duty.”
Izard, less than half Franklin’s age and with no accomplishments to speak of, didn’t hesitate to call the old doctor “haughty, and not guided by principles of virtue or honor.” When no evidence could be found of Franklin’s supposed perfidy, Izard took that as proof in itself. “His tricks are in general carried on with so much cunning that it is extremely difficult to fix them on him.”
Contemptuous barely captures Franklin’s opinion of Izard: “little, hissing, crooked, serpentine, venomous.” Still, the mudslinging hindered but didn’t derail his discussions with the French foreign ministry about formalizing a Franco-American alliance. The atmosphere at Franklin’s residence in the Hotel de Valentinois in the exclusive Passy section of Paris continued to reflect his manner of relaxed improvisation, which, as a negotiating style, was all the more effective for being true to his nature, earnest and elusive at once.
For example, William Bingham recently had accepted Martinique’s demand of a 1 percent fee on all services to American privateers; he persuaded a dubious Congress that receipts verifying French payoffs, if made public, would “quicken the resentments of the English.” Thinking along similarly devious lines, Franklin dismissed the conventional wisdom that French ships leased to British merchants seeking immunity from privateer attack undermined the American cause. He predicted that shipowners would, “with a little encouragement, facilitate the necessary discovery” of British cargoes despite the supposed protection of sailing under a French flag. That encouragement, namely bribery, could then be leaked to the British with predictable outcries of French treachery.
When Franklin (with what his adversaries called “insidious subtlety”) encouraged American privateers, increasingly prevalent in European waters, to bring their prizes to French ports rather than sail them back to America for settlement, he pushed the boundary of diplomatic decorum to the point of impertinence. France could turn a blind eye only to a degree; in the face of blatant indiscretion, a sharp scolding was due its American guests if only to mollify British outrage. Franklin crafted slick apologies for the infractions that were mindful of French dignity while still pushing sly proposals to transfer captured cargoes onto French ships at sea or to conduct prize sales just outside the harbor in technically international waters. He rarely gave ground completely, in other words, leaving each issue slightly nudged toward maintaining friction between France and Britain.
He could play the game harder if need be. His effusive expressions of remorse to the foreign ministry “when any vessels of war appertaining to America, either through ignorance or inattention, do anything that might offend,” often carried reminders, lest France forget the commercial windfall which an alliance might bring and which Anglo-American reconciliation would certainly snuff, that its “protection to us and our nation will always be remembered with gratitude and affection.”
Yet even as he outwardly backtracked from encouraging privateers, he supported Deane’s continuing call for Congress to send more blank commissions to Europe. “This mode of exerting our force should be pushed with vigor.”
Franklin and Deane conferred almost daily. “The latter appears to be the more active and efficient man,” a British intelligence report said, “but less circumspect and secret, his discretion not being always proof against the natural warmth of his temper, and being weakened also by his own ideas of the importance of his present employment.”
In running the mission’s maritime operations under Franklin’s far-thinking but often chaotic leadership, Deane puffed up his role because he thought its significance underappreciated. “I repeatedly gave my sentiments in favor of sending cruisers into these seas,” he told anyone who’d listen. “They have been of infinite prejudice to our enemies, both in their commerce and reputation.”
Franklin praised his colleague’s contributions. “He daily proves himself an able, faithful, active, and extremely useful servant of the public.” When the Lees questioned why most of the mission’s commercial documents bore Deane’s signature alone, Franklin explained that Deane “consulted with me and had my approbation in the orders he gave, and I know they were for the best and aimed at the public good.” But he knew this about Deane as well: “I perceive he has enemies.”
Having enemies was no rarity in those times. But Deane was vulnerable because his store of well-wishers was thinner than he realized. When the Lees’ charges against him first circulated in Congress, they’d been countered by the strong advocacy of Robert Morris. But when Robert learned that fall of Deane’s efforts to remove his brother Tom as the top American agent at Nantes, he renounced their friendship—and Deane didn’t find out for months.
Communication lapses between Paris and Philadelphia also kept Deane from realizing the extent to which his commissioning of French fortune hunters as Continental officers had angered people like George Washington and Nathanael Greene. Greene almost resigned over the elevation of a French artilleryman, Philippe du Coudray, over General Henry Knox. Du Coudray’s drowning near Philadelphia in September 1777 resolved the matter, though not before it opened a permanent rift between Greene and John Adams, who condemned the general’s refusal to bend to Congress’s civilian will.
Franklin too was besieged with applications from French aristocrats and thus came to sympathize with Deane’s difficult position during his early months abroad. But there was little chance that colleagues in America could appreciate the isolation and stress that had led Deane, without funds or commodities to pay for supplies obtained on credit, to accept French officers in order to placate their wealthy families.
It didn’t help Deane’s reputation that his two steadiest companions in Paris were Beaumarchais and Franklin’s American-born secretary, Edward Bancroft. Beaumarchais was essentially viewed as a French Silas Deane, a clever insider who couched his avarice in idealism; while Bancroft’s frequent travel between France and Britain, the nation of his citizenship now, hinted at the apolitical opportunism underlying his shady business deals and his employment as a British spy.
But most exploitable by Deane’s enemies was his work with privateers, whose notorious success in New England and the West Indies brought instant connotations of lawlessness. Franklin, through his tireless efforts to free American mariners from British custody, would be revered by sailors as “the patron saint of prisoners.” Deane earned a less beatific title as the one “who watched over the sea captains.” He enjoyed the work for its saltwater, daredevil milieu. His critics among the L’s and the A’s suspected that he enjoyed its plunder as well.
F
or years, France and Spain had shared the view that “England is the monster against which we should always be prepared.” Vergennes, the French foreign minister, wasn’t yet ready to get “actively offensive,” however. He had twenty warships in the West Indies and another thirty-two in France prepared to support America “whenever it can be done with advantage.” But he wanted further proof from the battlefield that the Continental Army stood a chance against British ground forces.