The Revolution precipitated a series of European wars, forcing the United States to articulate a clear policy of neutrality in order to avoid being embroiled in these European conflicts. Question 5. The Declaration of Independence served as a model for the French Revolution. The joint conquest was proposed of Canada, the Floridas, and the British West Indies. When hostilities first erupted, the crown did . The French support NATO modernization efforts and are leading contributors to the NATO Response Force. Gunrunning to America was certainly going on in 1774, and no doubt Franklin knew about it. Vergennes, who had confidently hoped to receive these protests under very different circumstances, was forced to buy a little more time at the expense of his American friends. The first move was to eliminate Franklin and Deane by creating a scandal in Congress about their peculation of public funds. Masonry was powerful in France and all-powerful in Nantes, and for perhaps a generation its exporters had been sending American brothers, along with bills of lading and business papers, sheaves of French Masonic literature in exchange for similar pamphlets from the colonies. They asked that frigates be sent over by August to cruise against Englands Baltic trade and attack the British Isles. There were sixty-odd American merchants established in Nantes, and when Franklin considered that all this activity was being repeated on a somewhat smaller scale in Bordeaux, Lorient, Le Havre, and Dunkirk, he felt that the Franco-American alliance was already a reality. He soon went down to Spain, where Conyngham was taking fresh prizes. Franklin had already planned his mission to France, where he would be joined by his fellow commissioners, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. Copyright 1949-2022 American Heritage Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved. Vergennes admitted that open assistance to the United States meant war, but war was in any case inevitable. America needed French aid of every sort: ships, supplies, loans, to begin with. All this was excruciating, since Lee had trumpeted in letters home that he had the ministry and Hortalez in his pocket. He supported his private investment in the American future by using his fleet of a dozen ships for Caribbean trade on the return voyage to France, and this sugar trade brought him profits to invest in more goods for America. For diplomatic reasons, he always pretended a vast ignorance of Hortalez & Companya feat like hiding an elephant in a hat. The Comte de Vergennes. Franklin faced the critical year of 1777 with the knowledge that the British fleet would pound American hopes to nothing unless France and Britain began their ordained war. The merchant was the intendant for supplying clothing for the French Armyand of late the American Army, for he had given Beaumarchais a million livres worth of clothing on credit. He had connived in the Conyngham raid in the confidence that the next time Stormont came fuming into his Cabinet with threats of war, he could hand the pestiferous ambassador his portfolio and wish him a pleasant old age in England. (We must remember that all this was happening before Lexington.). With Deane and Carmichael, and all those shadowy young Americans who helped the great privateering drive of 1777, he organized an underground system for escapes. Sixty years after his death the incredible truth came out. No doubt the colonies hoarded local supplies for their own defense, and the merchants hoarded their stocks for higher prices. Wickes took two small merchantmen which ran down their colors with alacrity. The American Revolution of 1775-1789, which concluded as the revolution in France was unfolding, was perhaps the most significant. This blogpost looks at the important French role in the American Revolution. This was the same thing as asking France and Spain to declare immediate war against Great Britain. Franklin comforted himself by beginning his magnificent work for the prisoners at Forton and the Old Mill in England, masters and men of the Continental Navy and the privateer fleet who were classed as pirates by George III and who sickened and starved in his antiquated prisons. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. When Deane arrived in Paris in the summer of 1776 Arthur Lee rushed over from London. His beloved wife had died, and his best friend Robert Morris had thrown him over because he had told the truth about Tom. First these navies quarreled head-on, in the English Channel and then in the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean, in a war of escorts. He had to fend off a break with England until France was ready for war. By late June the captain and his men were released from jail, and the Revenge was loaded with powder and arms. For a complication of reasons the Massachusetts cousins, John and Samuel Adams, had formed a close alliance with the Virginia brothers, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee. A certain Monsieur Hortalez, said the courier, was sending munitions worth 200,000 to the Cape, Martinique, and Statia, which American captains could obtain for Congress simply by saying Hortalez to the port commandant. For months, in fact, Franklin and Deane had slipped away in the evening for conferences with the minister, and Lee spread the word that the Doctor was having an affair with some French beauty. Franklin immediately got to work at this dismal situation. Inequality of Rights. He contributed a million livres to the colonies war chest and his uncle, Charles III of Spain, followed suit. It was a fine moment for his debut. He was the Edward Edwards of the secret service, the master spy of the century. Miss Augur, one of many writers who have honored the great old man on his 250th anniversary this year, is the author of several other books, including Tall Ships to Cathay and biographies of Anne Hutchinson and John Ledyard. Even respected modern historians will repeat some of Arthur Lees calumnies about Franklin and Deane, Jonathan Williams, and William Carmichael, though they have been disproved over and over since their creation in a sick mind. They were in the best possible hands; Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the few masters seasoned in the merchant fleet who had joined the Continental Navy. But somehow, even when he acted in a cheap way, Silas Deane was not cheap. The Estates-General was a meeting of the three estates (clergy, nobles, everyone else) that could be called by the French King and was famously and infamously called in 1789 out of a desperate desire to try to push through reforms that would keep France from going bankrupt. However, Izard and Arthur Lee let no day pass without earnest efforts, and on January 2, 1781, a move was made in Congress for Franklins recall. British Debt. Because the future could somehow work in him he had become the sort of man coming generations would repeat. Like Great Britain, France had a young king. At the moment, Nantes was all Frankliniste . But the early ratio of seven British merchantmen captured to one American lost was rapidly declining, and Britains patrol of the seaboard was making it difficult to maintain a supply line of military and civilian goods. Arguably the key French contribution to the war came during the Yorktown campaign. It encouraged the French to adopt the government system of popular sovereignty. Since this ruined Arthur Lees flattering picture of himself as Americas first envoy to Madrid, he was enraged. By this process of elastic diplomacy the amenities were preserved while both sides gained time for war preparations and spared their exchequers the drain of active hostilities. The Sugar Act, was made to try and stop the smuggling of sugar and molasses. France did not wait for the announcement of July Fourth. Americans were at first enthusiastic in support of the revolution. His key man for American contacts was Paul Wentworth of New Hampshire, who before the war had been the London agent for that colony and after the war was elected a trustee of Dartmouth College, to which he had presented scientific apparatus. The single most important diplomatic success of the colonists during the War for Independence was the critical link they forged . Britain won the Seven Years War and imposed the Peace of Paris which bred the next cycle of conflict with the Continental powers. The currency had fallen to half its value. He might have included the foreign islands, since all colonial America had been united for a century and a half in its resistance to the mercantilism of Europe. What was the main purpose of the Stamp Act Congress? Deane and Beaumarchais were already fast friends, working in harmony to load the Hortalez fleet with war supplies. Franklin was a shrewd judge of men, and his unclouded confidence in Bancroft needs some extraordinary explanation. By a natural process the activities of the mission were divided. Explain the purpose of a colonial stamp tax, how it would be implemented and which people or groups it would affect. They were in a rivalry to dominate the entire world. However, over time divisions of opinion became apparent between federalists and anti-federalists. For once Wentworth brought the King good news, the only kind he could ever believe. The traffic which had started about 1770 was very large. The Revenge was owned half by Congress and half by Hodge and David Conyngham, a wealthy cousin of the captains who was on a business trip to Europe. Franklin soon warned Congress not to enlarge its connections with this questionable pair. In order to bring the reluctant enemies to blows he had to influence chiefly two men: George III, who was just as set against a French war as he was adamant in the American conflict, and Vergennes, the mentor of a young and inexperienced king. Concluded between the government of King Louis XVI and the Second Continental Congress, the treaty proved critical to the United States winning its independence from Great Britain. When Deane left Philadelphia on his mission to France, Franklin suggested that Edward Bancroft would be a useful consultant on European affairs, and so it proved. Franklin enjoyed the brief engagements. This rule was so thoroughly disobeyed that great shipping houses like Willing & Morris of Philadelphia kept factors, or at least correspondents, all over Europe and the Caribbean to take care of their trade. To gain time, he placated Stormont by arresting the three Wickes vessels (which kept them safe from the British warships on patrol) and by promising that the new cutter being fitted for Conyngham would be sold. But he was needed more in Nantes. The historian Henri Doniol, who edited the secret French archives of the period, claimed that Franklin did more than coach the Whigs; that he in fact started an international gunrunning ring by quiet negotiations with certain arms manufacturers and exporters in England, Holland, and France. Franklin could make his quip about Philadelphia taking Howe while he privately worried about his family and friends there, about Washingtons reverses, and the dreadful paralysis that had seized the French ministry. The table has been produced based upon "Ferguson's estimate of the total cost of the war": Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 103, Table 5.4. This long-range program was necessary, but it did not change the fact that the lumbering and inefficient British war machine had at last got itself oiled and repaired for a heavy assault upon the United States. Every step in preparing the lugger for a cruise was watched by the British in Dunkirk. The American Revolution occurred during a period that some historians refer to as the "Second Hundred Years War" between France and Britain. The destinations given were usually French ports on the Channel, and the ostensible purpose was the sudden enormous need for arms in the French slave trade. You cant at this time, he wrote, be unacquainted with the faithless principles, the low, dirty intrigue, the selfish views, & the wicked arts of a certain race of Men, &, believe me, a full crop of these qualities you sent in the first instance from Philadelphia to Paris., Arthur Lee then followed with a letter to Samuel Adams which revealed his definite plan to supplant Franklin. Many of the vessels loading up in French ports with arms for Washington were the private ventures of merchants whom Deane had inspired with confidence. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, under Franklin, engaged agents abroad to explore the possibilities of foreign alliances. Conyngham shook them off and began the most spectacular cruise of the war. In August, 1774, Sir Joseph Yorke, for years the British ambassador at The Hague, wrote his superior, the Earl of Suffolk: As the contraband trade carried on between Holland and North America is so well known in England I have not thought it necessary of late to trouble your Lordship with trifling details of ships sailing from Amsterdam for the British Colonies, laden with teas, linnens, etc., But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the Polly , Captain Benjamin Broadhurst, bound to Nantucket has shipped on board a considerable quantity of gunpowder. In November Congress resolved to recall Deane for questioning, and sent John Adams to take his place in the mission. It attempted to pay down that debt by taxing colonists through the Stamp Act, generating far more resentment than revenue. The King was progressing from the swaddling clothes of a dominant mother to the strait jacket of his manic seizures, and even in his long periods of sanity his balance was precarious. His association with Hortalez was a stroke of luck. French Revolutionary wars, title given to the hostilities between France and one or more European powers between 1792 and 1799. He had put up for a long time with colonial violations of the trading laws, but when the Boston Tea Party made him look ridiculous, George III precipitated the war. The American Revolution was by no means a purely American-British conflict. A number of ill-advised financial maneuvers in the late 1700s worsened the financial situation of the already cash-strapped French government. He knew that this purpose was the weakening of Britain rather than the emancipation of the United States. Arthur Lees secretary, Major John Thornton, was not only British but British secret service. B.) Free subscription>>, Please consider a donation to help us keep this American treasure alive. This cat and mouse game was only part of the new turn in French policy. England, Franklin said suavely, could hardly object to France sending the battleships with their crews, since Britain herself was borrowing or hiring troops from other states. In terms of violent behavior, the American Revolution can't hold a candle to the French Revolution. The move was long overdue, for the Americans had been making a brilliant success of their sea raids all over the Atlantic and the Caribbean. One of Conynghams prizes was recaptured by the British, who took her into Yarmouth. A member of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1773 he was elected to the Royal Society under the sponsorship of Franklin, the astronomer royal, and the kings physician. He had reached an impasse: France would not help America unless America showed promise of winning her war, and America could not win without French help. Even Vergennes was now lukewarm. He sent his first secretary, Grard de Rayvenal, to Passy with his congratulations and the suggestion that Franklin might now press the treaty negotiation which France had avoided for nearly a year. Franklin was now seventy, afflicted with gout, and wretchedly tired from his labors in Congress and its candle-burning committees. Continental Congress established the Secret Committee of Correspondence to publicize the American cause in Europe. He masked his powerful and subtle mind behind the benevolent simplicity which was also part of his nature. Deane was in and out of the Passy house, keeping his hotel quarters for business and the entertaining of transient sea captains and a horde of friends. Though facing insurmountable odds, the underdog naval forces of the young United States proved their savvy by helping to defeat Great Britain in the War for Independence. As a result of Lees carelessness in leaving his portfolio in his room when he went out to dine, the commissioners had to abandon the building of a great frigate in Amsterdam, and she was sold to Louis XVI at cost. Intended as a defensive alliance, it saw France provide both supplies . The copies of his early correspondence with Beaumarchais proved that he knew better. The Americans' victory over the British may have been one of the greatest catalysts for the French Revolution. The two Lees and Izard were busily writing letters about the expected alliance. The Channel Islands privateers were out in force, and the maritime war in Europe, which could no longer be closely directed from Passy, was in a state of anarchy.
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