This point he successfully carried. He had very wisely arranged with Congress that all the money he might recover should be transmitted by him to the Congressional treasury, to be paid by the minister to the individual claimants. According to the concordat or agreement which was entered upon with the French government when the little squadron sailed, it was settled:
“That the division of prizes should be made agreeably to the American laws; but that the proportion of the whole, coming to each vessel in the squadron, should be regulated by the minister of the Marine Department of France and the minister plenipotentiary of the United States of America.”
But here there were conflicting principles. By the laws of France a certain proportion of all prize-money was set apart for the support of the Hospital of Invalids, from which institution American sailors could derive no benefit. The American prize laws gave captors the whole value of ships of war, and half the value of merchantmen. After long negotiation the French government yielded this point also, and allowed the distribution to be made according to American law.
There were, it will be remembered, five hundred British prisoners, captured by Jones, maintained at very considerable expense for some time by the French government, at the Texel. The British government refused to surrender, in exchange for these men, American prisoners. They did, however, give up French prisoners, in exchange for them. When Commodore Jones passed over these men to the French authorities, it was with the distinct understanding that they, in conference with the British government, should obtain for them an equal number of American captives, to be delivered to Commodore Jones. But the spirit of the British cabinet was so implacable toward the Americans, that the French government could not accomplish this.
Marshal Castries now contended that the expenses attending the maintenance of these prisoners at the Texel, and their transportation to England, should be deducted from the prize-money. With justifiable intensity of purpose, Commodore Jones combated this claim. Dr. Franklin, then in Paris, was in entire accord with Commodore Jones upon this question, as upon all the other principles Jones had insisted upon in the adjustment. On the 25th of March he wrote, in a letter addressed to “Honorable Paul Jones, Esq.”:
“I certainly should not have agreed to charge the American captors with any part of the expense of maintaining the five hundred prisoners in Holland till they could be exchanged, when none of them were exchanged for the Americans in England, as was your intention, and as we both had been made to expect.”
The commodore immediately enclosed this letter in another, which he addressed to Marshal de Castries. He wrote:
“The within copy of a letter which I had the honor to receive yesterday from Mr. Franklin, will convince you that he never consented, and could not consent, to the manner proposed by your predecessor and by M. de Chaumont for settlement of the prize-money due to the American officers and men who served under my orders in Europe.
“I will not complain that the prisoners which I took and carried to Holland were not exchanged for the Americans, who had been taken in war upon the ocean, and were long confined in the English dungeons by civil magistrates, as traitors, pirates, and felons. I will only say I had such a promise from the minister of marine.
“It was all the reward I asked for the anxious days and sleepless nights I passed, and the many dangers I encountered in glad hope of giving them all their liberty. And if I had not been assured that Mr. Franklin had made an infallible arrangement with the courts of France and England, for their immediate redemption, nothing but a superior force should have arrested them out of my hands, till they had been actually exchanged for the unhappy Americans in England.”