First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [130]
THE Americans in the winter of 1780–81, following the Hartford Conference, were in no better case, although the British did not fully realize to what low ebb the rebellion had sunk. The mutinies in the army and the catastrophic fall of the financial credit of Congress, with every prospect, as Rochambeau expected, of the currency falling shortly “to total non-value,” darkened the outlook even more. In Virginia, Benedict Arnold, acknowledged on both sides as a general of the highest capacity, was conducting “thundering excursions” of destruction at the head of 2,000 men (largely southern Loyalists) on behalf of the enemy. Defense was weakening. Under the pall of accumulating misfortune, Congress determined to send a special envoy, in the person of Colonel John Laurens, to inform the court of France in the “clearest light the state of distress of this country.” To save the sinking cause of the Revolution, fresh help from France was essential. Benjamin Franklin was already in France as congressional commissioner, but it was felt that a fresh voice was needed to supplement the old philosopher’s finesse. The younger Laurens, who knew the privations in the field from shared experience, had an added personal reason to fight the British in the cause of his father, who, captured at sea with the incriminating Dutch treaty, was still a prisoner in the Tower of London. His son could be counted upon to be a forceful advocate. John Laurens had fought with Washington at Brandywine and Monmouth and afterward, and had been employed by him in a number of secret missions. Commissioned a colonel by Congress, he had fought a duel for what he considered insults to Washington with the troublesome Charles Lee, whose order for retreat at Monmouth in the New Jersey campaign of 1778 had so infuriated Washington, and who ever after had been trying to discredit the Commander-in-Chief in the hope of supplanting him. Since the duel, Laurens had been serving as Washington’s secretary, being credited by him with a character for “intrepidity bordering on rashness,” which would be useful for cutting through the diplomatic niceties established by Franklin in his relations with Vergennes. Engrossed in the female charms and admiration of Paris, Franklin as envoy had acquired more celebrity than tangible aid.
Before Laurens departed, Washington drew for him a dark and frank appraisal of conditions. He thought a point of crisis had been reached. The people in general had lost confidence and regarded the impressment of supplies as “burdensome and oppressive.” The system had excited “serious discontents” and “alarming symptoms of opposition.” The army had suffered “calamitous distress” and their patience was “nearly exhausted.” With money, the Allies could make a “decided effort” to secure America’s liberty and independence; without such aid, “we may make a feeble expiring effort” which could well be our last. In a letter of April 9 to Laurens in Paris, Washington put the case as starkly as he could: “We are at the end of our tether, and now or never our deliverance must come.”
Franklin, humiliated by the dispatch of a special envoy to his post while he was present, was galvanized by Laurens’ coming to make a more emphatic approach of his own. In letter and interview with Vergennes, echoing Washington’s “now or never,” he told the Foreign Minister he must face the dire fact that unless America received the “most vigorous aid of our allies, particularly in the article of money,” she might have to yield and sue for peace, leaving Britain to “recover the American continent and become the terror of Europe.” He asked Vergennes point-blank what Congress might be told it could expect in French aid. Vergennes answered that the King was prepared to make an outright gift of 6 million livres, to make up for the promised Second Division.
Laurens, on arriving, opened a campaign as direct as bullets. He promptly asked Vergennes for a loan of 25 million livres