The glorious cause, p.50
The Glorious Cause, page 50
Independence freed thought, although it did not entirely end the confusion over just what sort of arrangements might be made with Britain’s enemies. Not surprisingly, Congress received a good deal of advice on how to proceed. Much of it played on the theme of the importance of American commerce to Europe, a theme that in turn rested on the proposition that commerce should furnish the essential connection between the Old World and the New. At this time, and for a long time afterward, American statesmen held that trade should be free lest America be reduced to dependence upon a single trading nation in Europe. The long experience of such a dependence understandably was prominent in American minds. As for why European nations should welcome such arrangements, there was economic gain to consider: America bought and sold much. Eagerness to trade would exist, Thomas Paine remarked sardonically, so long as “eating is the custom in Europe.”9
John Adams did not agree with Paine on many things, but he shared the conviction of Paine and others that for the young republic commercial policy should stand in stead of foreign policy. It was to Adams that Congress turned to draft a “model treaty” which would define the basis of America’s relations with Europe—and more immediately with France in the expectation that France might enter the war. Adams pondered the matter in spring 1776 not long before independence. His notes show that he favored a most cautious policy, one that assumed that France attributed immense value to American trade and would apparently welcome a chance to cut down her chief rival in Europe. “Is assistance attainable from F[rance]?” Adams asked himself. “What connection may we safely form with her?” The answer: “1st No Political Connection. Submit to none of her Authority—receive no Governors, or officers from her. 2d No military Connection. Receive no Troops from her. 3d Only a Commercial Connection, i.e. make a Treaty, to receive her Ships into our Ports. Let her engage to receive our Ships into her Ports—furnish Us with Arms, Cannon, Salt Petre, powder, Duck, Steel.” Under these conditions no “alliance,” meaning a political union, would be made with France and Spain. Yet Richard Henry Lee had proposed alliances with foreign states when he made the motion for independence in June. Lee seems not to have intended a firm political connection with obligations and responsibilities, and surely not military obligations. “Alliance” had a rather elastic meaning in the eighteenth century and might be regarded as virtually synonymous with commercial treaty. In any case, Adams, and the “model treaty” that Congress adopted in September, offered little to any foreign state that would come to America’s aid. The eighth article of the model treaty recognized that any formal arrangement might bring Britain into war with France. In such case the United States promised not to aid Britain in the war, a “commitment” that reveals as clearly as any statement just how little the Congress was prepared to offer in return for French assistance. 10
To be sure, in the next year Congress gave up this restricted conception of foreign policy. Military defeat, first on Long Island and then up the Hudson and in New Jersey, forced it to compromise these enlightened principles. The first major concession to new realities came in revised instructions at the end of 1776 to the American commissioners who were now empowered to offer France the British West Indies if France would enter the war. This change may have seemed more fundamental than it actually was. The Congress, in placing so much reliance on commerce as a force in foreign relations, did so convinced that power accompanied trade. The Congress admired political power as much as any European foreign ministry, but it did not believe that traditional arrangements were necessary to obtain it. The realities of war brought a change in perception. 11
The commission sent to Europe seems to have shared the conviction of Congress that Europe’s interest in American trade could be exploited. They knew, however, that the chance to injure Britain appealed more and that this opportunity provided the strongest card in an otherwise weak American hand.
The men Congress hoped would represent it to the French government included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson refused the appointment; his wife was sick and he did not wish to leave her. Franklin accepted and so did Silas Deane, who was, of course, already in Europe. To replace Jefferson, Congress turned to Arthur Lee, who, like Deane, was in Europe on American business.
Lee had seen enough of Deane to know that he did not trust him. But Lee seems not to have trusted anyone. He had reason to suspect Deane, who was allowing French aid to fall into his own pockets. After the commission began its negotiations Deane did more than even Lee suspected—passing American secrets to Edward Bancroft, the confidential secretary of the commission who was in the pay of the British government.
Franklin, unaware of Deane’s practices, arrived in France early in December 1776. The British government professed dismay that the French would receive him, the agent of rebels, and Franklin’s correspondence reveals that he felt uncertain of his welcome by the French. He had reason for this uneasiness. The young king of France, Louis XVI, regarded the American Revolution with skepticism. No European monarch wished to see another rejected, action which might provide an unhealthy model. Others in France shared their king’s anxiety—French merchants, who questioned whether the nation could bear the expense of another war, did not want peacetime prosperity upset. Before Franklin’s arrival Turgot, while still controller-general of finance, fed French suspicions with the prediction that Anglo-American trade would flourish even after independence.
Although Franklin did not directly dispel such doubts, he almost immediately captured popular affections. He stepped off the Reprisal, the ship that carried him across the Atlantic, with a simple fur cap on his head which he had worn for warmth against the chill November winds. The cap, his plain spectacles, which a man conscious of fashion would not have put on in public, and, most of all, his apparent simplicity and straightforwardness attracted the admiration of Paris. The French, full of illusions about the innocence of the New World, wanted a hero, and here in this American genius they found a simple philosopher, a wise and good representative of the best of the American wilderness. Franklin enjoyed the adulation but was too sophisticated to allow his head to be turned by it. Nor did he believe that popular feeling would bring France into a treaty with America. That would take careful preparation, and so he removed himself from the eyes of the public and set up operations in Passy, a small village in the suburbs of Paris.12
Congress had instructed the commissioners “to press for the immediate and explicit declaration of France in our favor, upon a suggestion that a reunion with Great Britain may be the consequence of a delay.” These initial instructions did not mention an alliance; in a few months, however, Congress authorized the commissioners to seek closer ties to France. For their part the French were determined to guide their policy by two principles—they would enter no agreement that permitted the Americans to settle for anything less than independence, and they would not act without a formal commitment from Spain.13
The negotiations proceeded slowly, with events in America serving to pull the two sides apart and then to push them together. In February 1777 the commissioners informed Vergennes that the United States would promise not to make a separate peace with Britain in return for the same guarantee from France. The next month they offered to join France and Spain in an alliance. Vergennes, uncertain of the war’s progress, delayed, and the Spanish government would not even allow Arthur Lee to enter the country when he tried to present the American case.14
The commission continued over the summer to press for French recognition and a large loan. In November, at the time news of Howe’s capture of Philadelphia arrived, their efforts seemed futile. On December 4, however, messages were received telling of Burgoyne’s capture. Within a few days Vergennes invited the commission to renew the proposal for a Franco-American alliance. Franklin drafted it, and on December 17, 1777, Vergennes agreed that France would recognize the United States and enter into an alliance. But, before anything could be signed, Spain must be asked once more to join France and America. By the end of the month the Spanish refused, but Vergennes—his anxiety raised by knowledge that Deane and Franklin had talked with Paul Wentworth, a British agent dispatched to sound them out about reconciliation—decided to proceed alone.15
The two sides signed a treaty of friendship and commerce and a treaty of alliance early in February 1778. The commercial treaty included a most-favored-nation clause and opened up several ports in the West Indies and France itself to American vessels without restrictions. The treaty of alliance, which was to come into effect only if France and Britain went to war (a virtual certainty), declared that the purpose of the two nations was to maintain the liberty and independence of the United States. Everyone recognized that the eighth article of this treaty was crucial: “Neither of the two Parties shall conclude either Truce or Peace with Great Britain, without the formal consent of the other first obtained; and they mutually engage not to lay down their arms, until the independence of the United States shall have been formally or tacitly assured by the Treaty or Treaties that shall terminate the War.” Almost as important was France’s promise not to claim any English territory on the continent of North America and its agreement that any such territory captured in the war would belong to the United States.16
After the signing, the treaties were sent on their way to America, arriving on May 2, just ahead of the proposals from Britain for reconciliation. The British government, however, did not mean to recognize American independence. The French treaties received the approval of Congress on May 4. By June 14, 1778, France and Britain were at war.
II
Britain now faced immense strategic problems, to say nothing of internal political and financial strains. Before Burgoyne’s collapse at Saratoga, British strategy had followed an erratic course. Sandwich complained in December 1777 that the navy had not been well employed, carrying troops here and there in convoy duty and never really using its own strength effectively. His statement described clearly enough what the navy had done, and his argument made at the same time that, properly used, the navy might strangle the colonies by raiding and blockading their ports suggested one sort of strategy available to Britain. A great maritime power, as Britain was in the eighteenth century, could have chosen to fight a naval war. But when Sandwich advocated this strategy, Britain had just seen a very different sort of plan, a land campaign far from the support of the navy, bring disaster.17
Sandwich’s advocacy of the sea notwithstanding, neither he nor anyone else had thought through Britain’s problems in the war. Nor during the first two years had Britain fought with any general, or overall, conception in mind. The war had not begun on British terms, and in marching to Lexington, Gage had not chosen the circumstances for a war with America. He had acted with a much more limited purpose in mind and then surprisingly had been locked up in Boston for almost a year. From Boston, Howe had taken the army to Halifax and returned with a massive force to New York, where he sought to destroy Washington’s army. That design preoccupied him for the next fifteen months, although his expedition against Philadelphia in summer 1777 also looked toward bringing loyalists in southern Pennsylvania into the open. Among Howe’s difficulties one stood out: an imperfect understanding that putting down a rebellion and fighting a war are not necessarily the same thing. The ministry at home shared his confusion and never really decided which of the two they were doing or how the two were related. In giving approval to Burgoyne’s plan to isolate New England, the government presumably had hoped to make a military operation serve a political purpose. Had Burgoyne made his way to Albany with his army reasonably intact, he would indeed have damaged the American cause, especially if in his progress to the Hudson he had smashed Gates’s army.
Burgoyne’s surrender and the entrance of France into the war forced British leaders to rethink their problems, but they attained no greater coherence in planning. At first, as news of Saratoga trickled in, it seemed that all had been made clear. Sandwich evidently now felt certain enough to call into question all previous efforts and advocated in their stead a naval war, arguing that of all strategies it alone offered a means of wearying the Americans until their will to resist crumbled. During the winter of 1777–78, a naval war won over the ministry and gained the support of Amherst, probably the most admired military leader in the nation, and of the king himself. What moved these men after Saratoga was a feeling that France’s coming into the war was inevitable and that Spain would follow. There was something approaching relief in their letters and conversations during the winter. They were back on familiar ground, a war with the Bourbon powers. Still, they did not welcome this war; in fact, its approach filled them with dread. But at least it was comprehensible, as the colonial rebellion was not. As Sandwich remarked in the long assessment he provided North—France and Spain are “at bottom our inveterate enemies.” Amherst told the king that the colonial war was now a secondary consideration in a situation in which the primary concern had to be France. Use the navy to block up the colonial ports, Amherst urged; if anything could make the Americans see reason the navy could, by squeezing them hard.18
A little of this persuaded North, who felt despair at Burgoyne’s failure and seemed to want nothing so much as to escape office. The king, after receiving the secret reports on the course of Franco-American negotiations, grasped the new situation as quickly as anyone. After talking with Amherst, he began speculating on strategies appropriate for the coming war. Among them was a proposal, apparently Amherst’s, to withdraw altogether from the colonies and, after strengthening Canada, Florida, and Nova Scotia, to attack France and Spain in the West Indies and Louisiana. A land war against the colonies, he wrote North in February, combined with a war with France and Spain “must be feeble in all parts and consequently unsuccessful.”19
On March 8, 1778, these assessments produced instructions to General Henry Clinton, who had replaced William Howe as commander in chief. The primary operations would now be conducted from the sea, and Clinton was ordered to cooperate with the navy in raids against the American coast from New York to Nova Scotia. Clinton was also to prepare an attack against the Carolinas and Georgia, long considered the soft spots in American resistance. Since these new efforts reduced the importance of Philadelphia, Clinton was instructed to pull his forces back to New York, although Germain, who prepared these orders, gave Clinton discretionary authority to remain if local conditions warranted keeping troops there.20
Five days later, when the French government announced that it had signed treaties of amity and commerce with the United States, these instructions were virtually cancelled. Though Britain and France would not be at war until June 1778, it was now certain, and the disposition to strike France first could now become policy. For a few days the king, North, and Amherst discussed the possibility of taking all British forces out of the colonies, but by March 21, when a second set of orders was drafted by Germain, nothing so drastic seemed necessary. Still, the new strategy called for a shift in direction and of resources. The planned naval blockade was not explicitly given up, but it was no longer accounted of first importance. The main effort would now be against France—”faithless and insolent” in the king’s bitter phrase—and Clinton was ordered to make it. He was to send an expedition of 5000 troops against St. Lucia in the West Indies, 3000 more to reinforce the Floridas, and withdraw the remainder to New York City, which was to be held to strengthen the negotiating position of the Carlisle Commission, diplomatic agents who were about to be dispatched to America with instructions to conclude peace with the rebels without agreeing to independence, a condition both ridiculous and pathetic.21
The ministry decided almost without thought to attack the French in the West Indies. The islands were a familiar arena, the cream of the British army was in America, and the military resources for an attack across the Channel simply did not exist. Nor did the will, and the possibility was not even considered.22
The West Indies were a rich prize. The economics of mercantilism seemed to suggest that the islands possessed much more value than the continental colonies. Certainly the West Indies trade returned much greater profits than trade with the mainland. The West Indies merchants clamored for protection in 1778, as always, and given the value of their business they were hard to put off. Had they been silent the result would have been the same. Striking the French in the West Indies seemed virtually preordained, and the decision was easily made.
St. Lucia was chosen for solid tactical reasons. It lay in the Windward Islands just south of Martinique, where the French had a superb harbor. Further south were British-held Grenada and Tobago and, a hundred miles to the east, Barbados, an important producer of sugar. The Windward Islands were a principal group in the Lesser Antilles. In the northern group, the Leeward Islands, the strongest British station was on Antigua. The French controlled the most important of these islands and in September 1778 would seize Dominica, a lonely English island lying between Guadeloupe and Martinique. The largest and wealthiest British island in the Caribbean, Jamaica, lay a thousand miles to the west but, because of its remoteness and the prevailing winds, could not be used in the campaigns against the French in the Lesser Antilles. St. Lucia could, however, if it were seized, for it had the anchorages from which the navy might sail against ships going in and coming out of Martinique.
