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By Root 963 0

He was not the ideal selection for a peace mission. Carlisle, as noted, knew nothing of negotiation. William Eden, the third commissioner, had been confidential secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, which governed relations with the Colonies, and, as a member of both the English and later Irish parliaments, had to deal with both Americans and Irish, two troublesome peoples. During the war with America, he served as the director of secret intelligence. In these positions he might be supposed to have learned the utility of tactful procedures, though if he had, he seems not to have been able to convey them to his colleagues.

The British government itself had nullified the mission before it could act, by ordering the evacuation of Philadelphia for transfer of command to New York, giving an effect of British withdrawal just as the peace commissioners were due to arrive in America. The appearance of yielding was enhanced by the transfer of 5,000 troops, which had held Philadelphia, to the West Indies to counter expected French attack on the islands. Philadelphia was thus rendered indefensible and Carlisle deprived of his theorem that “gunpowder or guineas will fix the business.”

An offer of peace terms by one belligerent will always give an impression of a weakening of purpose and will to victory. The other party, sensing weakness, will be less disposed to accept terms. This is one reason why ending a war is always more difficult than starting one. The Peace Commission and the Conciliatory Propositions unavoidably gave an impression that British enthusiasm for the war was fading, which was indeed the case and which naturally gave the Americans reason to reject terms or even to discuss them.

Frustrated and affronted in America by the refusal of Congress to meet with him and his colleagues, Johnstone’s idea was to persuade individual members by worldly rewards to move the recalcitrant Congress to enter negotiations. He made his proposals in writing, offering to bribe Robert Morris of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in America and a devoted partisan of the Revolution, and also Joseph Reed, the Pennsylvania patriot, who was offered £10,000 if he could reconcile the Colonies with Britain. Johnstone suggested that peerages could be arranged for other members who might succeed in promoting a settlement. Among those he approached was Henry Laurens, President of the Congress. When Johnstone’s letters were given by their indignant recipients to the press, public outrage forced the overenterprising commissioner to resign from the Peace Commission and return to England. Eden, more circumspect, took no part, unless private and undocumented, in his colleague’s too zealous maneuvers, writing only to his brother at home that if “my wishes and cares could accomplish it, this noble country would soon belong once more to Great Britain.” His chief of mission, Lord Carlisle, was left to resort to a tactic of threats of terror and devastation. In a public manifesto of October, 1778, which he ordered distributed to all members of the Congress, to George Washington and all American generals, to all provincial governors and assemblies, to all ministers of the Gospel and commanders of the British forces and prison camps, he proclaimed in the name of the Peace Commission that the Colonies having made alliance with the enemy of Britain, it became Britain’s duty “by every means in her power to destroy or render useless a connexion contrived for her ruin”; in short, to replace the “humanity and benevolence with which she had hitherto pursued the war” by sterner practices. Carlisle’s notion of benevolence addressed to people who in every colony had already suffered pillage and destruction, the burning of villages and the laying waste of farms, fields and timberlands, did not lend him credibility. Taking advantage of his threats, Congress recommended to local authorities that the British text should be published in gazettes of their districts, “to convince the good people of these states of the insidious designs” of the Peace Commission.