“I know not whether Captain Landais will obey my orders, nor what the ministry will do with him if he comes. But I suspect that they may, by some of their concise operations, save the trouble of a court-martial.”
It subsequently appeared that Landais had previously been dismissed from the French service for insubordination. This fact was not known to Congress when he was assigned to the command of the Alliance. They simply knew that he was a Frenchman of illustrious family, of great pretensions, and who had been an officer in the French navy. Congress inconsiderately, in its anxiety to compliment France, placed him in a position which his eccentric passions totally disqualified him from filling.
Landais wrote to Dr. Franklin soliciting another command. In a very characteristic reply, dated March 12th, 1780, Dr. Franklin wrote:
“No one has ever learned the opinion I formed of you, from the inquiry made into your conduct. I kept it entirely to myself, I have not even hinted it in my letters to America, because I would not hazard giving any one a bias to your prejudice.
“By communicating a part of that opinion privately to you I can do no harm, for you may burn it. I should not give you the pain of reading it, if your demand did not make it necessary.
“I think you then, so imprudent, so litigious and quarrelsome a man, even with your best friends, that peace and good order, and consequently the quiet and regular subordination so necessary to success, are, where you preside, impossible. These are within my observation and apprehension. Your military operations I leave to more capable judges. If, therefore, I had twenty ships of war, I should not give one of them to Captain Landais. The same temper which excluded him from the French marine would weigh equally with me.”
It was one important object of Captain Jones to get prisoners, that by an exchange he might release the American prisoners who were suffering the most barbarous treatment in the prisons of England. He carried with him into the Texel, five hundred British captives. Franklin proposed to the British government to exchange them for an equal number of Americans. But the ministry refused. They sent a large number of men-of-war to watch the channel, and cruise off the Texel, quite confident that they should be able to capture the prisoners as soon as any attempt was made to transport them to France. For some time they refused to exchange American prisoners on any terms. They would surrender the French captives alone, in return for the English.
The sympathies of kind-hearted Captain Jones were deeply moved in behalf of the captive Americans. And yet his feelings would not allow him to retaliate in treating with inhumanity the British prisoners in his hands. They were generally poor and ignorant men. Not a few had been impressed into the service. They were not responsible for the cruelty of the government, over which they had no control. There was a large party in England totally opposed to this unrighteous war, and still more opposed to the barbarity with which the government was conducting it.
When it was proposed and carried in Parliament to employ the savages as the allies of Great Britain,—to hire the savages, with torch and tomahawk and scalping knife, in midnight assault, to burn the log-cabins and butcher the helpless women and children in their lonely homes, far away in the wilderness, hundreds of voices were raised in indignant remonstrance. The Earl of Chatham exclaimed, in the House of Lords, in one of the most eloquent and impassioned of addresses:
“I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this house or in this country. Were I an American, as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms—never, never never.”