American Crisis

by William M. Fowler Jr.

  With that brief reply Congress gave permission for him to depart.

  Washington understood that in all likelihood “duty” would not call until the spring. Rarely did eighteenth-century armies undertake winter campaigns. With the notable exceptions of his two victories at Trenton (December 26, 1776) and Princeton (January 3, 1777) the American army, like its British counterpart, spent winters encamped and inactive. Having endured winters at Morristown and Valley Forge, the Washingtons would have looked forward to spending the cold months amid the comforts and company of friends in Philadelphia. The commander in chief decided to remain in the city while the army took up winter quarters along the Hudson River.16

  What might have been less appealing to the general and his wife was facing the steady stream of people who made their way to Chew House. On Thursday November 29, the day following his first visit to Congress, a delegation from the Pennsylvania Assembly, led by Speaker Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, arrived to present an address.17 Muhlenberg’s visit set a pattern. Over the next several weeks a long train of people and organizations, faculty from the University of Pennsylvania, magistrates of the city, officers of the American Philosophical Society, and others, came to honor the general. In each case Washington returned the favor with remarks prepared by his hardworking aides Jonathan Trumbull Jr. and Tench Tilghman. Evenings too were filled with moments of accolades. The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick saluted him at an elegant dinner held at the City Tavern, and on at least one occasion a theatrical production was performed in his honor. One day, to escape the tedious routine of receiving and replying to addresses, Washington rode a few miles out to Frankford to engage in his favorite pastime, riding on the hunt.18

  Washington remained in Philadelphia four months (November 26, 1781–March 22, 1782). Only twice during that period did he attend a session of Congress: when he arrived in the city and when he left. His absence from public sessions mattered little, for the real business of governance was being handled in private.

  Monday evenings after Congress adjourned for the day, Washington met with the secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Robert R. Livingston, Secretary at War Benjamin Lincoln, Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, and his assistant Gouverneur Morris (no relation to Robert) at Robert Morris’s elegant home on Market Street. (This house was once occupied by Richard Penn as well as General Sir William Howe during the British occupation.) The stately three-story brick home was only a few blocks from Independence Hall.19 Their host was, next to Washington, the most powerful man in America. As light as the public purse was, he nonetheless held the strings. Morris was a self-made man. In the prewar years he had been one of Philadelphia’s most successful merchants. Although he allied himself early with the patriot cause, he was a cool Whig, among the minority in the Congress who initially sidestepped signing the Declaration of Independence. He waited a month and then added his signature with the following comment: “Although the councils of America have taken a different course from my judgment wishes, I think that the individual who declines the service of his country because its councils are not comfortable to his ideas makes but a bad subject; a good one will follow if he cannot lead.”20

  Morris was a controversial figure. At a time when the line between public and private finance was vague, the superintendent of finance often crossed over between the two worlds and comingled affairs. Just as they had heaped opprobrium on Silas Deane for his machinations, many of the “old revolutionaries” disdained Morris for what they viewed as equally corrupt behavior.

  Morris’s assistant, Gouverneur Morris, was a wealthy New Yorker. Elected to the Continental Congress, Morris was of enormous assistance to Washington during the Valley Forge encampment in helping to straighten out the army’s tangled logistics. At home, however, he fell out of step with his New York constituency when he insisted on the need to enlarge the powers of Congress at the expense of the states. Defeated for reelection in 1779, he opted to remain in Philadelphia, where he entered into a business partnership with Robert Morris. A notorious rake—“I like only the yielding kiss and that from lips I love”—Morris had shattered and lost his leg in 1780 when, according to rumor, he jumped out of a bedroom window to avoid his lover’s returning husband.21 His peg leg did little to restrain him or change his habits. At six feet and plump, he was an imposing figure. The talented and arrogant Morris once boasted that he “never knew the sensations of fear, embarrassment, or inferiority.” His congressional colleague, New Hampshire’s Josiah Bartlett, agreed, noting that Morris was “for brass equal to any [he was] acquainted with.”22 Morris was a fervent nationalist. In an unguarded moment following the siege at Yorktown, he revealed his sympathies to General Nathanael Greene. He feared peace more than war.

  I say if the War continues for if it does not I have no Hope, No expectation that the Government will acquire Force and I will go farther I have no Hope that our Union can subsist except in the Form of an absolute Monarchy and this does not seem to consist with the Taste and Temper of the People. The necessary Consequence if I am Right is that a Separation must take Place and consequently Wars, for near Neighbours are very rarely if ever good Neighbours.23

  Another key figure at the meetings was Charles Thomson. Born in Londonderry, Ulster, he arrived in Philadelphia as a ten-year-old orphan in 1739. Despite his poor beginnings he managed to garner an education and as a young man displayed considerable political skill in the hurly-burly of Pennsylvania politics. During the turmoil leading up to the Revolution he allied himself with Benjamin Franklin and took a leading role in resisting royal authority. John Adams, who knew and admired Thomson, once called him the “Samuel Adams of Philadelphia.” Thomson married into a wealthy Quaker family and was a close associate of Robert Morris’s. The First Continental Congress elected him secretary, a post he held for the next fifteen years. For its entire existence Thomson was the Continental and Confederation Congress’s chief bureaucrat. He knew more about the body, its members, and its workings than any other person in America.

  Rounding out the table at the Monday night gatherings was Robert R. Livingston, another wealthy New York lawyer whose family possessed large estates along the Hudson. Notwithstanding his service on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, he left Congress in 1776 to reenter New York politics and became chancellor, the state’s highest judicial position. He returned to Congress in 1779 and accepted the post of secretary of foreign affairs in 1781. He favored a strong central government.

  Washington and Lincoln were the only military officers at the table. From Hingham, Massachusetts, Lincoln had risen in the local militia ranks and joined the Continental army in 1776. Washington met Lincoln during the siege of Boston and described him as “an abler and more industrious man than his great bulk and his loose jowls would indicate.”24 In 1777 Lincoln was commissioned a major general; in 1781 Congress appointed him secretary at war while also allowing him to keep his commission as major general.25 Lincoln and Washington had watched their men suffer pain and defeat firsthand. They knew the dangers of a weak Congress. Personal experience made them advocates for strong government.

  It was a congenial, convivial, and politically like-minded group. These men were nationalists with a continental vision who were increasingly impatient with a Congress bound tightly by states whose parsimony and parochialism put victory at risk and made their hope of a strong nation increasingly unlikely. The Revolution had taken them to heights from which they could see beyond their own local interests to envision a “rising empire” of united states. Their hopes, however, were tempered by the fear that the centrifugal forces of localism would overcome the centripetal force of revolution. Only a stronger union, cemented by a reinvigorated Congress, could ensure independence and preserve the nation. They understood that in spite of the fact that the recently approved Articles of Confederation gave structure to the new government, now titled “The United States in Congress Assembled,” the sinews of power were a
s feeble as ever. The Articles had done nothing to provide Congress with what it needed most: an independent source of income.26 The states, Washington insisted, must not “sitt themselves down in quiet.”27 His dinner companions agreed “that to make a good peace you ought to be well prepared to carry on the war.”28

  To do so, Congress desperately needed French aid. Always anxious to wipe away the disgrace of 1776 when he had been driven off Manhattan, Washington pushed for French naval support to launch a joint attack against New York City. “Without a naval force we can do nothing,” Washington wrote to Lafayette in November 1781, urging him to use his influence with the French court to provide ships.29 De Grasse’s departure for the West Indies after the battle at Yorktown crushed that plan, and by the New Year hope of French support grew ever dimmer. For both the French and the British, the strategic focus of the war had shifted to the Caribbean, the cockpit of war between these two superpowers. There was no chance that the French would risk their position in islands so rich in sugarcane by diverting squadrons to North America. Hobbled without support from the sea, Washington was stymied but not defeated, for the British were in no position to attack him either. In this parlous moment the greatest danger to the American cause was not from without but from within. The government of the United States was on the verge of financial collapse. The nation might survive without the French navy, but without French gold the weak republic faced bankruptcy.

  French support to Congress, albeit in secret, had begun in 1776. A stream of supplies and money that began as a trickle rose to a torrent after the French alliance in 1778, and by 1781, a time when domestic finances had become ruinous, French money was the principal brace preventing a complete economic collapse.

  Ironically, while Congress was close to penury, the American nation as a whole was not. To be sure, the war had exacted a heavy toll. The ongoing enemy occupation of the ports of New York City and Charleston laid a dead hand on commerce in those regions, as did the Royal Navy’s prowling cruisers and privateers along the coasts and on the high seas. No blockade is ever complete, and imports into America remained remarkably strong, while exports fell into a steep decline, making it increasingly difficult to find remittances to pay foreign debts. Concurrently, shipbuilding had virtually disappeared, fishing was in turmoil, and trade with the Indians in the West had halted.30

  Yet despite these disruptions, large areas of the colonies were, and had been for a good part of the war, relatively free from enemy attack and occupation. Many ports hit hard by the collapse of exports managed to find prosperity in privateering. Cut off from foreign imports and markets, many communities looked inward and diverted resources to local productions. None of these activities compensated fully for the domestic disruption caused by the war, but at the same time the states did have resources. The problem was they refused to share them with the central government. As the war dragged on and patriotic enthusiasm waned, the problem had grown more acute. State support had dropped off precipitously.31

  Over imported wine and fine food Robert Morris and his Monday night companions complained about and condemned the behavior of the states. Morris was particularly annoyed. For more than six years Congress had financed the war by authorizing paper money to a sum of more than 200 million dollars. Since Congress had no regular source of income other than requests to the states which often went unanswered, the value of the paper depended entirely on public faith in the Congress. As faith declined, the money collapsed. Morris was doing all that he could to keep the financial ship of state afloat. To do that, he played one creditor off another. Angry creditors literally came to his door insisting on payment. When he refused them admittance they stormed away in “great wrath.”32 Morris’s only hope, and the nation’s, was more foreign loans. In near desperation Gouverneur Morris wrote to John Jay, the American minister in Spain, asking him to approach the Spanish Court and “for Heaven’s sake convince them of the Necessity [of ] giving us Money.”33 At the same time Jay’s colleague John Adams was at The Hague seeking assistance from the Dutch.34 It would take a few months, but eventually the burghers agreed to a loan. Jay had no such luck in Madrid. While awaiting news from Adams and Jay, Morris turned to the French.

  Banking on the hope that loss of the thirteen colonies would deal a heavy blow to its perpetual enemy Great Britain, France had invested heavily in American independence. It had dispatched money, ships, and soldiers across the Atlantic. By the end of 1781 the war had cost France an immense sum of money, and though the French might take pride in their role in American victories, thus far they had gotten little out of them except the satisfaction of beating the British.

  Pleasing the French was vital, and so maintaining a cordial relationship with the Chevalier de la Luzerne, the French minister to America, was critical. Luzerne, along with his secretary and translator, François Barbé-Marbois, had been in America since the fall of 1779, when the pair had traveled across the Atlantic on board the frigate Sensible, accompanied by John Adams and his young son John Quincy, bound home from Paris. During the voyage, for the moment at least, Adams set his Francophobia aside and took a liking to Barbé-Marbois, describing him as a “tall genteel man” whose English was fair enough so that he “fell down the stream” of conversation with him “as easily as possible.”35 Luzerne received less notice. His English was as lacking as Adams’s French. After arriving in Boston, the two French diplomats took a month to make their way in a leisurely fashion to Philadelphia. En route they spent two days with Washington at his headquarters. Barbé-Marbois practically deified the commander in chief: Washington was “noble,” “modest,” “well built,” “thin,” “even tempered,” “tranquil,” “orderly,” and “polite.” “He makes no pretentions, and does the honors of his house with dignity, but without pompousness or flattery.”36

  In Congress attention was on Luzerne. His predecessor, Conrad Alexandre Gérard, had left a scent of ill will on his departure. During his tenure in Philadelphia debates in Congress over what the proposed terms of peace ought to be had revealed serious differences between France and America. Gérard had been urgently defending the interests of his nation. Some members of Congress, in particular New Englanders, aligned with Virginia delegates, had become increasingly suspicious of French motives, fearing that European power politics were overwhelming American interests.

  Luzerne, a man of considerable charm, did a good deal to erase suspicions between the two allies. Adams, however, who had returned to France late in 1779 as a commissioner to negotiate peace, remained a thorn in the French side. In the eyes of the French he was one of the principal causes of strain between the two allies. Adams, in their opinion, was too independent and free thinking (that is, anti-French). During the spring of 1781, following the instructions of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, Luzerne pressured Congress to restrain the obnoxious Adams, who had crossed swords with Vergennes on numerous points. Previously the minister had tried to get him recalled, but that effort failed. If Adams could not be recalled, perhaps he could be marginalized, and so Vergennes ordered Luzerne to do all that he could to undermine Adams and persuade Congress to limit his role.37 Luzerne played his part with exceptional skill. In June 1781 Congress instructed the American ministers in Paris “to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally the king of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace without their knowledge and concurrence.”38

  Sensing the displeasure of the French, another American commissioner, Benjamin Franklin, warned his colleagues in Philadelphia of France’s growing weariness at the Congress’s incessant requests for money.39 Luzerne echoed the message and in private told Robert Morris that the French court ought not to be expected to do for America what the Americans refused to do for themselves. The states, he argued pointedly and correctly, ignored Congress’s requests for support. Why should France send money if the states would not?

  Morris, whose sympathies in thi
s matter were almost certainly closer to those of Luzerne than to the recalcitrant states, responded to the chevalier with a history lesson. “Taxation requires Time in all Governments and is to be perfected only by long Experience in any Country. America divided as it is into a Society of free States possessing sovereign Power to all domestic purposes, cannot therefore be suddenly brought to pay.” He went on to say that whatever the war was costing France, it was clearly less than the financial toll it was taking on the British. The French were, in Morris’s estimation, getting good value for their investment.40

  Morris’s riposte did little to assuage Luzerne. He responded almost immediately with an equally testy rejoinder. He told the financier: “[I do not] think my Court will find in [your arguments] sufficient reasons to change their resolution … after the great success which has crowned the allied armies, the king has a right to expect some exhausting efforts on the part of the United States.”41 This was no time for subtle diplomatic language. The armies and navies of France were fighting around the world at great cost while America was in a state of inaction.

  While a soft answer might have assuaged the chevalier’s wrath, it would have also masked the real American crisis. Always in the back of French minds was the concern that Congress might make a separate peace unfavorable to France. The possibility of financial collapse made that specter seem more real. Morris understood this and decided to take a hard stand. In a tone that can only be termed impertinent, he told Luzerne that while he was sympathetic to the financial cost to France, it was of no consequence to him. “As to the mode in which [support is sent], His Majesty’s convenience and the Situation of affairs will best determine it. I wish to receive Pecuniary Aid and when I consider the Importance I am led to expect it.”42