In this first interview the minister was lifted out of his discouragement by Franklins solid faith in the American destiny, and by his understanding of the whole European complex which made him able to suggest the right move at the right time rather than chimerical impossibilities. On July 23 he wrote a memoir to Louis XVI declaring that the moment had come when France must resolve either to abandon America or to aid her courageously and effectively. He urged a closer alliance to prevent a reunion of Britain and America. However, Franklin had boarded the Reprisal for that very purpose. People he loved and admired had far too much influence on him. The French government has immediately recalled its ambassadors to the US and Australia for consultation in response to America's recently announced national security partnership with the United . Vergennes was so disheartened by the bad news which had arrived even before these disasters were known, and he so much dreaded a sudden declaration of war by Britain, that in August he formally closed the ports of France to American privateers and their prizes. The colonies could not conclude treaties until they declared themselves a nation, and the necessity of getting military supplies and the support of a powerful fleet did a great deal to hasten independence. A member of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1773 he was elected to the Royal Society under the sponsorship of Franklin, the astronomer royal, and the kings physician. Franklin and Deane were at the top of that long list. By early 1775 the British embassy in France estimated that war supplies worth 32,000,000 livres (about $6,000,000) had been shipped from that kingdom to the colonies. Q. The colonies needed these things . The Battle of Saratoga was an extensive and punishing conflict and a key victory for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. And the French people, cheering in the streets and squares, were as proud of Saratoga, he wrote home, as if it had been a Victory of their own Troops over their own Enemies.. Resentful over the loss of its North American empire after the French and Indian War, France welcomed the opportunity to undermine Britain's position in the New World. Contrary winds kept the Reprisal from entering the Loire to make the port of Nantes. Bancroft was still the mission confidant at Passy; certain Americans who sat at Deanes dinner table reported on ship movements to the British secret service, and Captain Joseph Hynson, who happened to be Lambert Wickess stepbrother, stole an entire pouch of dispatches intended for Congress, which contained all the secret correspondence between the mission and the French ministry for the last eight months. It also meant that mainland meat and fish would spoil for lack of salt. Born in Massachusetts in 1744, Bancroft was just of age when he settled in London, but he was already a notable scientist and writer. The dreadful thing is that Arthur Lees nightmare was accepted by perfectly sane men and that it not only outlived the Eighteenth Century but has persisted in a shadowy form into the Twentieth. Vergennes would promise to investigate the matter, which meant that Stormont had lost a point. One traditional characteristic of the French diplomacy of alliances has been the "Alliance de revers" (i.e. Secret aid was no longer sufficient, he argued, for the British claimed that the policy of the Bourbons was to destroy England by means of the Americans, and America by means of the British. But he had not reckoned on the reversal of Spanish policy. His future United States included Canada and the Floridas and the British West Indies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas. That night boats brought his cannon and powder and a number of French seamen, and the Dunkirk Pirate was on his way. The United States, far from asking something for herself, was in reality advancing Bourbon interests and fighting their war. Lee next stormed Prussia. Most of them were of no earthly use to the Commander in Chief and drained an impoverished Congress of money and patience. Revolutionaries were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment including individual freedom. Though facing insurmountable odds, the underdog naval forces of the young United States proved their savvy by helping to defeat Great Britain in the War for Independence. Franklins experiment had been a complete success in the laboratory sense; the sea raids had brought England and France to the verge of war. Over the course of the war, France contributed an estimated 12,000 soldiers and 32,000 sailors to the American war effort. This wealthy and devoted young Marylander had been educated in England and was qualified for diplomatic assignments. In order to bring the reluctant enemies to blows he had to influence chiefly two men: George III, who was just as set against a French war as he was adamant in the American conflict, and Vergennes, the mentor of a young and inexperienced king. The Doctor was adept at working through trusted friends, and his friends were legion. They were based on the Plan of 1776, drafted chiefly by Franklin, and they laid down his cherished, and essentially modern, principles of free trade and settled the wholly new problem of how a republic should conduct its relations with a kingdom. Ferreiro, Larrie D. Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France & Spain Who Saved It. He could not urge France into the war without Spanish support and without patriot victories to insure the survival of the young nation across the Atlantic. The man who believed there was never a good war or a bad peace was about to use all his powers to sweep the Bourbon nations into the War of Independence. The estimate means little, for the British were slow in discovering the tremendous scope of the activities abetted by Vergennes. England registered the expected sense of outrage; the whole country seethed with the news. Part 2 focuses on the French land and naval forces that assisted the U.S. in combating the British military. In the kindest of letters, Gardoqui explained the situation to the approaching envoy and suggested a meeting on the French side of the border. George III was uneasy about both Americans because they gambled wildly in stocks and kept mistresses. One after the other his Whig friends rose in Parliament and warned that France might soon come out in support of the Americans. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. He had spent eighteen years in England as colonial agent and the last eighteen months at home in the Continental Congress. (The third captain of that cruise was staying behind to take out one of the new American frigates built at Nantes.) Deane was in and out of the Passy house, keeping his hotel quarters for business and the entertaining of transient sea captains and a horde of friends. Somehow the wild Irishman, repeating the maneuver of the sound and sober Wickes, created an infinitely greater reaction. The campaign against Franklin, the father of mischief, took longer because, as Izard confessed in a letter to the president of Congress, Henry Laurens, it was extremely difficult to find any proofs of his crimes. Bermuda, which barely escaped becoming the fourteenth state, had a large merchant colony on the Dutch island, and there sold her American friends the thousand fine cedar sloops she built or refitted for them. There was no good news at Passy. The commissioners drew on it for their expenses, for the purchase of war supplies, for building three frigates in Holland and France, and for keeping up the maritime war in European waters. Deane arranged to meet Wentworth at dinner a day or so later, and Franklin took care to tell the minister what was afoot. took place in France and India. The stench of treachery was in the air. In mortal terror of discovery, Bancroft was always called Edwards or some other cover name in the secret files, and even in private conferences with Wentworth and Lord Stormont. On the very day the French ministry decided for the alliance, Paul Wentworth was back in Paris. England, Franklin said suavely, could hardly object to France sending the battleships with their crews, since Britain herself was borrowing or hiring troops from other states. He was a bosom friend of Alderman Lee and had accepted his appointment by the Adams-Lee bloc in Congress as envoy to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The move was long overdue, for the Americans had been making a brilliant success of their sea raids all over the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The letter announcing his imminent arrival in Madrid was received with consternation. He had connived in the Conyngham raid in the confidence that the next time Stormont came fuming into his Cabinet with threats of war, he could hand the pestiferous ambassador his portfolio and wish him a pleasant old age in England. He came down to Passy to receive one of the captains commissions Franklin was empowered to issue, and then Carmichael took charge of him. Franklin knew that Vergennes, who for years had befriended America, would scuttle her the instant she ceased to serve his purpose. By the middle of July Vergennes had made up his mind to ask the King for armed intervention. These reports were written in invisible ink between the lines of love letters addressed to Mr. The only source for salt during the war was the Turks Islands beds at the tail of the Bahama chain, long a Bermudian monopoly. In 1757, Franklin went to England to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly as a diplomat in its fight against the descendants of the Penn . On February 6, 1778, Benjamin Franklin was in France signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance. The table has been produced based upon "Ferguson's estimate of the total cost of the war": Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 103, Table 5.4. This well-connected young man had been sent direct from Congress to buy two ships to serve as packets for the mission. Shortly after this, Parliament authorized British privateering. Johnson was captured and sent to the Old Mill, from which he soon escaped. Soon Franklin and Deane had a group of young men busy in the various ports, helping merchantmen and privateers speed on their way, informing them of shifts in French regulations and dangerous areas patrolled by British warships, recruiting French seamen to fill out depleted ships companies, finding masters for ships and ships for masters. They were in the best possible hands; Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the few masters seasoned in the merchant fleet who had joined the Continental Navy. Silas Deane was invaluable. After that opening wedge, which tacitly killed the embargo, Franklins resolution for world trade was bound to go through. It thus comprises the first seven years of the period of warfare that was continued through the Napoleonic Wars until Napoleon's abdication in 1814, with a year of interruption under the peace of Amiens (1802-03). He was evidently buying arms and setting up a smuggling base in the Low Countries. He was to steal all original papers possible from the commissioners, and copy others. A week later she was halfway out of the harbor when a British sloop and cutter were sighted. The court of France, he wrote, is the great wheel that moves them all and he added that of all posts he preferred Paris for himself. When Deane arrived in Paris in the summer of 1776 Arthur Lee rushed over from London.