Shelburne wrote to George III that Rayneval “appears a Well-Instructed, Inoffensive Man of Business, and makes the most decided Professions on the part of Mons. De Vergennes, whom he states as desirous to expedite everything which can contribute to an Instant and final conclusion.” The king protested: “I owne the Art of Monsr. De Vergennes is so well known that I cannot think he would have sent [Rayneval] if he was an inoffensive Man of Business,” and warned Shelburne that he, George III, would not be the instrument of a “bad peace.” Shelburne pressured the king by dropping hints that ratified George’s belief that the British navy was disintegrating.
* * *
While Shelburne and Rayneval had been meeting, on September 13 a combined Spanish and French force of great size began an assault on Gibraltar. The attacking force included new floating batteries carrying 138 guns, and more than five thousand men, supported by thirty thousand on land and in sixteen ships of the line, and by sixty-six cannons firing from Spanish territory. Those taking part included Louis XVI’s brother and cousin, an indication that France and Spain expected a victory. But British flaming cannonballs sank the floating batteries and exploded Franco-Spanish magazines with such violence that the roar could be heard twenty miles away, deafening the royals for several days, as well as most other members of the Bourbon armed forces. It became clear that Gibraltar would remain in British hands.
In Great Britain this was welcome news, but it upset Shelburne’s peace efforts because it firmed the king’s resolve, and that of the public, to have Great Britain henceforth take a harder line in negotiations with the French and the Americans. Parliament was due to reopen in late November and there was a strong possibility that the MPs would vote out Shelburne’s ministry, and with it the determination to end the war. Before facing a confidence vote, Shelburne wanted a peace treaty in hand.
Gibraltar’s loss was also a problem for the Americans because it could push Madrid to demand recompense for not obtaining Gibraltar—such as lands in the American South and West.
On September 28 Jay wrote Adams that the British had finally changed Oswald’s commission and were now eager to deal with the Americans, and urged Adams to come to Paris. In the interim before he arrived, Jay, pushing hard, got Oswald to initial a paper on which the American southern boundary was fixed, at Jay’s insistence, at the thirty-first parallel north latitude, that is, at the St. Mary’s River border of Georgia and Florida. Similarly the western boundary was put at the Mississippi and the northern boundary at the Nipissing Line, just south of Ontario. The document also deferred the settling of America’s eastern boundary to a joint commission. But it did affirm America’s right to fish off Newfoundland and, of equal importance, its right to dry the fish ashore.
Jay and Franklin were delighted with the document but nervous about its reception in London. They were correct to worry. The proposed treaty arrived just after the good news about Gibraltar’s resistance of the siege, and so the Shelburne cabinet rejected it. A new emissary was sent to Paris along with Oswald. Henry Strachey was thirty years younger than Oswald and a former colonial administrator in India, MP, and high treasury official—a man of broad governmental experience and energy. Strachey’s instructions were to reject American positions on the flashpoints.
Adams arrived in Paris spoiling for a fight. He was so angry at Franklin and Vergennes for prior slights—some real, most imagined—that he delayed visiting Franklin for some days, and Vergennes for three weeks. He wasn’t sure what to expect from Jay, with whom he had had frequent and vehement disagreements in Congress. He mused in his diary, “Between two as subtle Spirits, as any in this World, the one malicious, the other I think honest, I shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical Part to Act. F.s cunning will be to divide Us. To this End he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuver.… J. declares roundly, that he will never set his hand to a bad Peace.”
On October 28 Adams and Jay met, alone, for three hours, and Adams was impressed to learn how obstinately Jay had stood up to both Vergennes and Franklin. As Jay would shortly write to Livingston, he and Adams recognized that “It is not [in France’s] interest that we should become a great and formidable people, and therefore they will not help us become so.” It was in the light of this understanding that Adams and Jay prepared to resume talks with Oswald and Strachey.
They began on November 2 at a dinner at the Hôtel du Roi, with Adams, Jay, Franklin, Oswald, and Strachey. The next day Adams brought a smile to Strachey’s lips when he said that he had no intention of cheating anyone out of his property, and certainly not Loyalists. Shortly Adams made a proposition, with Jay and Franklin’s concurrence: to have Congress recommend to the states just compensation for Loyalists. “The English Gentlemen … were much pleased with it, and with Reason, because it silences the Clamours of all the British Creditors, against the Peace, and prevents them from making common Cause with the [Loyalist] Refugees.”
In his diary Adams repeated the old tale of the eagle and the cat: in a farmer’s yard, the eagle spots what he thinks is a rabbit, and grabs it; once aloft, however, the cat manages to get his claws and teeth around the eagle’s neck. “The Eagle, finding Herself scratched and pressed, bids the Cat let go and fall down. No says the Cat: I wont let go and fall, you shall stoop and set me down.”
Now it was Lafayette’s turn to be involved. Empowered by Congress to aid in any negotiations, so far he had failed to insert himself into the peace talks. But he smoothed the way for Adams to reconnect with Vergennes. Despite their mutual disdain, at this critical juncture they behaved themselves. Adams gave Vergennes a straightforward account of the unilateral negotiations with Great Britain and the three matters of contention, the fisheries, the northeastern boundary, and reparations. He might well have boasted of the research that he had done on those points prior to leaving the United States. When Vergennes seemed to back the British in their call for restitution of property, Adams was able to counter by saying that the British had taken property in Ireland without similar restitution.
Decorum prevailed and Vergennes, in the company of Lafayette at a dinner with Adams, promised the Americans another six million livres. Adams knew he had done something right because he was seated next to Vergennes’s wife and got along well with her, even in his execrable French. Moreover, at this dinner other French nobles paid him what he regarded as the ultimate compliment: “Vous êtes le Washington de la negotiation.”
Adams eventually came to think it was Jay who deserved that accolade, as after that dinner Jay became the leader of a united trio of Americans in the parlays with the British. Franklin, who understood that he would be outvoted if he objected too strongly, was content to play the illness card and agree to his comrades’ strong positions. Meanwhile the parallel negotiations between France and Great Britain continued, with Rayneval making another trip to London. From that city Henry Laurens, now fully free, having been exchanged for Cornwallis, agreed to come to Paris and take up his post as commissioner, as Adams had begged him to do. Laurens’s motivation: “Thank God, I had a son, who dared to die for his Country!”
When Strachey brought back to Paris the British refusal to accept the American ideas on the boundaries and the fisheries, Adams offered a spirited argument: that the haddock so prized by Great Britain and France were spawned on American soil and spent many months in American territorial waters before migrating to the Newfoundland banks. “I said it was the Opinion of all the Fishermen in America that England could not prevent our Catching a fish without preventing themselves from getting a Dollar.… That neither the English nor French could have it. It must be lost if We had it not.” Adams also had research materials showing that Americans had used the banks since the 1763 treaty, with permission, and were not now about to give up that right.
Franklin had a similar killer fact to use in the reparations battle. He was willing, he said, to have America compensate the Loyalists, but contended that Great Britain must be equally willing to compen
sate Americans for freeing slaves and needlessly burning towns and property. Franklin pointed out that his own library in Philadelphia had been looted. He also warned that if the British pushed too hard on compensating the Loyalists—or on the fisheries—or on the United States having free access to navigation on the Mississippi—the American Congress was likely to reject the treaty.
By then Oswald and Strachey had become convinced of the correctness of the American positions, and pledged to urge them on Shelburne. When Laurens joined the talks on November 29, he ratified what Jay, Adams, and Franklin had agreed to and added only one codicil—that Americans had the right to later add to the list of what property had been taken. It was this proposition that, in effect, wedded the final settlement to the continuing right of American citizens to own slaves and for the owners to sue for their loss if the slaves had been lured or taken from them. Adams was grateful for Laurens’s participation, and in his diary also had a few good words for Franklin’s “sagacity.” Actually the final document was the product, almost equally, of efforts by Franklin, Jay, and Adams, a reflection of their willingness to put aside personal antagonisms and concentrate their considerable intelligences on securing for their country the best settlement obtainable in the circumstances.
On November 30 Franklin, Jay, Adams, Laurens, and Oswald all signed the preliminary accord, thus ending the war between Great Britain and the United States.
* * *
Acceptance of the preliminary accord by all the combatants, however, had to wait on the conclusion of the parallel British negotiations with France and Spain. These became as complicated as three long-established monarchies could make them.
Vergennes was amazed at how much the British had conceded to the Americans, telling Rayneval: “The English are purchasing the peace rather than making it. Their concessions in fact … exceed all that I had thought possible.” He urged Rayneval to hasten France’s negotiations with Great Britain, fearing that if the Bourbon kingdoms did not move quickly enough, the generosity of the British settlement with America could turn the combined might of the English-speaking nations against them.
Frederick the Great believed that there was a simple reason why the Europeans had to come to a peace agreement quickly: “The king of Spain needs money and can get none from Holland. The new vingtième [additional tax] France has imposed on the people is not bringing in half what was expected … and as one cannot make war without money, it is to be expected that the end of their resources will be an effective motive for the belligerent powers to want peace.” Louis’s finance minister disagreed with that estimate, writing, “The government’s credit has been maintained beyond all expectations” because the assistance extended by creditors during the war “has given us the means of bearing the burden and making the credit of France more extensive and more solid than it was during the years of peace which preceded the war.” As for Spain, the more significant motivator was their defeat in the attempts to take Gibraltar by force. Spain now said it would give up its claims to Gibraltar only if France and Great Britain proffered something in exchange. “Thank God for Carlos giving up Gibraltar without France ever asking him to do so,” Vergennes sighed with relief. Reinforcing Spain’s continuing power to make war if the new condition was not met was the presence in Cadiz of Admiral d’Estaing at the head of a very large Spanish and French fleet that had plans, drawn by Saavedra, to reinstate the expedition against Jamaica; Lafayette was to join.
A potential Gibraltar trade set off a final six-weeks of negotiations. To reach a comprehensive, three-sided agreement, Rayneval, Aranda, Montmorin, Vergennes, Floridablanca, and Shelburne all had to exceed their instructions and make compromises. In the horse-trading, Gibraltar remained British, while Minorca and the Floridas were left in Spanish hands and British and French recent conquests in the Caribbean were mostly restored to their prewar ownership. France also received back Pondicherry in India and the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland.
* * *
In Paris the Americans learned on December 14 of a preliminary agreement between France and Great Britain, and later in the month of details involving Spain—and of a final six-million-livres loan, given at a time when the French treasury was contemplating default on some of its own obligations.
On January 20, 1783, at Versailles, the American commissioners signed the final accords, along with the representatives of Great Britain, France, and Spain, the latter two also on behalf of the Netherlands. With these signatures, and even though the treaty, including some last-minute alterations, would not be ratified by Congress until the following December, the American Revolutionary War came to a close.
So too did the American connection with France. It had done more for the United States of America than either party to the alliance had initially imagined. France had sustained America by dint of its friendship when most other nations would have little to do with it, and by loans and gifts at times of serious financial difficulties. France had further made possible America’s most significant battlefield victories, the ones that won the war, and had been of enormous help in assuring that the integrity and the independence of the United States of America would continue well into the future.
Epilogue
“After my head falls off, send it to the British, they will pay a good deal for it.” —Comte d’Estaing
1783–1844
Concerning the later lives of the French who were of central importance to the Franco-American connection during the Revolutionary War:
Comte de Barras. After taking Nevis and Montserrat in January 1782, Barras fell ill on Martinique during the Battle of the Saintes. Returning to France in 1783, he was awarded the Croix de Saint-Louis and retired with a pension of four thousand livres a year. As did many of his fellow captains and admirals, he became a founding member of the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati, the American-based, honorary association of officers who had served during the Revolutionary War. In the early days of the French Revolution, his nephew Paul Barras protected him from the retaliation taken by the new government against the nobility and former high military officers. In 1792 he was promoted to vice admiral and died shortly thereafter.
Caron de Beaumarchais. In 1784 Louis XVI lifted the ban on production of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, which became a commercial success and the basis of a Mozart opera. Beaumarchais lost money publishing Voltaire’s complete works but made a fortune providing drinking water to Paris. Making common cause with the Revolution as it began, he obtained recognition of the rights of authors, something he had sought for a dozen years. Elected to the commune of Paris, he nonetheless came under suspicion of trying to profit too much from buying arms for the military, and was imprisoned in 1792. Freed, and while out of the country ostensibly seeking arms for the revolutionary forces, he was declared an enemy of the state and not permitted to return until 1796. He died in 1799, possibly by suicide. The debts he incurred in the service of the American Revolution were partially repaid to his family years later.
Achard de Bonvouloir. In India, after settling the disposition of his papers and taking a final communion, the chevalier died of a tropical illness in 1783.
Florimond du Bouchet. Initially denied membership in the Society of the Cincinnati because he had not served long enough as a field officer, du Bouchet crossed to America and in a special pleading won admission. He continued in the French military. When the French Revolution began, he blamed it on the bad example provided by the American one. His family property was confiscated and his relatives were executed. Upon the defeat of his royalist army, he went into exile. Returning under an 1802 amnesty, he served as Napoleon’s commandant of the Belgian fortresses of Ypres and Breda. In 1814, during the restoration of the French monarchy, he was confirmed as a marquis, promoted to lieutenant general, and retired to complete his memoir. He died in 1826.
Le Ray de Chaumont. The American Revolution bankrupted Chaumont, because the money and credit he had ad
vanced to the Americans, and to France for participation in it, was not repaid properly by either country. To meet obligations he sold his Passy home; his son, with Franklin’s help, did extract partial recompense from the American government. Using some of that repayment the Chaumonts purchased vast tracts in the Adirondacks that the son proceeded to develop, initially as a retreat for the nobility who were under attack in France in the early part of the French Revolution. During that revolution, many remaining Chaumont family assets in France were seized, but Chaumont himself was spared the guillotine despite his continuing close connections with the royal family. He also survived Napoleon’s ascension to power, and died in 1803.
Thomas Conway. Through the intercession of Lafayette, Conway, while serving in India, was included in the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati. After serving as governor general of the French territories in India until 1787, he was appointed head of all the French forces east of Africa, but in 1791 was deemed insufficiently noble-born to be considered for further promotion. Remaining a royalist during the French Revolution, he fought alongside others in southern France. In 1791, when their group was defeated, he escaped to Ireland, land of his birth, where he was made commandant of the Sixth Regiment of the Irish Brigade, a division of the British army. He died in 1795.
Louis Duportail. In 1783 Duportail drew up plans for an American peacetime engineer corps, including an “academy” at West Point modeled on Mezières, and then returned to France. There, transferring to the infantry, he was appointed a brigadier general and later a maréchal de camp, manager of the installations in several important areas. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Duportail occupied a middle ground between the royalists and revolutionaries, and was appointed minister of war, completing a remarkable rise for a man not born to the nobility of the sword. During his tenure as minister he instituted some important reforms in the armed services. Forced out in 1792 by the more radical leaders, he recrossed the Atlantic, bought a farm near Valley Forge, and helped draw up the initial engineering curriculum at West Point. In 1797, during the second Washington Administration, the United States argued that its debts to France had been incurred under a previous French regime and refused to honor them any longer. Outraged, Duportail sought to return home, and in 1802, when Napoleon extended an amnesty offer to all former French military officers, he took ship toward France, but he died while at sea.
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