Sir,
Your Excellency had the goodness to write me on the 16th of January last, in the following words. “As to the fusils and other arms of our manufacture, you will have liberty to purchase them, and the bankers Splittgerber, who have charge of the fabrication of arms, will be instructed to deliver to you whatsoever may be demanded on your part. I subjoin a note of the prices, which are the same as the king pays, and add, that the fusils for the infantry may be had at a little lower price, if regard is only had to the solidity of the work, without insisting on that exact uniformity which the king requires.”
In consequence of this, I ordered eight hundred fusils for infantry, of the best kind, from the Messrs Splittgerber, and paid them their own price immediately. My intention was to arm a regiment, that the whole army might judge of the superiority of the Prussian model. The fusils were sent by Hamburgh to Bordeaux, and were shipped from thence to America, a case having previously been opened, and a fusil taken out and sent to me. By this specimen, I find that the fusils, so far from being of the sort at present used in his Prussian Majesty’s army, are directly the reverse, and of the worst and most ordinary workmanship that can be imagined. I do assure your Excellency, that they are such as our militia would reject, and appear to me and others, who are competent judges, to be old rejected muskets. The ramrod is not a quarter of an inch in diameter, and the lock holes that receive it narrow and of the same diameter above and below; so that the Prussian manner of charging is impracticable with these fusils. The observation I made a thousand times over of the fusils, which the troops at Berlin used, enables me to assure you, that this is a most egregious imposition in being sent as the same, and I am sure they would not sell in Europe for six livres a piece.
My merchant at Bordeaux, the Commercial Agent of Congress, assures me that he took the fusil, from which I form my judgment, with his own hand out of one of the cases sent from Messrs Splittgerber, through the house of Chapeaurouge at Hamburgh.
I therefore entreat your Excellency to oblige these men to do me justice. I am not so much offended at the imposition, for the money it has defrauded me of, as for the disgrace it will bring on the manufactures of Prussia, and the disappointment of the plan I had formed to introduce them into the United States. The mildest reparation, which I conceive can be demanded of the Messrs Splittgerber, is that they send immediately to Bordeaux, at their own expense, eight hundred fusils, such as are ordered, that is, of the present Prussian form, and the best workmanship. Those, that they have sent, I will order to be sold in America, and the net amount of what they bring shall be paid to them.
I have the honor to be, &c.
COUNT DE VERGENNES TO ARTHUR LEE.
Translation.