AMERICA'S OBLIGATIONS TO FRANCE.
The woes and crimes of unhappy France have attracted the mixed regards of the world; it has become an agreeable and timely diversion to look away from the distressing picture, to find whatever there is of compensation in the glories and virtues of her past; and the occasion is thus created to review our own obligations as a nation to this now stricken and humbled European power, and to determine how much we are indebted to France for our own independence and liberty. Another interest is added to the occasion in the fact that this part of our history has been but scantily told, and that, as the writer is persuaded, our national vanity, notoriously accumulated as it is about everything belonging to the Revolutionary period, has hitherto prevented a fair and full confession of the obligations referred to—has diminished the story, if not actually misrepresented it. But it is a mistaken vanity, the very opposite of a manly pride. A sentiment of the illustrious Lafayette fits in here. A citizen of both France and America, he stood between the two, and spoke happily for each, saying: "Comme un Français, dont le cœur brûle de patriotisme, je me réjouis du rôle que la France a joué, et de l'alliance qu'elle a fait. Comme Americain, je reconnais l'obligation, et je crois qu'en cela consiste la vraie dignité."
The severe truth of history and the constraints of true dignity alike compel the statement, that but for the French interposition the cause of the American colonists was likely to be lost; at least, that our independence would not have been obtained when it was, and as completely as it was, but for the succors of France. And this proposition, the writer thinks, may be made out from a summary view of the history of the period, yet calling attention to some facts that do not appear hitherto to have been calculated.
Accustomed as we are, in looking back upon the history of our Revolutionary struggle, to dwell upon its last signal triumphs, and naturally disposed to measure the preceding events by the conclusion, it is difficult for us of this day to realize how narrowly it avoided defeat, and in what extremity it at one time hesitated. In the winter of 1780, and at a time when the aid of France was most urgently implored, the American cause was almost at its last gasp. Many of its leaders had secretly despaired of it, and found it difficult to impose upon the public the countenance of hope. In a private letter, Mr. Madison wrote: "How a total dissolution of the army can be prevented in the course of the winter" [1780-1781] "is, for any resources now in prospect, utterly inexplicable." There was no money to pay the troops; and the fact was that the war was no longer kept up but by ill-digested and dilatory expedients. Meanwhile, the fate of arms accumulated against the colonists, and the fortunes of the field were as bad as the embarrassments of the interior administration. The more Southern States appeared to be already lost by the irruptions of the enemy upon an indefensible coast; and the whole army of General Greene was soon to be in full retreat before Lord Cornwallis through the State of North Carolina.
The two great wants of the colonists, and which had become vital, were money and a fleet. "The sinews of war" were nearly spent. The paper money of Congress was fast becoming worthless; the resource to specific requisitions was a mere indirection as long as the states supplied them by paper emissions of their own; and of this resource it was prophesied in Congress that "what was intended for our relief will only hasten our destruction."
The want of a counterpoise to the naval power of England was the main point of the military situation. Here was a fatal weakness; and events had progressed far enough to show that the hope of a decisive field anywhere in the colonies depended upon their maintaining a naval superiority in the American seas. In weighing the chances of the war, the configuration of the American territory is to be studied; and how vulnerable it was from the water had already been proved by the events of the war. At the time of the Revolution, the breadth of the American settlements from the Penobscot to the Altamaha did not average more than a hundred miles from the sea-line. This jagged strip of territory, traversed by estuaries and navigable streams, was so accessible to the enemy's vessels, that his navy might be considered as constantly equivalent to a second army operating on the flank of that engaged on shore. Wherever Washington might move, this apparition would cling to him—his flank constantly threatened, and every movement he made on land compelled to calculate the possibility of a counter-movement by the English fleet that hovered on the coast, and might develop an attack with greater expedition than he could change his front to meet it. It was the thorn in his side. When the baffled American commander spoke of retiring into the mountains of Virginia for a last desperate stand, it was not a rhetorical flourish, as it has generally been accounted, but a true military appreciation of the situation—the necessity of a barrier against the naval power of the enemy. If that barrier could be made on the water by the interposition of a fleet, then he would be (what he had not hitherto been) free to operate on the land, and make there a field that might be decisive. But the element of any such strategic combination was naval supremacy, and, until that was obtained, he could only hope at best for a desultory warfare, with constant exposure to a risk that he could neither meet nor avoid.
Now, the two vital wants of America—a foreign loan and a naval armament—were those which were precisely supplied by France. A foreign loan of specie, to the amount of twenty-five millions of livres, was asked of his Most Christian Majesty; and Franklin, reinforced by Col. Laurens, was instructed to impress the French king and his ministers with the especial need of a demonstration against the naval power of England. The succors were granted, and were beyond the expectations of the colonists. In July, 1780, the first French expedition, under the command of the Count Rochambeau, landed at Newport. And from that moment a new hope commenced for America, and a new inspiration was to bring to sudden buoyancy a sinking cause. The French force, however, was held inoperative for some time for the want of a sufficient navy to co-operate; and to this end the supplications of Congress to the French monarch had been redoubled. The expedition of Rochambeau consisted of five thousand men. It was to be reinforced by a fleet from the West Indies; but the orders had miscarried; and it was more than a year later when the second instalment of French aid was made available, and the conditions realized which fixed the last field of the war, and secured that final victory to which the French aids, by land and by water, were each indispensable. To this second aid reference will be made in its order.
Usually, a foreign contingent is not the best of the military material which a country may afford. The hireling and the adventurer enter largely into its composition, and its standard of service is low and suspicious. But this common imputation could not be cast on the expeditionary corps under Rochambeau. It was of the flower of the French army, and nobility did not disdain the service of the infant Republic. The illustrious Lafayette stood by himself, being a volunteer, and independent of the action of the royal forces. "The Marquis," as Washington never failed to punctiliously call him, won all hearts in America; and, though accused by Thomas Jefferson, who, however, was habitually envious, of having "a canine thirst for popularity," there is good reason to believe that he was actuated by a solid attachment to liberty and inspired by generous motives. Anyhow, he was destined, as we shall see, to perform one of the most brilliant and critical services of the Revolution. The Count Rochambeau was never popular in America; his manners were haughty, and he had a military exclusiveness; but he was an excellent soldier, and at one time he gave a striking example of his deference to republican principles in submitting to be arrested, in a group of his officers, at the hands of a petty county constable, on the complaint of a New England farmer for some acts of petty "trespass" on his fields! In his command, landed at Newport, there were names already illustrious in France, or destined to become so. Of such names were the Chevalier de Chastellux, performing the duties of major-general in the expeditionary corps, an encyclopædist and the friend of Voltaire; Berthier, afterwards risen from the rank of an under-officer to be a marshal of France and minister of war; the Count de Ségur, celebrated in literary as well as military life; the Duke de Lauzun, afterwards a general of the French Republic; the Count de Dillon, who, a few years later, met a tragic fate at the hands of the Revolutionary party in France; Pichegru, then a private in the ranks of the artillery; Matthieu Dumas, subsequently a peer of France; Aubert-Dubayet, afterwards minister of war under the French Republic; the Prince de Broglie, afterwards field-marshal, and one of the victims of the Revolutionary tribunal of 1794, etc.
Of the character of the soldiers we have some pleasant and vivid contemporary testimony. The idea which the sturdy American colonist, the backwoodsman with his Tower musket, had formed in advance of the French soldier, was not altogether a complimentary one. It was generally a caricature, popular at that day, of a dapper, ill-contrived individual who made ridiculous mistakes in the English language, ate frogs, memorable in the lampoon of Hogarth as toasting one of the amphibious at the end of a rapier, and had but the one virtue to make amends for his eccentricities—a courage that was unquestionable, though grotesque and physically inefficient. The picture was dispelled at the sight of Rochambeau's veterans—men who equalled in stature and in strength the best that England could display, who were inured to hardship and fatigue such as were scarcely supported by the green backwoodsman, and who marched hundreds of miles with an order and steadiness that never failed to be admirable. Mr. Madison, who saw these troops file through Philadelphia, after the fatigues of a march from the banks of the Hudson River, thus testifies his impressions of the spectacle: "Nothing can exceed the appearance of this specimen which our ally has sent us of his army, whether we regard the figure of the men or the exactness of their discipline."
Such was the brilliancy and the solid worth of the first contributions of France to her feeble ally. To estimate the motives and spirit of such aids, what influences ranged an old and brilliant monarchy by the side of an infant Republic branded with "rebellion," and intertwined flags so opposite, it will be well to review the relations of the parties to an alliance so strange and exceptional.
France had no interests to cultivate in America, no objects of ambition to secure in a quarter of the world from which she had deliberately withdrawn. Her flag had not appeared there since the Treaty of Paris in 1756, and her subsequent cession to Spain of her possessions on the Mississippi left her, for the present, disembarrassed of all territorial claims and interests in America. She had no reason for any affection for the English colonists now asserting their independence; they were the sons of those who had fought against her; the traditions of the colonial wars in America were yet fresh. On the side of the rebel colonists themselves, there was a suspicion of France—at least, no disposition to expect any generosity from her in the struggle that was to ensue. So little was that part expected which she did eventually take in the American Revolution, that Patrick Henry (incredible as the fact may appear to those who have read only eulogiums on this person) actually retreated at the last from the Declaration of Independence, from fear of France and her co-operation to subdue the colonies. In a letter to John Adams, written five days after the Virginia Convention had adopted the famous resolution of the 15th May, 1776, for independence, he dwells upon the apprehension that France might be seduced to take sides against the colonies by an offer from England to divide the territories of America between them. It was an unworthy suspicion; but Mr. Henry, who had but little originality, and was a characteristic retailer of popular impressions, was probably in this imputation upon France the echo of a thought common at the time.
No grounds of sympathy were yet apparent between France and the struggling colonists; nothing, as far as the men of 1776 should see, but recollections of old animosity and present causes for distrust. Even the sympathy of religion, which has proved such a fruitful source of international friendships and alliances, where there have been no other points of coincidence, was wanting; instead of it, a sharp antagonism was the fact. Protestant America, many parts of it yet fresh with the persecution of Catholics, had no reason to expect favors from Catholic France. Indeed, when those favors were given, there was some discontented and ungrateful outcry that it was a design upon the religion of the colonists; so deeply sown was the distrust of France. There were those to object that Congress had attended a Mass, and that the municipal authorities of Boston had, on some occasion, walked in a Catholic procession. The traitor, Benedict Arnold, in casting about for reasons to defend his treason, could find none more plausible, or, in his estimation, more likely to be received, than that the French alliance was about to betray the religion of the colonists, and that he, therefore, had determined to take refuge in Protestant England! Such an appeal to popular prejudice was doubtless extravagant, even more so than that of Patrick Henry accusing France; but both show the extent of estrangement and suspicion which France had to overcome before she could convince America of her friendship and generosity. And, unfortunately, as we shall presently painfully see, such suspicion was never entirely overcome, but was to remain to disfigure the last page of the history of the Revolution, and to attach to it a story of permanent disgrace to America.
When the colonies implored the aid of France, through an address of Congress in November, 1780, the appeal showed an extremity and temper of the colonists which suggested that almost any price would be paid for the necessary succors. How far the French monarch might have availed himself of the necessities of his suppliant ally, had he been selfish enough to make these the measure of his demands, is a conjecture almost illimitable. To purchase the aid of Spain, the American Congress had been willing to retract former resolutions, and to offer the almost priceless boon of the exclusive navigation of the Mississippi; and it was only the fatuity and blindness of that power that had prevented the fatal concession. Was the aid of France worth less? and was the temper of concession not to be practised upon by herself?
It has been usual to give a very summary and cold explanation of the aids which France furnished the American cause, by pointing out its effect to cripple her powerful and hereditary foe, England; thus detracting from the generosity of the contribution, and representing it as a mere move on the diplomatic chess-board which the French monarch could not do otherwise than make. But this detraction does not hold good. Admitting the full force of the reasons which it imputes to France, there is much in her alliance with America that is yet left unexplained; and there are circumstances which make it one of the most peculiar and unique examples of generosity recorded in history. It has not been unusual for powerful nations to assist the weak on no other ground of sympathy than having a foe in common; but it has seldom been the case that such aid has been rendered without the powerful ally exacting terms for her own contribution, and turning to her own advantage the necessities she has been called upon to aid. England herself had afforded a precedent for the price of such concessions. She had asked of the United Provinces, for the price of her support against Spain, that all her expenses should be repaid, and that the towns and fortresses of Holland should be held by her as pledges for the conditions of the alliance. France would have been sustained by historical example, and by moral right, in exacting very important concessions for her aid of the American cause in circumstances in which that aid was deemed vital for the success of a struggle that already bordered on despair. She asked nothing. She gave an army and a fleet, and bore all the expenses of both armaments. She advanced money and replenished the almost empty treasury of her ally. And she yet enlarged the generosity of her alliance by devoting her arms, not only to a common operation, but pledging at the outset the indispensable conclusion of her exertions in the independence of America and the territorial integrity of the States. In the Treaty of 1778, "the direct and essential end" of the alliance was declared to be "the liberty, sovereignty, and independence, absolute and unlimited, of the United States."
The arms of France were thus given directly to a cause of republican liberty rather than merely involved in a diplomatic complication. What reasons could have induced this apparent excess of generosity, this singular spectacle of the ancient monarchy of the Franks taking sides with the infant republic of the Anglo-Saxon colonists of America?
The explanation is that the French aid was a contribution of the people of France rather than that of its crown. It sprung out of the popular heart rather than the grace of a kind and munificent monarch; and it has this circumstance of a tender and imperishable souvenir to the American people. It was a free love-offering, the first dedication of their cause in the sympathies of the world. That republican sentiment which a few years later in France sprang into such fierce life, was already deeply harbored in the hearts of her people; and the movement of the American colonists gave it an opportunity of comparatively safe expression; while all the romance of such a sentiment found abundant material in the circumstances of the struggle, the distance of the theatre, its scenery bordered by savage life, the novelty of a people whose history was entirely unique, and whose simplicity of manners suggested comparisons with classical antiquity. The enthusiasm of the French mind seized every attractive circumstance of the occasion. It was entitled "the crusade of the eighteenth century." Again, it was adorned with recollections more antique, and it was said that "the Republic of Plato" had at last found realization in the midst of a people whose exclusive situation had been a school for virtues hitherto unknown, and was to afford an experiment that had until then lingered in the speculations of philosophy and the dreams of poetry. The simplicity of American manners was taken as a charming contrast to the court splendors of Paris and Versailles. It was not only Franklin's cotton stockings, but every peculiarity of the American citizen became a picturesque study and the symbol of a new political life. The memoirs of the Count de Ségur are among the contemporary testimonies of the rage in the French capital for everything American; and we are specially told of "cet air antique qui semblant transporter tout-a-coup dans nos murs, au milieu de la civilisation amollie et servile au dix-huitième siècle, quelques sages contemporans de Platon, on des republicains du temps de Caton et de Fabius!"
Of the operations of the allied arms, our space only affords such a sketch as may give some general idea of the extent and value of the French aid. Washington had at first proposed, on the arrival of Rochambeau, to attempt the repossession of New York City, and to crush there the main body of the British army. But the failure to arrive of the naval forces expected from Brest and the West Indies disconcerted the plan; and events were preparing another theatre for the final catastrophe. The British post and army in Virginia became the objective point of the allied arms. The long-expected French fleet was at last assured; it was to make its appearance in the Chesapeake; and Washington prepared to move his army from the banks of the Hudson to the distant scene of co-operation. From a temporary observatory on the heights near Newburg, the anxious commander watched his army crossing the blue stream; and as he mounted his horse, to put himself at the head of a march that was to toil over many hundreds of miles to find a last and effulgent field, far away in Virginia, he wrung the hand of a French officer who stood in the group around him, as expressing the new hope that had dawned in his face, and repledging the alliance that was to win its realization. And now ensued a combination of circumstances, in each one of which the French arms determined a crisis, and displayed a dramatic spectacle.
Lafayette, "the boy" in Cornwallis's estimation, "the tutelary genius of American independence," as he has been designated by a Virginian historian and statesman (William C. Rives), was sent forward to Virginia, to hold in check there the haughty enemy. Washington had given to this young Frenchman supreme command of the operations in Virginia. He justified a trust which the pride of the state might possibly resent, in his own estimate of the qualities of the noble foreigner. In a private letter to a Congressman of Virginia (Jones) he wrote: "The Marquis possesses uncommon military talents; is of a quick and sound judgment; persevering and enterprising without rashness; and, besides these, he is of a very conciliating temper, and perfectly sober—which are qualities that rarely combine in the same person. And were I to add that some men will gain as much experience in the course of three or four years as some others will in ten or a dozen, you cannot deny the fact, and attack me upon that ground." Lafayette was elevated over the heads of both General Wayne and the Baron de Steuben.
When the Frenchman came to the defence of Virginia, she was well-nigh conquered. She was open in every direction to the enterprise of the invader. Her public men were recreant, and under the suspicion of cowardice. One of her most faithful censors has recorded the delinquency of the times. In a letter dated the 6th November, 1780, Judge Pendleton wrote: "We had no House of Delegates on Saturday last, which, with our empty treasury, are circumstances unfavorable at this juncture. Mr. Henry has resigned his seat in Congress; and I hear Mr. Jones intends it. It is also said the governor intends to resign. It is a little cowardly to quit our posts in a bustling time." The city of Richmond, for which was to be reserved in history stains beyond any other American city, was ready to submit tamely to another occupation. The fact is, painful as the confession may be to the Virginian of to-day—offending the pride of a state that has almost invidiously claimed her part in the Revolution—Virginia had grown reluctant in the war, and disposed to have recourse to unworthy expedients. She had been prominent in Congress to recommend the surrender of the navigation of the Mississippi in order to buy the alliance of Spain. She had twice proposed a dictatorship; and now, when Cornwallis was advancing, and Mr. Jefferson was resigning the governorship, and suspicion, as we have seen, had fallen on other leaders in the "bustling times," no less a person than Richard Henry Lee, then in retirement at Westmoreland, was willing to surrender the liberties of Virginia to a dictator as the only resource of safety! Now, the state had nothing between her and the public enemy than the twelve hundred bayonets of Lafayette. The address and skill of the young Frenchman saved the Old Dominion from a subjection that would, otherwise, have been complete, as far as the swift arms of Cornwallis could have overrun the state.
Lafayette had retired to the Rapidan as the imposing and triumphant army of Cornwallis advanced on Richmond. Here, joined by the Pennsylvania troops under General Wayne and a body of riflemen from the western part of Virginia, he was able to retrace his steps, and to press Cornwallis's retreat towards the Chesapeake. Extricating himself from an unequal engagement at Jamestown, he moved up the river, and reposed at Malvern Hill—since celebrated as a refuge in a greater contest of arms. Subsequently, at Williamsburg, he was joined by the allied forces under Washington and Rochambeau—and then commenced the combination that was to compass Cornwallis, and to constitute the last splendid scene of the war.
It was a broad scene. On the 30th of August, 1781, twenty-eight line-of-battle ships, bearing the flag of France, rode on the beautiful expanse of the Chesapeake. They had come from the West Indies. Eight other ships suddenly appeared from the opposite point of the compass: the French squadron from Rhode Island, which had entered the Chesapeake, in spite of the efforts of the English admirals to intercept it. The Ville de Paris, the flag-ship of the French admiral, had held in council the great actors of the drama—Washington, Rochambeau, and the Count de Grasse; and it only remained to draw the lines, by sea and land, around the despairing enemy. The splendid fleet of France was the barrier between Cornwallis and the succors that Sir Henry Clinton had promised from New York. It was the element of victory—the apparition of a new hope risen from the seas. On the other wing of the scene floated the flags of Washington and Rochambeau. On the land were the splendid armies of France side by side with the militia of the young republic, and almost as numerous as the soldiers, a vast concourse of country people, watching the sublime wonders of a bombardment that laced the night skies, and enchanted by the music of the French timbrel, an instrument then unknown in America. Three French commands, those of the Count Rochambeau, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Marquis de Saint-Simon, stood on the field of Yorktown.
In this circle, made possible only by the links of the French aid, went down the flag of Cornwallis and the hopes of England. It was a memorable scene, and one which brought into strong relief the assistance of our ally. In a letter to General Washington from Mr. Jefferson, who had just retired from the gubernatorial chair of Virginia, the distinguished patriot, after offering his congratulations, justly wrote: "If in the minds of any, the motives of gratitude to our good allies were not sufficiently apparent, the part they have borne in this action must amply evince them." At the height of its emotions of joy and gratitude, Congress promised a monument for the scene. It was resolved that it would "cause to be erected at York, in Virginia, a marble column, adorned with emblems of the alliance between the United States and his Most Christian Majesty, and inscribed with a succinct narrative." The pledge to this day remains unfulfilled; and no monument testifies our early and imperishable obligations to France, except such as may yet exist in the hearts of our people.
Here, with the illumination of Yorktown, we would willingly conclude the history of the Franco-American alliance. But there is a sequel not to be omitted—a painful story that belongs yet to the justice of history.
In the negotiations for peace that followed Yorktown, the American Congress, new and timorous in diplomacy, betook itself to a refuge, the shallowness of which is especially conspicuous in diplomacy—that of supposing wisdom in a multitude of counsellors. It constituted no less than five commissioners to treat at Paris. The selections were ill; and in some instances the worst that could have been made. Of the five, Mr. Jefferson did not attend. Mr. Adams was personally distasteful to the French government. How far Mr. Henry Laurens might be suspected of undue deference to England might have been judged from his famous Tower letter, the cringing humiliations of which had opened the doors of his prison; and it is said that when this letter was divulged to Congress it would have recalled his commission, had there not been doubts of the authenticity of the document, so extraordinary was its tone. But it is justice to add that the subsequent conduct of Mr. Laurens repelled the charge of partiality for England; however, the French Government may have had reason to be displeased at his antecedents. Mr. Jay was of a suspicious temper, an intrigant rather than a diplomatist; illustrating precisely that lowest notion of diplomacy, that it is essentially a game of deceptions—a part that can be performed only with a false face. Happily, the world has outlived this degrading idea of a really august office, and has come to question why deception should be considered more necessary in diplomacy than in any other branch of public service. Indeed, there is room in diplomacy for the exercise of the highest abilities, an arena for the busiest and most exacting competitions of intellectual skill, without calling into requisition the weapons of chicanery and fraud. There is no political service that more strongly than the office of the diplomatist tests that sum of powers which the world calls character: the clear, strong purpose, with its quick and happy selection of opportunities, the instinct, the tact, and the decisiveness which hold the secret of what is greatness in history, rather than any amount of learned accomplishments or any training of the intellectual closet. The diplomatist must be quick, yet strong and unremitting; he must have unbounded confidence in himself, without the weakness of vanity; he must be patient, yet not dilatory; thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of the French proverb, that "he who learns to wait is master of his fortune." He must have the faculty of putting things in the strongest possible light—that best and rarest of rhetorical talents, the power of statement. He must have a nice sense of opportunities; the delicate touch with the iron will; he must practise what Byron numbered among the cardinal virtues, "tact"; of all men he must wear that excellent motto, suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Here, surely, is a theatre for many virtues and abilities, without calling to aid the mask and sinister weapons of professional deceit. The greatest diplomatist of modern times, the unequalled Bismarck, is said to be remarkable for the bluntness and directness that have overcome by the very surprises of openness the chicanery of his opponents. The robustness of his dealings with the finesse of the old traditional school of European diplomacy reminds one of the duel in "Peter Simple." A sturdy Englishman engages a master of fence, and while the latter practises the most scientific attitude and has his rapier poised according to the figures of the science, he is infinitely surprised to have it seized in mid-air by the naked hand of his antagonist, and himself run through the body. Not secundum artum, but a most efficient way of concluding the combat. Of the open and best school of diplomacy, Franklin at the French court was a fair representative, the very opposite of Jay. The philosopher of Pennsylvania has never been justly measured as a diplomatist; he had been successful beyond all other American envoys; he was now the Bismarck of the diplomatic collection at Paris, although he unhappily gave way to the leadership of Jay.
In the negotiations for peace that ensued, Mr. Jay, leading more or less willingly the other commissioners, was soon over head and ears in an intrigue with the English ministry; acting on that lowest supposition of tyroism in diplomacy—that the other party must necessarily design a fraud, and that a counter-fraud must be prepared to meet it. Congress had instructed that there should be made "the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the King of France"; and it took occasion to give a remarkable expression of gratitude to France, its resolutions declaring "how much we rely on his majesty's influence for effectual support in everything that may be necessary to the present security or future prosperity of the United States of America." Mr. Jay, who had taken the lead in the negotiations, willingly followed by Adams, "dragging in Franklin," and resisted to some extent by Laurens proceeded deliberately to violate these instructions. He had conceived the suspicion that France was secretly hostile to an early acknowledgment of the independence of America, and wished to postpone it until she had extorted objects of her own from the dependence of her ally. It is now known that this suspicion was wholly imaginary. But Mr. Jay and his colleagues acted upon it, and were twisted around the fingers of the English ministry to the extent of treating with them, without giving the French government knowledge of the steps and progress of the negotiation, thus contributing to the adroit purpose of England to sow distrust in the alliance that had humbled her. While the American commissioners were professing to the French minister that negotiations were yet at a distance, they had actually signed the provisional articles of a treaty of peace with the crown of Great Britain. Worse than this, they had agreed to a secret article, which stipulated a more favorable northern boundary for Florida, in the event of its conquest by the arms of Great Britain, than if it should remain in the possession of Spain at the termination of the war. Spain was at that time an ally of France; and so it may be imagined how the latter would be embarrassed by this secret article, and how England might meditate in it an advantage in disturbing the understanding of France and America.
Mr. Jay, unconscious that he had been made a catspaw of British diplomacy, felicitated himself that he had made an excellent bargain and done an acute thing; possessed as he was with that fatuity of all deceivers, that omits to calculate the time when the deception must necessarily become known. When the game that had been played upon its ally became known to Congress, it plunged that body into the most painful embarrassment. Mr. Madison, in his diary of the proceedings of Congress, thus records its impressions: "The separate and secret manner in which our ministers had proceeded with respect to France, and the confidential manner with respect to the British ministers, affected different members of Congress differently. Many of the most judicious members thought they had all been in some measure ensnared by the dexterity of the British minister, and particularly disapproved of the conduct of Mr. Jay in submitting to the enemy his jealousy of the French, without even the knowledge of Dr. Franklin, and of the unguarded manner in which he, Mr. Adams, and Dr. Franklin had given, in writing, sentiments unfriendly to our ally, and serving as weapons for the insidious policy of the enemy. The separate article was most offensive, being considered as obtained by Great Britain, not for the sake of the territory ceded to her, but as a means of disuniting the United States and France, as inconsistent with the spirit of the alliance, and as a dishonorable departure from the candor, rectitude, and plain dealing professed by Congress."
Congress did not extricate itself from the dilemma; it could not do it. Suppression of what had been done could not be continued; still less was it possible to make explanations to France; the only thing to do was to say nothing, and to let the painful exposure work itself out. The King of France had acted with an openness and an attention to his allies, the contrasts of which made the exposure one of great bitterness and shame. The Count de Vergennes had assured the American commissioners: "The king has been resolved that all his allies should be satisfied, being determined to continue the war, whatever advantages may be offered to him, if England is disposed to wrong any of them." Now, when the articles were brought into council to be signed, the French monarch could not be other than surprised and indignant. He put royal restraint upon his speech; but he could not forbear saying, with a bluntness that must have bruised American pride, and staggered the self-felicitations of Mr. Jay, that "he did not think he had such allies to deal with."
The court of France sustained the insult with dignity, and yet with evidence of a deep sense of wrong. When inquiry was made whether expostulations would be made to the American Congress, the reply of M. Marbois was heroic: "A great nation," he answered, "does not complain; but it feels and remembers."