Dr. Bancroft was an old friend of Franklins from his London days. Students will analyze maps, treaties, congressional records, first-hand accounts, and correspondence to determine the different roles assumed by Native Americans in the American Revolution and understand why the various groups formed the alliances they did. Affairs at Nantes became more and more tangled, and William Lee did nothing to straighten them out. If Vergennes had any doubts about Franklins grasp of Bourbon aims, they were resolved by the Doctors masterly letter of January 5. He waited until the Revenge was safely out of Dunkirk, and then he and the commissioners exchanged letters, purely to clear the record, about the necessity of France abiding by her treaties, which meant no more violations by American privateers. It looked like a checkmate. Wickes got clean away, only to founder in a storm off the Banks of Newfoundland. France's support deepened after the Americans beat the British in the October 1777 Battle of Saratoga, proving themselves committed to independence and worthy of a formal alliance. On January 24 Wickes sailed out of Nantes with a French pilot and several French seamen aboard, strengthening the desired impression of collusion with Versailles. Spain had ceased her royal aids to America. Stormont then delivered to Vergennes threats only a step removed from war. He agreed to investigate the matter. America could fight only her own sort of war on the seas, and this had started before Lexington and would continue long after Yorktown. It made the French . Q. Wentworth, he wrote North, is an avowed stock jobber and I never let that go out of my mind. His, Privateers could accomplish wonders, but they could not fight the great British ships of the line. As was demonstrated at the Battle of Yorktown, the French alliance was decisive for the cause of American independence. The treaties of amity and commerce were promptly offered. The southern states were crammed with tobacco, which could not even be sent up along the coast because of the British cruisers on patrol. Before Deane and Wentworth met, he sent word to Passy that France would after all not wait for word from Spain but would conclude the alliance independently, on one condition: that no separate peace be made with England. Even though some consider King Louis to just be a contributor he . Despite his own best efforts, Lees mission turned out to be a success. It ultimately did nothing of the sort, and its calling is usually . France had been secretly aiding the American Colonies since 1776, because France was angry at Britain over the loss of Colonial territory in the French and Indian War. Because the future could somehow work in him he had become the sort of man coming generations would repeat. But he was quite happy to spend the year of 1777 in the humbler role of itinerant trouble shooter in the French ports. Through English friends Franklin raised funds to give the prisoners warm clothes and blankets, food, a chance to bathe and wash their clothes, and spending money for small comforts. One of his parts was acting as confidential agent for the King, for his circumspection was as profound as Franklins. Vergennes may never have realized what had happened during that fateful year of 1777. 1783. Later Congress backed up this pledge and authorized all tenders necessary to get Bourbon help. And the French people, cheering in the streets and squares, were as proud of Saratoga, he wrote home, as if it had been a Victory of their own Troops over their own Enemies.. It made the French . He was hardly prepared for the booming activity in Americas behalf that he found in Nantes. They found the star of them all in Dunkirk. While a gifted and expert secret agent can develop a second personality which keeps him from making slips, in Bancrofts case this doubling of self may have reflected a profound split in the psyche. And so the man who believed that there never was a good war or a bad peace, old Dr. Benjamin Franklin, a man laden with the worlds honors who might easily have pleaded age and weariness, set out for France in his seventy-first year to secure these necessities for his country. He made this gesture impressive by sending two sloops of war to Dunkirk to take the captain and his men and deliver them to the local jail. France, planning a war of revenge, saw in the growing revolt of the thirteen colonies a chance to weaken her chronic enemy, and by 1766 she was ready to rush to their support if they broke with England. Nothing came of these appeals, and meanwhile Franklin and Deane had been working at a highly secret project which might prove more effective in precipitating a Franco-British war. Franklins hosts were the merchants Pliarne and Penet, who had little standing in Nantes, but who may have been subsidized by Vergennes. The result of this conflict would not only determine the fate of the thirteen North American colonies, but also alter the balance of colonial power throughout the world. Franklin was now seventy, afflicted with gout, and wretchedly tired from his labors in Congress and its candle-burning committees. By this process of elastic diplomacy the amenities were preserved while both sides gained time for war preparations and spared their exchequers the drain of active hostilities. Vergennes admitted that open assistance to the United States meant war, but war was in any case inevitable. But Bancroft was in the most strategic position of any informer, and his conduct at Passy was mysterious. Lack of food. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French people commemorating the alliance of France and the United States during the American Revolution. 1. A disguised British vessel at Dunkirk had alerted the warships, and as soon as the Revenge was in the open sea she was chased by several British frigates, sloops of war, and cutters. A young girl began having strange fits. Congress demanded impossibilities of him: a huge loan which France could not afford, French battleships and seamen, and the prompt entrance of the Bourbons into the war. He had corrupted his government from Lord North down in the hope of buying security for himself. As such is their miserable policy, 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. A first fleet under the orders of the Admiral d'Estaing was dispatched to . Late in October, 1776, Benjamin Franklin sailed for France to direct the foreign sector of the extraordinary war into which his young country had been plunged. They were in the best possible hands; Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the few masters seasoned in the merchant fleet who had joined the Continental Navy. The merchant was the intendant for supplying clothing for the French Armyand of late the American Army, for he had given Beaumarchais a million livres worth of clothing on credit. Their difficulties in shipping out supplies to America were also greatly increased, for Lee had set down everything he could learn without coding it. Tom Morris was dragging out the last months of his wretched life, and Lee saw no point in beating a dead horse. And Franklin, Voltaire, and Rousseau were linked together as the presiding geniuses of the century. All this was so familiar to Franklin that it did not discourage him; he simply had to be on his guard for the moment when Vergennes would stop playing for the joint interests of both countries and play for France alone. But the harm had been done. The American Revolution had a multifaceted effect in France, extending the national debt, contributing . Arthur Lee, who would have ruined the secret project if he had been in Paris to interfere with it, was busy elsewhere. When Wickes brought his captured brigantines to Nantes they were speedily bought by a French purchaser for less than half their value. France and Britain drifted into hostilities without a declaration of war when their fleets off Ushant off the northwest coast of France on June 17, 1778. The French and Indian War was the North American conflict that was part of a larger imperial conflict between Great Britain and France known as the Seven Years' War. The King was always anxious to avoid friction with England, and Lees visit would arouse her suspicions. Washington was the War Department, Robert Morris at various times was Treasury and Navy and always was Commerce, and Franklin was the Department of State. Despite having little experience in commanding large, conventional military forces, his leadership presence and fortitude held the American military together long enough to secure victory at Yorktown and independence for his new nation in 1781. That was its only point; Vergennes would soon learn of this long interview with the British representative, and he might be worried if Franklin neglected to tell him anything about it. Both men were in Franklins confidence, and they worked closely with Vergennes. His friend Sieur Montaudoin bought a great Dutch ship and named it Benjamin Franklin . In 1757, Franklin went to England to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly as a diplomat in its fight against the descendants of the Penn . Now the picture had entirely changed, and Spain hoped to make peace with the new king on the Portuguese throne. By early 1775 the British embassy in France estimated that war supplies worth 32,000,000 livres (about $6,000,000) had been shipped from that kingdom to the colonies. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. Somehow the wild Irishman, repeating the maneuver of the sound and sober Wickes, created an infinitely greater reaction. Franklin comforted himself by beginning his magnificent work for the prisoners at Forton and the Old Mill in England, masters and men of the Continental Navy and the privateer fleet who were classed as pirates by George III and who sickened and starved in his antiquated prisons. Most of them were of no earthly use to the Commander in Chief and drained an impoverished Congress of money and patience. Sixty years after his death the incredible truth came out. His new cutter, the Revenge , had been bought by William Hodge of Philadelphia, who had also obtained Conynghams first ship. By then Congress had set up two secret committees on both of which Franklin was extremely busy. The Hortalez ships, scattered as they were at Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, and Dunkirk, were still too conspicuous to be missed by the busy British spies. The colonies needed these things . A generation after the end of the Revolutionary War, new revolutions emerged in nearly a dozen Spanish colonies in Central and South America. She had stolen Hollands priority on the seas and had swept France from the American continent and the best part of her fisheries. Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949, Benjamin Franklin And The French Alliance, Franklin was now seventy, afflicted with gout, and wretchedly tired from his labors in Congress and its candle-burning committees. A smuggling mechanism had long since been perfected, to the general salvation. His, Soon Beaumarchaiss coach was tearing down the road to Paris so fast that it overturned and he injured an arm. He had reached an impasse: France would not help America unless America showed promise of winning her war, and America could not win without French help. They asked that frigates be sent over by August to cruise against Englands Baltic trade and attack the British Isles. Franklin remembered the bitter crisis of the summer when Louis XVI had agreed to armed intervention and then had capitulated to his uncle. Bancroft had sped to London, mainly to make a killing on the stock market, but he would not fail to bring George III the bad news. On his first escape from Old Mill in 1779, Conyngham tunneled out with 53 companions. 1. American victory over the British in the Battle of Saratoga convinced the French that the Americans were committed to independence and worthy partners to a formal alliance. As soon as Arthur Lee arrived from London the three commissioners wrote Vergennes announcing their appointment to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce with France. The Bahamas, too, acted as allies. It is true that these countries, and to some extent Spain, had for some time been shipping out contraband for America, mostly through their Caribbean islands. His first wife soon died and he married the daughter of a great political familyand switched to politics. With the appointment of the mission to France the affairs of the two secret committees were theoretically unscrambled; the commissioners were to take charge of foreign relations, and young Tom Morris of commercial matters. The islet of St. Eustatia, an international free port in the northern Leewards, was a fountainhead of what Samuel Adams called the Unum Necessarium . However, Franklin had boarded the Reprisal for that very purpose. He made for the English Channel, where he took four small merchantmen, which he sent to Lorient under prize masters. Franklin and Deane now wrote the committee urging action in every sea where British carried on commerce. Overview of the four causes: 1. To forestall a truce with Britain, the ministers had stipulated that the United States must make no peace that surrendered her independence. He had put up for a long time with colonial violations of the trading laws, but when the Boston Tea Party made him look ridiculous, George III precipitated the war. Moreover, importers of cannon and powder had to arm their merchantmen, and if their merchantmen were transformed into privateers, as many were, they needed a large supply of ammunition. Vergennes had patiently dissembled Frances violations of neutrality in one encounter after the other with Stormont. The French and Indian War began in 1754 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce recognized the U.S. as an independent nation and promoted trade between France and America. The celebrated dramatist Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais now cast himself in his own best role, which he played without applause. In this first interview the minister was lifted out of his discouragement by Franklins solid faith in the American destiny, and by his understanding of the whole European complex which made him able to suggest the right move at the right time rather than chimerical impossibilities. Franklin was a shrewd judge of men, and his unclouded confidence in Bancroft needs some extraordinary explanation. Young Gustavus Conyngham of the landed Irish gentry had emigrated as a boy to Philadelphia where his relatives were prominent shipping merchants. With Deane and Carmichael, and all those shadowy young Americans who helped the great privateering drive of 1777, he organized an underground system for escapes. If he had written the true story of his life as a drama no audience would have believed it. Bermuda, which barely escaped becoming the fourteenth state, had a large merchant colony on the Dutch island, and there sold her American friends the thousand fine cedar sloops she built or refitted for them. Vergennes sent an agent, Achard de Bonvouloir, to Philadelphia to sound out Franklin about the prospects of a separation from England and a successful war. But the accident was symbolic: Hortalez & Company had suffered a. took place in France and India. Franklin immediately got to work at this dismal situation. He refused to sign the final peace treaty with England until all American prisoners were released. The move was long overdue, for the Americans had been making a brilliant success of their sea raids all over the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Then and then only did he dissolve his company, which had spent over 42,000,000 livres, mostly for America, and most of it never paid back. Vergennes kept him safe in jail, for the minister was co-operating with Franklins policy up to a dangerous point. His jealousy of Franklin, which grew into a nightmare for Americans on two continents, had begun in 1770 when Massachusetts appointed Franklin its agent in England, and Lee his inactive deputy to replace him if he left England or if he died. At the moment, Nantes was all Frankliniste . Soon Beaumarchaiss coach was tearing down the road to Paris so fast that it overturned and he injured an arm. His private period of turmoil and decision lay behind him, and he could think calmly of what must be done to make Jeffersons great charter a reality. One after the other his Whig friends rose in Parliament and warned that France might soon come out in support of the Americans. He returned to Paris with his usual air of pompous impeccability, for his conscience was light. This was amazing enough; France had broken through the limits of her ostensible neutrality and was allowing Martinique to become a base of war against Britain. The second . France remains the center of political activity, and here, therefore, I should choose to be employed., He went on to suggest how Franklin and Deane might be erased altogether. Now she was acknowledged as a nation in her own right, a nation whose treaties protected her commerce on the seas and her growing space on land, a rising people for whose friendship Britain and France must compete. He waited until the, Beaumarchais was with the three commissioners when the official messenger arrived. Captain Pearson of the Speedwell had orders to follow any suspected American ship out to the open sea and there arrest her. Americans, for instance, were forbidden to trade directly with foreign countries or with the foreign islands of the Caribbean, except in a few commodities which could be sold under cumbersome and expensive restrictions. In terms of violent behavior, the American Revolution can't hold a candle to the French Revolution. But Franklin and Deane knew what to expect from Arthur Lee. French forces under Rochambeau landed at Rhode Island in 1780, which they fortified before linking up with Washington in 1781. It was an entirely new sort of war because the United States was a new sort of country, whose survival depended less on land fighting than on a complex of factors in which Franklin was . That formality over, Vergennes was ready for his great move. In November 1789, Richard Price . The single most important diplomatic success of the colonists during the War for Independence was the critical link they forged . William Lee opened the campaign against Deane in a letter to Francis Lightfoot Lee. He was the Edward Edwards of the secret service, the master spy of the century. A swarm of workmen then changed the marks of the vessels by slapping on new coats of paint, changing the figurehead, and such devices. Meanwhile, Grard warned, the negotiations must be kept secret. Above all we needed an ally. With economic law as a lever he got Congress to open trade with the whole world, Great Britain excepted, three months before independence was ratified. At the same time he yearned to be a statesman like Franklin. The Secret Committee, dominated by the capable merchant Robert Morris, methodized the smuggling of war supplies from Europe, which had been going on for years. He refused, when his mission was over, to return to his once beloved Paris. While Spain's influence on the Revolutionary War was significant, perhaps the most profound impact was the broader American Revolution's impact on Spain. Dubourg, said the archivist, amassed arms with the help of the brilliant new foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, who was determined to make the American rebellion a success; and Montaudoin shipped this contraband to America. The British had many other secret agents in France, and other avenues of information. Spain had been fighting Portugal in South America and had favored just such an alliance with the hope of getting Portugal as her share of the plunder. He gave Franklins courier a verbal message: due to Mr. Lees unflagging labors with the French embassy in London, Versailles had been persuaded to send goods worth 200,000 (Hortalez had said 25,000) to the Caribbean as an outright gift. Franklin had a share in preserving the friendship between the mainland and Bermuda at a moment when it was severely strained. Vergennes promptly granted the requested interview. Soon the old names were changed to the Committee of Foreign Affairs and the Commercial Committee to make this distinction clear. (We must remember that all this was happening before Lexington.). It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. Carmichael, who was still the liaison man between Passy and Dunkirk, found an obliging British subject as the ostensible purchaser of the Revenge , and while he was about it he sold the Surprise to a French buyer and sent her around to Nantes to join the privateer fleet. French involvement in the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 began in 1776 when the Kingdom of France secretly shipped supplies to the Continental Army of the Thirteen Colonies when it was established in June 1775. In this desperate situation a few individuals took over as heads of non-existent departments. Though still reeling from the loss of its American colonies at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the country remained a global power with a strong army and navy. During the struggle for American independence, France provided the money, troops, armament, military leadership, and naval support that tipped the balance of military power and paved the way for the Continental Army's ultimate victory. He was lulled by the specious truce with Francebut how would he feel if Captain Wickes captured a royal packet carrying the royal mails? These prospects were bleak enough in December, 1775, but Franklin sent Bonvouloir back with such a rosy report that they immediately improved. The United States, far from asking something for herself, was in reality advancing Bourbon interests and fighting their war. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, under Franklin, engaged agents abroad to explore the possibilities of foreign alliances. He supported his private investment in the American future by using his fleet of a dozen ships for Caribbean trade on the return voyage to France, and this sugar trade brought him profits to invest in more goods for America. America, Franklin retorted, is ready to fight fifty years to win it.. He was to steal all original papers possible from the commissioners, and copy others. Because of the Family Compact, Spain would have to approve the alliance with America, and accordingly Vergenness memoir was sent to Madrid with its proposal for a triple offensive and defensive alliance. Once he was installed as sole envoy in Paris, I should have it in my power to call those to account, through whose hands I know the public money has passed, and which will either never be accounted for, or misaccounted for, by connivance between those, who are to share in the public plunder. Franklin, bobbing a thermometer over the Reprisal s rail to take the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, could think about the life of the sea, this western Atlantic and warm Caribbean which nature had chosen as the home for the new race of Americans. In 1865, Edouard de Laboulaye (a French . Resentful over the loss of its North American empire after the French and Indian War, France welcomed the opportunity to undermine Britain's position in the New World. Delays which were not the fault of Deane and Beaumarchais held up most of the fleet for months after lading. Franklin resolved to break through any limitations put on his mission by Congress. He was evidently buying arms and setting up a smuggling base in the Low Countries. With great fanfare Lee proposed to make Prussia a second France. Yet Franklin had a high opinion of the human race and lofty hopes for his particular segment of it. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. Franklin had already planned his mission to France, where he would be joined by his fellow commissioners, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. The power which first recognizes the independence of the Americans, he said, will be the one to gather all the fruits of this war..

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