TO ROBERT R. LIVINGSTON.
Passy, July 22d, 1783.
Sir,
You have complained, sometimes with reason, of not hearing from your Foreign Ministers; we have had cause to make the same complaint, six full months having intervened between the latest date of your preceding letters and the receipt of those by Captain Barney. During all this time we were ignorant of the reception of the Provisional Treaty, and the sentiments of Congress upon it, which, if we had received sooner, might have forwarded the proceedings on the Definitive Treaty, and, perhaps, brought them to a conclusion, at a time more favorable than the present. But these occasional interruptions of correspondence are the inevitable consequences of a state of war, and of such remote situations. Barney had a short passage, and arrived some days before Colonel Ogden, who also brought despatches from you, all of which are come safe to hand. We, the Commissioners, have in our joint capacity written a letter to you, which you will receive with this.
I shall now answer yours of March the 26th, May the 9th, and May the 31st.
It gave me great pleasure to learn by the first, that the news of peace diffused general satisfaction. I will not now take it upon me to justify the apparent reserve, respecting this Court, at the signature, which you disapprove. We have touched upon it in our general letter. I do not see, however, that they have much reason to complain of that transaction. Nothing was stipulated to their prejudice, and none of the stipulations were to have force, but by a subsequent act of their own. I suppose, indeed, that they have not complained of it, or you would have sent us a copy of the complaint, that we might have answered it. I long since satisfied Count de Vergennes about it here. We did what appeared to all of us best at the time, and if we have done wrong, the Congress will do right, after hearing us, to censure us. Their nomination of five persons to the service seems to mark, that they had some dependence on our joint judgment, since one alone could have made a treaty by direction of the French Ministry as well as twenty.
I will only add, that with respect to myself, neither the letter from M. Marbois, handed us through the British negotiators, (a suspicious channel) nor the conversations respecting the fishery, the boundaries, the royalists, &c. recommending moderation in our demands, are of weight sufficient in my mind to fix an opinion, that this Court wished to restrain us, in obtaining any degree of advantage we could prevail on our enemies to accord, since those discourses are fairly resolvable, by supposing a very natural apprehension, that we, relying too much on the ability of France to continue the war in our favor, and supply us constantly with money, might insist on more advantages than the English would be willing to grant, and thereby lose the opportunity of making peace, so necessary to all our friends.
I ought not, however, to conceal from you, that one of my colleagues is of a very different opinion from me in these matters. He thinks the French Minister one of the greatest enemies of our country, that he would have straitened our boundaries, to prevent the growth of our people; contracted our fishery, to obstruct the increase of our seamen; and retained the royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our negotiations with foreign Courts, and afforded us, during the war, the assistance we received only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weakened by it; that to think of gratitude to France is the greatest of follies, and that to be influenced by it would ruin us. He makes no secret of his having these opinions, expresses them publicly, sometimes in presence of the English Ministers, and speaks of hundreds of instances which he could produce in proof of them. None, however, have yet appeared to me, unless the conversations and letter abovementioned are reckoned such.
If I were not convinced of the real inability of this Court to furnish the further supplies we asked, I should suspect these discourses of a person in his station might have influenced the refusal, but I think they have gone no further than to occasion a suspicion, that we have a considerable party of antigallicans in America, who are not tories, and consequently, to produce some doubts of the continuance of our friendship. As such doubts may hereafter have a bad effect, I think we cannot take too much care to remove them; and it is, therefore, I write this to put you on your guard, (believing it my duty, though I know that I hazard by it a mortal enmity) and to caution you respecting the insinuations of this gentleman against this Court, and the instances he supposes of their ill will to us, which I take to be as imaginary as I know his fancies to be, that Count de Vergennes and myself are continually plotting against him, and employing the newswriters of Europe to depreciate his character, &c. But as Shakspeare says, "Trifles light as air," &c. I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.
When the commercial article, mentioned in yours of the 26th, was struck out of our proposed preliminaries by the British Ministry, the reason given was, that sundry acts of Parliament still in force were against it, and must be first repealed, which I believe was really their intention, and sundry bills were accordingly brought in for that purpose; but new Ministers with different principles succeeding, a commercial proclamation totally different from those bills has lately appeared. I send enclosed a copy of it. We shall try what can be done in the Definitive Treaty towards setting aside that proclamation, but if it should be persisted in, it will then be a matter worthy the attentive discussion of Congress, whether it will be most prudent to retort with a similar regulation in order to force its repeal, (which may possibly tend to bring on another quarrel) or to let it pass without notice, and leave it to its own inconvenience, or rather impracticability in the execution, and to the complaints of the West India planters, who must all pay much dearer for our produce under those restrictions.