Washington [240]
With d’Estaing, Washington swallowed his pride and flattered the Frenchman’s pride unashamedly. “It is in the trying circumstances to which your Excellency has been exposed that the virtues of a great mind are displayed in their brightest luster,” he wrote, claiming that the unforeseen storm had stolen a major prize from the admiral.8 As part of the effort to repair frayed relations, John Hancock hosted a gleaming banquet at his Beacon Hill mansion in Boston, where the count was presented with a portrait of Washington. “I never saw a man so glad at possessing his sweetheart’s picture, as the admiral was to receive yours,” Lafayette reported from the scene.9
For Washington, the French alliance never flowed smoothly. The bulk of France’s fleet remained based in the Caribbean, which hindered joint operations, and the alliance with a mighty power placed Washington in an uncomfortably subservient position. By now he was accustomed to command, and a junior partnership didn’t suit his strong-willed nature. He admired French military know-how, but as an outwardly cool and reticent personality, he had limited patience with French histrionics. That summer he described the French as “a people old in war, very strict in military etiquette, and apt to take fire where others scarcely seem warmed.”10 Whenever he wrote to Count d’Estaing, his language seemed to grow more stilted, as if he were trying to ape French diplomatic language, and it never sounded quite natural. Somewhere inside Washington there still lurked the insecure provincial, trying to impress these snobbish Europeans.
Compared to their American counterparts, the French, in their handsome white uniforms, looked positively foppish, right down to their high-heeled shoes. On the eve of one operation with the French, Washington ordered his field officers to fix upon a uniform look for regimental clothing, explaining that “it has a very odd appearance, especially to foreigners, to see the same corps of officers each differing from the other in fashion of the facings, sleeves, and pockets, of their coats.”11 The French condescended to American soldiers, especially the militia. “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle,” said one French officer. “All the tailors and apothecaries in the country must have been called out . . . They were mounted on bad nags and looked like a flock of ducks in cross belts.”12
The Franco-American partnership soon gave way to reciprocal disillusionment. The French had imagined that Washington commanded an army double the size of the one they found, while Washington had hoped for more than four thousand French troops. His skepticism about French motives would harden into a corner-stone of his foreign policy. His fellow citizens, he thought, were too ready to glorify France, which had entered the war to damage Britain, not to aid the Americans. “Men are very apt to run into extremes,” he warned Henry Laurens. “Hatred to England may carry some into an excess of confidence in France, especially when motives of gratitude are thrown into the scale.”13 John Adams summed up the situation memorably when he said that the French foreign minister kept “his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”14 In yet another sign of his growing political acumen, Washington generalized this perception into an enduring truth of foreign policy, noting that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”15 For Washington, the Continental Army was a practical school in which he received an accelerated course in statecraft, completing