Volume 4, Chapter 43, Response in Britain and France
The great aim of American diplomacy during the 1776-78 period was to induce France to expand her role from that of staunch but covert supporter to open ally at war with England.
Pressures played upon the French government.
The masses and the political opposition led by former Foreign Minister Comte Etienne Francois Chausseul were eager for war, but Foreign Minister Comte Charles Gravier de Virgin, though deeply sympathetic to the New Republic, cautiously drew back from open war, especially after American reverses in the summer of 1776 and in 1777.
France and Spain had been about to go to war with England when Washington's ignominious defeat at the Battle of Long Island changed Bergin's mind, and France again drew back from the break after Burgoyne's capture of Ticonderoga.
Finally, Britain tried to intimidate France by threatening war if she did not cease her aid, while the Americans responded with subtle blackmail and threats of a separate peace with Britain, threats that conjured up to the French the fearsome vision of Old Pitt heading a unified Anglo-American war to crush France.
Negotiations for the fledgling United States with France were first handled by Silas Deane, who arrived in France in early July 1776.
He was succeeded by a three-man commission, appointed by Congress, to negotiate treaties and agreements in Europe, consisting of Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and Arthur Lee.
The commission arrived in Paris at the end of December 1776.
The wily old tactician Franklin proved to be a master at the intricacies of line, bamboozling and intriguing that formed the warp and wolf of diplomacy.
Moreover, the old rogue was a huge hit with the French, who saw him as the embodiment of reason, the natural man, and bonhomie.
This three-man commission was guided by a model set of treaties, the Plan of 1776, drawn up while Dean was still on his own in France by a committee of independents.
The committee submitted its model in mid-July 1776 and Congress adopted it in mid-September.
The plan, which furnished the model for all the 18th-century treaties of the United States, did not propose a formal political alliance with France, for John Adams had led Congress in adopting Tom Paine's isolationist view that America must be self-reliant, abstain from entangling alliances in the unremitting wars of Europe and avoid possible domination by any of the powers. Instead, the plan
and proposed French recognition of the independence of the United States and a perpetual treaty of commerce and friendship resting on the great international law principles safeguarding the rights of neutral nations.
Free ships make free goods.
Carefully restricted list of contraband that could be seized by belligerents and freedom of neutral shipping between belligerent ports.
All of these emerging libertarian principles went totally against the practice of Great Britain, the world's dominant and aggressive naval power.
The American model also proposed total freedom of trade and reciprocity between France and the United States.
As Professor Gilbert puts it, whereas usually commercial conventions were sources of friction and instruments of power politics reinforcing political alliances by commercial preferences, the Americans wanted to establish a commercial system of freedom and equality which would eliminate all cause for tension in political conflicts.
In other terms of the plan, no separate peace with Britain would be made by either party in case France should be involved in the war, and the United States was to pledge not to interfere with Spanish possessions in South America.
France, in turn, was to give up any claims it might have to territory on the North American continent.
In the plan of 1776, as Felix Gilbert points out, the infant United States set forth a shining, nude libertarian conception of how nation-states should deal with one another, political isolationism coupled with cultural and economic internationalism.
There was to be no political meddling by governments, but rather full freedom for peaceful and productive relationships between individuals and peoples.
This conception put into practice the foreign policy views that were being developed by the French philosophes.
The philosophes recognized that the expansion of international commerce was rapidly creating one interdependent economic world,
A true family of nations welded together through trade for mutual benefit.
The task of governments then, including their foreign policy, is to get out of the way of
this natural social intercourse.
Militarism, the shimmer of the balance of power, treaties and alliances, the frauds
of diplomacy, all were denounced as old-fashioned and incompatible with the new international
Order of Peace and Freedom and Reason, the only order compatible with the rapid emergence
of one economic world.
Or as the French physiocrat and libertarian Nicolas Baudot put it in 1767, the essence
of power politics consists of divergence of interest, that of economic policy of unity
of interest.
The one leads to war, frustrations, destruction, the other to social integration, cooperation,
and free and peaceful sharing of the fruits of work.
The old policy of aggression and restriction was to be replaced by the economic policy
of unrestricted freedom of trade, mutual benefit, and harmony among nations.
In brief, in the world to come, foreign policy per se would disappear.
In a free and rational world, foreign policy and diplomacy, a typical phenomenon of the
Ancien Regime would become unnecessary.
From the very beginning of the New Republic, John Adams, Tom Paine and the other American
leaders set forth as the objectives of American foreign policy, peace, full neutral rights
in International Law, political isolationism and unrestricted freedom of trade.
Relations between nations would become purely commercial contacts, and the need for political
diplomacy with alliances and balance of power would disappear from the international scene.
By the autumn of 1777, Britain had intimidated France into stopping the loading of vessels
for America, and in ousting the American privateers from hospitable French ports.
But the startling news of Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga coming in early December altered
matters completely.
Now Burgens knew that America could win.
In addition, the danger of an Anglo-American reconciliation suddenly emerged as Lord North's
Government moved from a policy of hard coercion to the offer of conciliatory peace terms.
Both these factors moved the French toward open war.
From Lexington to Saratoga, Britain had been united in patriotic fervor in a war to crush
the Americans.
Only the gallant and seemingly discredited minority Whigs, led by Burke and especially
by Charles James Fox, the London Radicals to the left and the Chattamites on their right
persisted in opposing the war.
The Whigs and the Radicals realized that their salvation could only come with a resounding
British defeat in America, and on such defeat they centered all their hopes.
In April 1777, in his letter to the Sheriff of Bristol, Edmund Burke finally came around
to Fox's position of advocating repeal of all acts upon America passed since 1763, even
the Declaratory Act, which had been an integral part of the short-lived Rockingham Ministry.
Burke also went so far as to hint that he preferred American independence to continuing
the war.
Burgoyne's defeat galvanized the British and the French.
The British cabinet tried desperately to conciliate the Americans and avoid French entry and was
now prepared to offer the old-wig terms of going back to the status quo before 1763.
The British secretly conveyed these terms to the American commissioners at Paris, but
it was all too little and too late.
Humans after three years of bitter conflict were not disposed to abandon their independence.
As would happen again and again in history, an imperialist power, bogged down in an exhausting
colonial war which it could not win, desperately tried to find a way to extricate itself, and
the revolutionaries coolly pointed to the simple solution, cease-fire and evacuation
of All Forces as preconditions to negotiations leading to recognition of independence.
But the British persisted in holding face to be a more important objective.
The Americans, however, used these offers to pressure France into immediate entry into
the war.
As early as mid-December, the French hastened to promise recognition of the independence
of the United States.
On January 8, even after failing to obtain Spain's agreement, Bergen's informed the
Americans that France was willing to sign a treaty of friendship and alliance with the
New Republic.
Finally on February 6, 1778, France and the United States signed two vital treaties.
The Treaty of Amity and Commerce was a revised version of Adam's Model Plan of 1776.
Neutral's rights were guaranteed, but instead of unrestricted free trade between the two countries, they adopted a convenient most favored nation clause.
The Treaty of Conditional and Defensive Alliance pledged a military alliance whenever war should ensue between France and Great Britain.
The aim of the alliance was declared to be the protection of the absolute independence of the United States.
France pledged itself never to claim territory in North America previously held by the British.
The two parties pledged themselves never to conclude a separate peace with Britain, nor to lay down their arms until the independence of the United States shall have been assured.
Each of the two countries also, rather rashly, mutually extended guarantees to the other's territory and agreed not to seek compensation from one another for wartime actions.
The treaties were a great diplomatic success and contained virtually everything for which the Americans could have hoped, with no compromise whatever of American independence.
The English Whigs were radicalized enough by these events to come forth now as open champions of American independence.
They and the radicals put up a vigorous and gallant fight to stop the war,
led by the Duke of Richmond's motion in early April for evacuation of the United States and recognition of its independence.
The British masses, however, showed little sign of recognizing the folly of pursuing the imperialist war.
On the contrary, they began to clamor for war with the ancient enemy France, and since war with France always conjured up William Pitt,
it is possible that a united opposition behind Pitt could have toppled the North regime.
For Pitt, however, Britain's imperial role came first and foremost, and he ensured the failure of the justly embittered Whigs by roundly attacking the very concept of independence for the colonies.
Furthermore, he refused any sort of cooperation with such anti-empire men as the Whigs.
In virtually the last act of his life, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, staggered into the House of Lords to register bitter opposition to Lord Richmond's notion, croaking,
If we must fall, let us fall like men. The dying Pitt collapsed, as Burke acidly put it, after he had spat his last venom.
Pitt had performed his last betrayal, his last obfuscation of the liberal cause, but his banner was taken up by his disciple, the Earl of Shelburne, and the Richmond Resolution was defeated in the House of Lords by a vote of 50 to 33.
In Commons, the American cause was led by Fox, who showed himself the equal of Burke as a political strategist.
Instinctively, Fox realized that political ideas remain isolated and quixotic until they become rooted in a social class.
He began, then, to reach beyond the narrow circle of Whig aristocrats toward the mass of country gentry, who, while traditionally Tory, were instinctively and inarticulately libertarian.
Their main concern was in keeping tax rates and therefore government expenditures as low as possible.
He linked up in their minds the American War to the aggrandizement of ministers and their favorite placement at home.
A successful American War would rivet the power of the executive and of the Crown upon Parliament and the British people.
In this session, Fox was able to make a serious bid for gentry support and succeeded on several issues.
While reviving and unifying opposition to the war with America, however,
the British liberal movement was beginning to undergo a deep-seated philosophical rift.
Elaborating a conservative liberal position was Edmund Burke.
Much of Burke's Letter to Bristol was a bitter attack on the renaissance radical libertarian wing of the opposition.
Burke violently denounced systematic reasoning in political philosophy, as well as the belief in abstract natural rights.
As against reason and logical consistency, he held up the instinctive wisdom of the past, compromise and ad hoc prudence in political affairs.
Burke was nothing if not provocative, and his letter to Bristol immediately provoked a pamphlet in reply by the ardent Whig peer, the Earl of Abingdon, who championed the natural rights philosophy.
Abingdon, however, was not the intellectual leader of the new libertarian movement.
That honor belonged rather to the dissenting minister, the Reverend Richard Price.
Price's magnum opus, widely and enormously influential in England and America,
was his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 1776.
Correctly observing that the Americans were risking all on behalf of liberty as a natural and inalienable right, he set out to examine both the nature of liberty and the controversy with America.
Weighing the relative danger to liberty from a despotic government, as against a popular mob, Price saw why a settled government is far more dangerous.
A mob is by its nature transitory and short-lived, while despotism wearing the form of government, and being armed with its force, is an evil not to be conquered without dreadful struggles.
While representation is a vital check against a king, Parliament's delegated power, too, must be kept subordinate and limited, for true sovereignty must lie in the people themselves.
The true purpose of government, Price argued, was to protect and confirm liberty and the natural rights of men and not to infringe them.
But power must be continually watched and particular dangers to liberty are an extravagant budget and a standing army.
Parliaments must be subject to frequent elections and be free of corruption.
He went on as well to denounce England's war against America and its claim to tax the colonies.
He also trenchantly defended revolution in phrases very similar to the Declaration of Independence,
which would appear six months later. Mankind are naturally disposed to continue
in subjection to that mode of government under which they have been born and educated.
Nothing raises them to resistance but gross abuses or some particular oppressions out of the roads to which they have been used.
There has generally been more reason to complain that they have been too patient than that they have been turbulent and rebellious.
In setting forth his theory of liberty Price came close to a stand for anarchism.
The polar opposites in political regimes were slavery on the one hand and self-government on the other.
And self-government or self-direction was the key to liberty, not government by law, since laws can be and are made by one person or set of persons to bind others.
To Price, the mark of the Free State was that in it every man was his own legislator. All taxes were free gifts. All laws were established by common consent. All magistrates were trustees. In short, the essentials of a system of individualist anarchism.
In such a society, moreover, there would be no artificial equality of income or position. The equality would be an individual independence and liberty. Equality is the independence of each on every other. No man could be ruled without his consent, or taxed, or abridged of his liberty.
Price's pamphlet quickly went into over a dozen printings and was rapidly reprinted in Scotland, Ireland and throughout the United States in pamphlet form and in the weekly press.
Emerging as leader of the London radicals in this period was Major John Cartwright.
One of the first open advocates of American independence, Major Cartwright refused to serve in the fighting against the revolution.
In contrast to the Whigs, he and other radicals realized that liberty could never become the guiding principle of the British state until the ruling oligarchy was at least curbed.
Hence, in his highly popular Take Your Choice, 1776, Cartwright urged a democratic reform of parliament to bring about a liberal government.
and Government. He boldly called for democracy to check and limit the oligarchic power of parliament. Specifically, he urged strictly uniform representation, voting by secret ballot, annually elected parliaments, and universal manhood suffrage. He even advocated the gathering of a great extra-governmental convention which could reform the British Constitution. While the liberals were becoming increasingly
On the American question, the harried Lord North, restrained by the King from resigning his post as Prime Minister, slowly pressed forward the former American policy of the Whigs.
Overriding the dismay of the Tory extremists, North pushed through Parliament in mid-March
the repeal of all the interfering Acts since 1763, including the T, Coercive and Prohibitatory
Acts, as well as abandoning any parliamentary taxation for revenue upon the colonies. Parliament
Parliament also created a commission under the Earl of Carlisle to go to America and offer peace terms on the basis of home rule.
The British concessions, however, made little impact on the United States, which branded anyone who might come to terms with the Carlisle Commission an enemy of the country.
Further, the Americans used this offer, as we have seen, to pressure France into entering the war.
Shortly afterward, Congress received news of the French treaties, which were ratified unanimously on May 4, after only two days of deliberation.
The Carlisle Commission arrived in Philadelphia in early June 1778, only to find General Clinton evacuating the city.
Hardly a strong position from which to bargain with the Americans.
The Commission's repeated request for peace talks were met firmly by Congress's unanimous rebuff of June 17.
There would be no negotiations unless they followed the withdrawal of British troops in recognition of the independence of the United States.
It was now only a question of time when hostilities between Britain and France would officially
begin and the clash came at a naval skirmish off Euchant near Brittany on June 17.
The two fleets battled to a standoff and thus furnished an unpleasant reminder to the English
that the French fleet was a formidable foe.
After the entry of France into the war, Britain was forced to adopt a defensive strategy in
America to permit the waging of a general war. Naval strategy became dominant. Indeed,
had French Admiral Charles Hector d'Estaing not dwindled in crossing the Atlantic, he
could have intercepted Lord Howe's inferior fleet engaged in the evacuation from Philadelphia.
When he arrived in American waters in July, he in Washington blockaded New York City.
Destang considered attacking the inferior British fleet in New York Harbor, but the
lack of maneuverability for his heavier ships forced him to desist.
From there he and General Sullivan moved toward a land-sea siege of the British base
at Newport.
But stout resistance and stormy waters beat off the French-American attack, and both land and sea forces withdrew.
de Stang, refusing to aid further in attacking Newport, withdrew his fleet to West Indian waters in November.
British strategy for America in the midst of the wider international war was temporarily to emphasize naval conflict,
Concentrating its land force in a few coastal bases such as New York City, Newport and Halifax, from which to wage blockades and raids on American trade and shipping and on coastal centers.
Even Lord Germain agreed that the British war on America must be principally naval.
But between the French Navy and American privateers, now fully and openly cooperating, British naval affairs were in powerless shape.
Before French intervention, British blockades and an efficient convoy system had considerably reduced the effectiveness of American privateers.
But now, while North delayed in pushing naval construction, American privateers could raid
British shipping from France and boldly strike at coastal areas of England and Ireland.
Of the single ships of the tiny Continental Navy, the most prominent exploit was that
of Captain John Paul Jones.
In the sloop Ranger and operating out of Brest in Brittany, Jones raided and fought successfully
during April up and down the coasts of England, Scotland and Ireland.
The British had decided to center their operations in 1778 on an amphibious expedition of 5,000
of Clinton's men against St. Lucia in the West Indies.
The arrival of Destang's fleet forestalled this attack.
and was not authorized to take offensive action on land, and so the 1778 campaign was frittered away.