65. Making Peace

As peace negotiations got under way, it became clear that the diplomatic interests of the powers were drawing apart. France and Spain were less than enchanted about a potentially powerful United States that might eventually ally itself with England; and Spain understandably wished to keep its conquests in the American Southwest. For its part, England, already reconciled to American independence, began to see that a peace settlement favorable to the United States would weaken the dangerous Franco-American alliance and secure a well-disposed country instead of an embittered ex-colony.

After much effort by France, Spain, despite its antipathy to the Revolution, had been induced to enter the war against Britain in the spring of 1779 by the lure of recapturing Gibraltar. The Secret Treaty of Aranjuez between France and Spain in April 1779 had provided for Spain to enter the war, but violated France’s terms of alliance with the United States by not insisting on American independence as a condition of peace. Furthermore, Spain flatly refused to recognize the independence of the United States, although it did send an envoy to the States who masqueraded as an “observer.” And, as we have seen, Spain provided aid and supplies to the American cause.

The most advanced doctrines of international law, set forth most recently in the American plan of 1776 and the Franco-American treaty of 1778, made neutral shipping in wartime free from seizure except for contraband, which was strictly limited to munitions. England, however, insisted on a far more restricted view of neutrals’ rights, and especially on the inclusion of naval stores (e.g., timber) in the category of contraband. Goaded beyond endurance, the major European neutral powers banded together in a League of Armed Neutrality. The league began on February 28, 1780, when the mercurial Empress Catherine II of Russia, after urging by France, issued a declaration setting forth the most advanced principles of neutrals’ rights and promising the use of the Russian navy to defend Russian rights. Even more important, Catherine invited other European neutrals to enter into conventions with her to enforce this code. Denmark and Sweden accepted by August 1780, and their bilateral conventions were forged into a tripartite alliance for protection of their common rights —rights, incidentally, which Spain but not England promptly pledged to accept. The Netherlands joined the Armed Neutrality in early January 1781. Britain, already enraged at the lucrative Dutch shipping and financial dealings with the United States, fell upon the Dutch at the end of 1780 in retaliation before Russian and other league ships could begin to protect the Dutch trade with America. At war, the Dutch were ironically deprived of the benefits of membership in the League of Armed Neutrality. Other powers joining the league later in the war were Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and the Two Sicilies. While the league did not exert armed weight against Britain, its very existence served as a useful deterrent to British depredations of their shipping, and it served to isolate and weaken Britain’s position in Europe and the world.

In July 1780, John Adams was appointed negotiator with the Netherlands, where he was able, in April 1782, to win Dutch recognition of the independence of the United States. Now minister to the Netherlands, Adams was able to negotiate a sizable loan from Amsterdam bankers, and, in October, a treaty of amity and commerce between the Netherlands and the United States. This agreement was modelled on the French treaty, and affirmed the libertarian principles of neutrals’ rights declared in the previous treaty and in many other recent documents (including the Declaration of Armed Neutrality).

Spain’s entry into the war in 1779 promptly highlighted an important problem with the future peace negotiations: What would be the territory of the new United States of America? East of the Appalachians there was no problem; the Americans would be recognized as holding the territory of the thirteen states. But what of the large and scarcely occupied lands of the West? Would America be granted these? Spain, with its vast empire over Central and South America, its large territory of Louisiana, and an acquisitive eye on Florida and the Southwest, was keenly—and negatively —interested in the possibilities of westward expansion of the United States. Rational principles of justice would have dictated that U.S. territory encompass settler lands and only a little more. This would have given to the U.S. only the territory east of the Appalachians and the settlements in Kentucky. Surely there was no valid reason for giving the Americans the territory north of the Ohio, which was sparsely settled by Frenchmen, militarily controlled by Britain, and peopled by Indians; and the area south of Kentucky was also populated by Indians and now militarily occupied by Spain.

The other issue with Spain was a corollary to the western land problem: navigation rights down the Mississippi. If the United States had received little or no land in the West, as was its just due, the Mississippi navigation problem would have been academic, since Spain, at New Orleans, controlled at the very least the mouth of the river and there would have been little American use of the Mississippi. Even at its most pressing, however, any demand by the U.S. for freedom to navigate the Mississippi would be highly presumptuous; freedom to trade or navigate is pleasant and beneficial, of course, but any such demand is aggressive behavior when made of one State by another.

America’s first statement of its peace terms came in 1779 in response to a Spanish offer to mediate the conflict before she entered the war: an offer that failed because of the intransigence of George III. The urging of France to define peace terms brought the Congress to a spirited five-month debate (March-August 1779), at which Conrad Gérard, the French minister to the United States, used his considerable influence to try to induce the Americans to moderate their aggressive demands for the Mississippi as their western boundary and their old colonial right of access to the Newfoundland fisheries. Actually, the fishing rights spurred the most acrimonious debate, with New England and such radicals as Richard Henry Lee pressing an aggressive demand that war be pursued until the American right to the Newfoundland fisheries be guaranteed. France, of course, had no intention of fighting to the last for this arrogant claim, and neither did the southern delegates. Thomas Burke, himself a radical, spoke only common sense when he berated the New Englanders and announced his aim “to prevent any obstruction to peace but such as were unavoidable.”

The split between radical and conservative factions in Congress had, indeed, been precipitated by the establishment of diplomatic relations with France the year before. Shortly after ratification of the Franco-American treaty in the spring of 1778, the French sent Conrad Gérard as full-fledged minister to the United States, where he arrived in mid-July. America had been represented in France by a three-man commission. The commission originally consisted of Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, and there soon developed a bitter split: Connecticut’s ultra-conservative (and eventually Tory) Silas Deane and the opportunistic hedonist Franklin on the one side, and the radical Arthur Lee on the other. Lee was particularly bitter at Deane’s massive peculations at the public trough of war aid and war contracts. In particular, Lee insisted on telling the truth that French aid through Beaumarchais was intended as a gift, whereas Deane and Franklin persisted in treating Beaumarchais as a legitimate merchant whom the Americans must repay. Lee cut to the heart of the matter in disclosing Deane’s and Franklin’s intimate business dealings with Beaumarchais, as part of their pattern of plunder of the American taxpayer.

When Deane was replaced by John Adams in 1778 and recalled to face Congressional inquiry, with minister Gérard ostentatiously siding with him, Congress rapidly split into two factions. The radical Adams-Lee “junto”—John and Sam Adams and Arthur and Richard Henry Lee—was pitted against Robert Morris and the conservatives. The major issue was whether Morris and his fellow oligarchs had the natural right to wax fat at the public trough, with little or no obligation to make an accounting to the public.

Gleefully entering the fray was Thomas Paine, who had been secretary to Congress’ Committee of Foreign Affairs, which in turn had evolved out of the old Secret Committee of Correspondence in April 1777. Paine blasted the peculations and irregularities of accounts of Deane and, beyond him, of Morris, and also attacked the system of interlocking public-private finance and of public officials engaging in private trade that made the financial irregularities possible. He accurately termed these officials “monopolizers,” and trenchantly added that

one monopolizer confederates with another, and defaulter with defaulter,... yet still these men will talk of justice.... That private vice should thus put on the mask of public good, and even imprudence in guilt assume the style of patriotism, are paradoxes....

Joining Paine in a press war over the Deane affair were Henry Laurens, the Lees, and the Pennsylvania radicals Timothy Matlack, David Ritten-house, and Charles Willson Peale, while Robert and Gouverneur Morris and William Duer defended Deane.

The result of this storm in Congress during 1778–79 was what all too often happens in such brawls: the decimation of the leaders of both sides. Grave irregularities being found in his accounts, Deane was implicitly repudiated by Congress and openly defected to the British side. Morris prudently left Congress and devoted himself solely to his commercial empire. Paine was forced to resign as secretary of the committee for disclosing state secrets in his zeal to expose the truth about Deane. France and Spain declared Arthur Lee persona non grata; His diplomatic career shattered, he became a congressman from Virginia and there led in the suspicion of France as an untrustworthy ally.

Characteristically, the one man who emerged from the fracas with laurels was wily old Franklin. When Gérard was sent as the French minister to the U.S., America had to appoint its own minister to France. With Deane gone, the old opportunist was the favorite of the French court, and France put severe pressure upon Congress to appoint him. A wave of laudatory propaganda by France poured into Congress, and lavish loans were pointedly made by the French to the United States through Franklin. Richard Henry Lee slashingly and trenchantly announced his disgust at Franklin as a “wicked old man” who labored “under the idea of his being a philosopher.”* Nevertheless, in mid-September 1778, Congress appointed him minister to France, but by a slender majority.

During the crucial 1779 session of Congress, the Adams-Lee radicals led the fight for maximum aggressiveness in peace demands and opposed Gérard’s attempts to moderate these demands on behalf of French and Spanish interests. Finally, on August 14, after much squabbling among the factions, Congress agreed to the following peace terms as a minimum: independence, the Mississippi as the western boundary of the new nation, and the thirty-first parallel as the southern frontier of the American West. (It was assumed that Spain would demand East and West Florida, and the thirty-first parallel would grant the United States a large chunk of West Florida south of the mouth of the Yazoo River.) Gérard had been able to moderate the fishing and Mississippi navigation terms and the American drive to seize Canada and Nova Scotia to the status of conditional rather than absolute demands.

In return for moderating their aggressive demands, the radicals expected to be able to name the minister plenipotentiary who would have the power to negotiate a peace based upon these terms. The radicals wanted Arthur Lee, but his support was too slight, and they were forced to swing their strength to John Adams, whom they vastly preferred to his rival, conservative New York oligarch John Jay. Finally, on September 27, 1779, John Adams, an independent man strongly disliked by the French, was chosen by Congress as its negotiator for peace.

France now launched a quiet but effective campaign to pressure and suborn the American Congress, a campaign led in the United States by the wily new French minister, the Chevalier de La Luzerne. During early 1781, when the war news was gloomy for the allies, Vergennes quietly prepared to betray America by being willing to settle for a truce based on existing military lines. He was prepared to use an Austro-Russian offer of mediation in the conflict to put this scheme into effect, and his pressure and quiet bribery weakened Congress’ stand. Much of his influence on Congress was exerted through the well-known Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire, who was on his secret payroll. La Luzerne’s pressure and quiet bribery succeeded, by late 1781, in getting Congress to name his friend, the conservative New York oligarch Robert R. Livingston, to the vital new post of secretary of foreign affairs. After a studied campaign of calumny against John Adams, the French were able to induce Congress to replace him with a five-man commission to conduct the peace negotiations. In addition to Adams, the commission would consist of Franklin, John Jay, who had been negotiating in Spain, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson was not able to leave for Europe in time, and Laurens was a prisoner in England, and so this left the conservatives Franklin and Jay as a majority on the commission.

La Luzerne’s pressure also succeeded, on June 15, 1781, in drastically modifying the American stance on peace. Congress rescinded its 1779 peace terms, and only independence remained as the minimum demand for making peace. Apart from independence, the commission had absolute discretion to make whatever terms they wished, with the amazing proviso that no action could be taken without the “knowledge and concurrence” of the French, whose advice should be ultimately followed by the commission. It seemed that America was binding itself to French dictation, and the composition of the new commission, as well as the identity of the new foreign secretary, confirmed this view. The stunned congressman James Lovell wrote to John Adams of these new instructions: “Blush, blush America.” After the Battle of Yorktown, Arthur Lee tried to get Congress to rescind these instructions, but it continued to cling heavily to an absolute trust that Vergennes would be ever vigilant in the pursuit of American interests!

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.