Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by Sarah Vowell

  Of course the finest expression of how the colonists had turned on the king was the Declaration of Independence, approved the following July. Thomas Jefferson singled out George III, proclaiming, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” More important, all of Jefferson’s specific digs at the king were preceded by one self-evident fact that obliterated any and all justifications for monarchy, aristocracy, and colonialism until the end of time, even though neither its author nor his comrades truly believed it: All men are created equal.

  A few true-blue moderates still clung to a futile hope for reconciliation with Britain when Bonvouloir, the French foreign minister’s spy, arrived in Philadelphia at the end of 1775. But to any objective observer, much less an Anglophobic Frenchman hoping to chat up Ben Franklin, most colonists’ commitment to prolonging the war seemed like a safe bet.

  Whether or not they could win was another question. When Bonvouloir enlisted a Frenchman living in Philadelphia to introduce him to Franklin, Franklin feared that the stranger could be a British double agent. However, he was curious and desperate enough to get past these suspicions. Franklin and his fellow Secret Committee member John Jay met with Bonvouloir in Carpenters’ Hall on Chestnut Street. Bonvouloir reported back to Vergennes that the Americans were bully for war, overestimating troop levels of fifty thousand men. (There were less than half that.) Writing to the French ambassador in London, Bonvouloir summed up the patriots’ ardor: “The enemy will have to chop them to bits before they will surrender.”

  In a letter to Vergennes, Bonvouloir reassured the foreign minister that while he had made no promises on behalf of France, the Americans “asked me if France would help them, and at what price. I replied that I believed France wished them well” (italics in original).

  Consequently, Vergennes was reassured that the Americans were committed to war and that their chances for victory were not entirely hopeless. Also, the Committee of Secret Correspondence shipped Silas Deane to Paris to find out if these French well wishes included things like actual artillery.

  Upon receiving this report and reflecting further on Beaumarchais’s arguments, in March of 1776 Vergennes sat down and wrote a position paper for Louis XVI he titled “Considerations on the Affairs of the English Colonies in America.” “Considered” is the word for this measured, obsequious memo. Vergennes flattered the king, pointing out that Louis was far too wise to get swept up in rash acts of vengeance against Great Britain, even though Britain deserved comeuppance, what with “the evils which since the commencement of the century she has inflicted on those who have had the misfortune to be her neighbors or her rivals.”

  Vergennes proposed clandestine aid to the rebels to avoid stirring up an overt war with Britain and to shore up the enemy of France’s enemy, advising, “The courage of the Americans might be kept up by secret favors and vague hopes.” He specifically suggested sending them covert “military stores and money” for the time being but warned against going public and making an official treaty with the insurgents until “the liberty of English America shall have acquired consistency.” In other words, they should not stumble into another war with Britain until the Americans prove themselves.

  Because these words convinced Louis XVI to open his heart and, more important, his wallet to the patriots, Vergennes’s memo arguably had as much practical effect on the establishment of American independence as the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder.

  That said, the clairvoyant counterargument France’s comptroller general of finance offered to Louis XVI is a far more riveting read. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot had had some success in reducing France’s budget deficit by slashing government spending. But he was increasingly unpopular among all social classes for some of his other innovative ideas, including his desire to tax the traditionally untaxed aristocracy, his brainstorm about replacing the power of skilled laborers’ guilds with a free market approach, and his monkeying with grain pricing during bad harvests that sparked the “flour wars,” for which he was, justifiably or not, blamed.

  While the foreign minister Vergennes understood the value of wasting a few paragraphs stroking the king’s ego before coaxing the king into doing his bidding, Turgot’s blunt missives to Louis tended to include rash insults, such as “You are too young to judge men and you have yourself said, Sire, that you lack experience and need a guide.” In fact, Turgot’s memo on the English colonies in America was his last state document. Having alienated the king, the aristocracy, the middle classes, and the poor, Turgot was forced to resign.

  It seems obvious that the economist in charge of bandaging France’s bleeding finances would oppose the French monarch’s spending money he didn’t have to help out some transatlantic anti-monarchist punks. But Turgot’s message recommending the king steer clear of the American rebellion is fascinating because it is levelheaded, openhearted, and eerily prophetic all at once.

  Turgot was friends with the philosophes like Diderot and Voltaire and even contributed anonymous articles on existence and etymology to the great group project of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia. After his postwar diplomatic stint in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, an admirer of Turgot’s writings on economic theory, would lug home a bust of Turgot, along with those of Voltaire and Lafayette, to display at Monticello.

  The reasons Turgot rejected helping the Americans still bear the stamp and sympathies of the Age of Reason. He predicted that colonial independence in general was inevitable and just, especially American independence, remarking on the patriots, “Their will can never be broken.”

  He went on to speculate that all mother countries that continued to exploit and oppress their colonies would someday “see their colonies escape them all the same, and become their enemies instead of remaining their allies.” (This is, for instance, exactly what would happen to the French in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, when Viet Minh revolutionaries defeated French forces in northwestern Vietnam, the beginning of the end of French rule in Indochina.)

  Turgot also had nothing but respect for the “prudence” of the American leadership, especially Franklin, commending “the enlightenment diffused among them.” He even had the foresight to envision postwar stability, anticipating that the rebels would “give a solid form to their government, and that consequently they will love peace and seek to preserve it.”

  However, as Turgot noted: “The king knows the situation of his finances.” There was, for starters, a budget deficit of twenty million livres. “By making premature use of our strength,” he said, referring to sending weapons and whatnot to the Americans, “we risk the perpetuating of our weakness,” meaning the financial weakness of the national debt, which a few years later would saddle the king’s wife, Marie Antoinette, with the nickname “Madame Deficit.” France would go on to spend more than one billion livres on the Americans.

  Just as he was dead-on about the eventual stability of America’s postwar government and the dangers of colonial powers ignoring colonists’ understandable desire for independence, Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: “War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people.”

  In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.

  The best place to mull over Turgot’s unheeded warnings is Paris, in the cold marble silence of the Chapelle Expiatoire (Chapel of Atonement). Its domed sanctuary, built over the mass grave where Louis and Marie Antoinette and hundreds of other casualties of the guillotine were
buried, was conceived in the monarchs’ honor. After the revolution, the king and queen were eventually dug up and reinterred in the traditional royal resting place at Saint-Denis, but the other remains remain, including a mistress of Louis XV and the assassin Charlotte Corday. While the chapel is cool and quiet and built in a Napoleonic neoclassical style my teenage nephew would categorize as “classy,” it is one of the few places in Gay Paree where a visitor can stand still and absorb the gravity and barbarity of what happened there, picturing the heaps of skull-less skeletons beneath her feet. Staring at the floor, I thought of the Parisian protesters’ whimsical slogan of May 1968: Under the cobblestones, the beach. The Chapelle Expiatoire represents the grim archaeological truth: under the marble, the bones.

  At least for his efforts on behalf of Americans, the foreign minister Vergennes got a town in Vermont named after him. All Louis XVI got was his head chopped off.

  Once Louis XVI agreed to Vergennes’s proposal to secretly back the Americans, Vergennes assigned Beaumarchais to solve how to do it without the British finding out. The playwright scripted a scheme in which the king would pay Beaumarchais to set up a fake company under a false identity and use half the money to buy the government’s surplus weapons and other equipment gathering dust from the Seven Years’ War (in other words, use the king’s money to pay the king for his own stuff). Then Beaumarchais proposed to lend the other half of the money to the Americans, who would use it to buy more surplus French equipment from the dummied-up business and hopefully repay the loan with tobacco and other American exports. To throw off the English, the goods could be transferred via the French colonies in the Caribbean if need be, and no one other than the king, the foreign minister, and the playwright would know the whole truth. The king was so amused by the kooky plan, he decided to convince his cousin the king of Spain to pitch in as well.

  “We are secretly giving you a million francs,” Vergennes informed Beaumarchais. “We shall get Spain to contribute an equal sum.” Thus Beaumarchais gave his phony business a Spanish name, Rodrige Hortalez & Company. In June of 1776, Vergennes issued the promised million francs to the fictional Spaniard’s firm, a sum doubled a few weeks later when Spanish matching funds arrived. Beaumarchais rented an elaborate office in the Marais district of Paris, though he was obviously the only one who ever laid eyes on the illusive “Monsieur Hortalez.”

  When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before. Steven scrolled through his phone to show me the photo he had taken on a previous trip of me standing in front of the former Rodrigue Hortalez & Company portal, sticking out my tongue to mimic the intricately carved tongue-wagging figure on the door. I wonder if Beaumarchais smiled every time he passed by the smart-alecky carving before going inside and performing both parts of loud, hammy conversations with “Monsieur Hortalez” behind closed doors.

  When Silas Deane showed up at Versailles in July of 1776 asking Vergennes to secretly supply the Americans when Vergennes had just passed along money to Beaumarchais to secretly supply the Americans, Vergennes smiled and shooed Deane away from his office lest the English get wind. He then dispatched Beaumarchais to Deane’s doorstep to inform the congressional representative that clandestine help would soon be on the way.

  As Beaumarchais began to track down cannons and cannonballs, that August an ominous and unprecedented British armada of 450 ships and boats carrying forty-five thousand British soldiers and sailors, as well as the rented Germanic troops known as the Hessians (of Headless Horseman fame), assembled in New York Harbor under the command of the siblings Admiral Lord Richard “Black Dick” Howe and his little brother General Sir William Howe. One eyewitness in New York City marveled that the waterfront was so overstuffed with terrifying British vessels, saying, “I declare I thought all London was afloat.”

  As Beaumarchais gathered blankets and grenades in France, William Howe’s redcoats came ashore and slaughtered Washington’s forces on Long Island, in Brooklyn, and then in Manhattan. A humiliated Washington could do nothing to stop his troops’ shoddy retreat from Kips Bay, swatting at them with his horsewhip and howling, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”

  They skedaddled north, only to lose the Battle of White Plains in Westchester County. Then on November 16, from across the Hudson River, Washington watched the fall of his namesake Fort Washington, the last American refuge in Manhattan, delivering unto the enemy nearly three thousand American prisoners of war in a single afternoon. New York City was lost for the rest of the war. Manhattan was not only the British headquarters and naval base for the next seven years; its waterfront was also the home of the diabolical prison ships in which skeletal POWs resorted to eating the lice off their skin once they ran out of rats. Nearly twelve thousand of them perished of disease and malnutrition—more than died in combat at all the actual battles of the war combined.

  By December, Beaumarchais’s muskets, tents, and shovels, not to mention nearly three hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder, were piling up promisingly in French ports—unbeknownst to the miserable, beaten-down patriot troops huddled around New Jersey listening to Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet The American Crisis being read aloud. It began, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

  Beaumarchais went incognito to the port of Le Havre to oversee his top-secret cargo being loaded onto ships. He arrived under an assumed name, planning to keep a low profile. That is, until he discovered the local thespians botching a production of The Barber of Seville. Enraged at the lame state of his play, Beaumarchais unmasked himself and demanded to start running rehearsals, going back and forth from the docks to the theater, barking at actors and stevedores alike.

  When my playwright friend Sherm and I see a reproduction of one of the cannons sent by Beaumarchais on view at Monmouth Battlefield State Park, I question Beaumarchais’s priorities. That he blew his cover as an arms dealer to tweak a provincial production makes perfect sense to Sherm, though. His only concern for his fellow dramatist is, “How did that production of The Barber of Seville turn out once he’d tinkered with it?”

  The British were well aware of Beaumarchais’s plot because their secret agent Edward Bancroft had gotten the handy job of being Silas Deane’s secretary in Paris. But the Brits could not act on this intel without exposing their valuable inside man. That is, until London heard from its other spies in Le Havre about the Beaumarchais shenanigans. The British government immediately made a stink to the French government, threatening war. Louis XVI was forced to pretend ignorance and order Beaumarchais to stand down and cancel the shipments to America. Luckily for the Americans, Beaumarchais got word this order was on its way, and the largest of his three ships was already crossing the Atlantic by the time Beaumarchais received the king’s command.

  Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, on December 27, 1776, a gloating George Washington sent the congressional president John Hancock a letter that began, “Sir, I have the pleasure of congratulating you upon the Success of an Enterprize.” The enterprise in question involved Washington leading his troops across the icy Delaware River on Christmas night and springing a sneak attack at dawn on Hessian troops encamped at Trenton.

  It was a bold and tricky maneuver and one of Washington’s greatest achievements as a tactician and commander. Relieved to be delivering the first good news in months, Washington informed Hancock that the enemy “finding . . . that they were surrounded, and that they must inevitably be cut to pieces if they made any further Resistance, they agreed to lay down their Arms.” He lauded the valor of his troops, remarking, “Their Behaviour upon this Occasion, reflects the highest honor upon them.” He noted that while he had lost a “trifling” three or four men, he was suddenly in possession of nearly nine hundred prisoners of war, including, if genealogy shows on cable TV are to be believed, the Hessian great-something-grandfather of actor Rob Lowe.

&
nbsp; The victory at Trenton boosted morale among the troops, the Congress, and the people to a degree possibly unwarranted by winning back a town in New Jersey, what with it being a town in New Jersey. Nevertheless, news that the Continentals had gotten the drop on a few hundred napping Germans alerted a skeptical world that Washington and his scrappy losers might perhaps, possibly, maybe have a shot at winning.

  By the time the Trenton update reached France, Benjamin Franklin had arrived in Paris. He, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee were working together (sort of—Lee and Deane never managed to get along). According to the letter the three sent to Congress, the Trenton victory “produced the most vivid sensation” in France. “The hearts of the French people are universally for us and the opinion for an immediate war with Great Britain is very strong,” they boasted. But they also warned, “The court has its reasons for postponing a little longer.” Putting off official entry into the war, they meant, given that securing an open and official alliance with the French was the reason Franklin had showed up in France.

  At least the good news from New Jersey emboldened Vergennes to allow Beaumarchais to send off more cargo-laden ships—which would eventually total forty. On March 17, 1777, the first of them arrived and dropped anchor in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A Philadelphia newspaper soon reported, “By an express from the eastward we are informed, that a vessel is just arrived from France with 12,000 stands of arms, besides a large quantity of powder and clothes.”

  While the shipment cheered up the rebels, the various commanders in various places started jockeying for supplies willy-nilly. Washington wrote to Congress to make the rather obvious suggestion that “the disposal and direction of Military Stores should be only with one body or one person. At present this power is exercised thro’ so many Channels, that much confusion is introduced.” On the one hand, what an embarrassment that two years into the war the rebels had not gotten around to setting up an efficient system for managing and dispersing supplies. On the other hand, actually having supplies to disperse was a new problem Washington was probably happy to have.