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and working with him on the terms of a treaty of amity and commerce patterned on the model drawn up for hopeful use with future allies by Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, William’s brother, in 1776. When it was completed, William sent it off in triumph to friends in Congress as his ticket for the diplomatic post. He had no authority to negotiate a treaty for his country any more than did Van Berckel or de Neufville for theirs, but no one worried about that for the moment. In Philadelphia the draft was submitted to Henry Laurens, a wealthy planter of South Carolina, lately President of the Congress. He was the man who had actually been appointed to The Hague to follow Adams. As he was about to sail in August, 1780, to his post, he took the draft of the treaty with him to examine the terms. Traveling not in convoy but in a lone packet (a passenger or mail ship), his ship the Mercury was chased by a British cruiser, H.M.S. Vestal, off Newfoundland. Quickly, Laurens emptied the diplomatic papers from his trunk, stuffed them into a bag weighted with shot and threw it overboard. Unfortunately, he had not deflated the air, so the bag floated, was sighted by an alert sailor on the Vestal and hooked on board. Boarders from the Vestal, on discovering Laurens’ identity as “a gentleman on his way to Holland to conclude a loan for the use of the persons calling themselves the United States of America,” arrested him on September 3 and carried him off to prison in the Tower of London, where he remained until the end of the war.

Discovery of the treaty in Laurens’ papers, and the correspondence associated with it, excited the British as a hostile act by the Dutch perfectly suiting their need. Here was proof, wrote Lord Stormont, now British Minister for Colonial Affairs, to Yorke, that Amsterdam was in direct contact with the Americans, conduct which he luxuriously described, as “to all intents and purposes equivalent to actual aggression.” Considering that the treaty was provisional and drawn by unofficial persons with no authority to act for either Holland or America, British intensity over the document was exaggerated—deliberately. They wanted to make a commotion that would frighten the Dutch out of entering the Neutrality League, and they carried on about the Laurens disclosure as if it were a plot to assassinate the King. If the States General were found to have had a hand in it, wrote Lord Stormont to Yorke, it could be used as a casus belli for a declaration of war. If the Netherlands under the influence of the French party entered the Neutrality League, the Laurens papers would “justify before the whole world any measure they [Britain] wished to take” and “give the properest direction to the war, by making it a particular quarrel between Great Britain and Holland in which no neutral power has any concern.” Yorke at once took up the agreeable task of conveying the British threat to the Prince. Publication of the affair, he reported, could not “fail to occasion a wonderful alarm in the country … and will thoroughly cool the ardour for the Northern League.” But Yorke pushed the matter rather too heavily, demanding in his most domineering manner that the draft treaty must be disavowed by the Stadtholder and that Van Berckel and his accomplices must be given exemplary punishment as “disturbers of the public peace and violators of the law of nations”; otherwise His Majesty would be obliged to take measures to uphold his dignity. Adams, not yet replaced, repeated that “the arrogant English were treating Amsterdam exactly as they had Boston.” With that fatal gift for the unlearned lesson, they produced the same result—unity against the oppressor, which in America had brought the fractious colonies into their first federation. Adams reported a wide expectation of war. On Christmas Day he wrote that a “violent struggle” gripped the Republic. Anti-English songs calculated to please the taste of sailors were sung in the streets. “A woman who sung it … the day before yesterday sold six hundred of them in an hour and in one spot. These are