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By Root 1018 0

such as the omniscient Abbé Raynal in his Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the Two Indies. As a late creation, America was pronounced to be still incomplete and unfit for human life, much less civilization. Its natural physical conditions, which the famed naturalist Buffon, in one of the wilder leaps of European fiction, managed somehow to describe as a “niggardly sky and unprolific land,” prevented healthy development of flora and fauna and even of the human race, who were believed weak in virility. Buffon, of course, never crossed the Atlantic to see America in person. According to similarly qualified scientists, fully grown adults from other climates who settled there “lost their powers,” and Buffon was able to satisfy himself in another of his peculiar findings that the native Indians “have small organs of generation” and “little sexual capacity.” Climate in the New World, according to a best-selling French treatise translated into Dutch in 1775, made men listless and indolent; they might become happy but never stalwart. America, affirmed this scholar, “was formed for happiness, but not for empire.” If this was intended to be reassuring, it hints at an underlying fear in Europeans of some huge primitive force in the New World that could rise to overwhelm them.

Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting some caution into the golden dreams. According to one school, America was too big, too divided, ever to become a single country, its communications too distended for the country ever to be united. Were it to gain independence, it would fall apart in civil war, nor could its long coastline be defended against a foe unless it acquired decisive sea power. The other school maintained that America’s immensity and large resources destined her for great power that must inevitably clash with the Dutch and threaten their trade, especially in the Colonies. Expectation of lucrative commerce, pessimists warned, must be held within this framework. Both arguments, that America was too weak and contrariwise too strong, were taken up by British propagandists in the effort to dampen enthusiasm within the Amsterdam group for closer ties with the American Colonies.

Combat at sea in 1779 over the tangled issue of neutral rights brought matters to increased tension. The reason neutrality was a subject so rife in nuisance value was because in a climate of incessant wars the belligerents were in everlasting need of supplies, for which they were dependent on neutral shipping. Neutrality law, supposedly established upon the simple principle of “free ships, free goods,” had been formulated by the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625; essentially it provided that anything carried in neutral bottoms except actual munitions of war was “free” to be delivered to a belligerent, while anything in a belligerent ship was ipso facto a prize of war. Subsidiary questions of what materials were “free” and what were contraband, what were a belligerent’s rights of search and seizure and a shipper’s right of convoy to protect against such action, had become so overregulated by treaties and protocols as to constitute a maze from which Theseus himself could not have found his way out. The purity of Grotius’ principle had been modified with disorderly effect to exempt naval “stores,” meaning materials, mainly timber, for ship construction, from the category of contraband. Limiting Britain’s freedom of action, the naval stores’ exemption and the principle of “free ships, free goods” were hated by the British, yet had been accepted in their Treaty of Westminster with the Dutch in 1674 in order to end the expensive and endless Dutch wars.

Naval stores brought the French vigorously into the picture. While individuals in France were fired by the ideals of liberty in the revolt of the Colonies, French official policy was not concerned with liberty but with aiding the rebels as a means of avenging herself on Britain for the loss of Canada