43. Response in Britain and France

The great aim of American diplomacy during the 1776–78 period was to induce France to expand her role from that of staunch but covert supporter to open ally at war with England. Pressures played upon the French Government: the masses, and the political opposition led by former Foreign Minister Comte Etienne François Choiseul were eager for war; but Foreign Minister Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, though deeply sympathetic to the new republic, cautiously drew back from open war, especially after American reverses in the summer of 1776 and in 1777. France and Spain had been about to go to war with England when Washington’s ignominious defeat at the Battle of Long Island changed Vergennes’ mind; and France again drew back from the break after Burgoyne’s capture of Ticonderoga. Finally, Britain tried to intimidate France by threatening war if she did not cease her aid, while the Americans responded with subtle blackmail and threats of a separate peace with Britain—threats that conjured up to the French the fearsome vision of old Pitt heading a unified Anglo-American war to crush France.

Negotiations for the fledgling United States with France were first handled by Silas Deane, who arrived in France in early July 1776. He was succeeded by a three-man commission appointed by Congress to negotiate treaties and agreements in Europe, consisting of Deane, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. The commission arrived in Paris at the end of December 1776. The wily old tactician Franklin proved to be a master at the intricacies of lying, bamboozling, and intriguing that form the warp and woof of diplomacy. Moreover, the old rogue was a huge hit with the French, who saw him as the embodiment of reason, the natural man, and bonhomie.

This three-man commission was guided by a model set of treaties, the “Plan of 1776,” drawn up while Deane was still on his own in France by a committee of independence. The committee submitted its model in mid-July 1776 and Congress adopted it in mid-September. The plan, which furnished the model for all the eighteenth century treaties of the United States, did not propose a formal political alliance with France, for John Adams had led Congress in adopting Tom Paine’s “isolationist” view that America must be self-reliant, abstain from entangling alliances in the unremitting wars of Europe, and avoid possible domination by any of the powers. Instead, the Plan proposed French recognition of the independence of the United States, and a perpetual treaty of commerce and friendship resting on the great international law principles safeguarding the rights of neutral nations: free ships make free goods; carefully restricted lists of contraband that could be seized by belligerents; and freedom of neutral shipping between belligerent ports. All of these emerging libertarian principles went totally against the practice of Great Britain, the world’s dominant and aggressive naval power. The American model also proposed total freedom of trade and reciprocity between France and the United States. As Professor Gilbert puts it: “Whereas usually commercial conventions were sources of friction and instruments of power politics reinforcing political alliances by commercial preferences, the Americans wanted to establish a commercial system of freedom and equality which would eliminate all cause for tension and political conflicts.”*

In other terms of the plan, no separate peace with Britain would be made by either party in case France should be involved in the war, and the United States was to pledge not to interfere with Spanish possessions in South America. France, in turn, was to give up any claims it might have to territory on the North American continent.

In the Plan of 1776, as Felix Gilbert points out, the infant United States set forth a shining new libertarian conception of how nation-states should deal with one another: political isolationism coupled with cultural and economic internationalism. There was to be no political meddling by governments, but rather full freedom for peaceful and productive relationships between individuals and peoples. This conception put into practice the foreign policy views that were being developed by the French philosophes. The philosophes recognized that the expansion of international commerce was rapidly creating one interdependent economic world, a true family of nations welded together through trade for mutual benefit. The task of governments, then, including their foreign policy, is to get out of the way of this natural social intercourse. Militarism, the chimera of the “balance of power,” treaties and alliances, the frauds of diplomacy, all were denounced as old-fashioned and incompatible with the new international order of peace and freedom and reason, the only order compatible with the rapid emergence of one economic world. Or, as the French physiocrat and libertarian Nicolas Baudeau put it, in 1767: “The essence of power politics consists of divergence of interests; that of economic policy of unity of interests—the one leads to war, frustrations, destruction, the other to social integration, cooperation, and free and peaceful sharing of the fruits of work.”* The “old policy” of aggression and restriction was to be replaced by the “economic policy” of unrestricted freedom of trade, mutual benefit, and harmony among nations. In brief, in the world to come, “foreign policy” per se would disappear; in a free and rational world, foreign policy and diplomacy, “a typical phenomonon of the ancien regime... would become unnecessary.”

From the very beginning of the new republic, John Adams, Tom Paine and the other American leaders set forth as the objectives of American foreign policy peace, full neutral rights in international law, political isolationism, and unrestricted freedom of trade. “Relations between nations would become purely commercial contacts, and the need for a political diplomacy with alliances and balance of power would disappear from the international scene.”**

By the autumn of 1777, Britain had intimidated France into stopping the loading of vessels for America, and in ousting the American privateers from hospitable French ports. But the startling news of Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga coming in early December altered matters completely. Now Vergennes knew that America could win; in addition, the danger of an Anglo-American reconciliation suddenly emerged as Lord North’s government moved from a policy of hard coercion to the offer of conciliatory peace terms. Both these factors moved the French toward open war.

From Lexington to Saratoga, Britain had been united in patriotic fervor in a war to crush the Americans. Only the gallant and seemingly discredited minority Whigs, led by Burke and especially by Charles James Fox, the London radicals to the left, and the Chathamites on their right, persisted in opposing the war. The Whigs and the radicals realized that their salvation could only come with a resounding British defeat in America, and on such defeat they centered all their hopes. In April 1777, in his Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol, Edmund Burke finally came around to Fox’s position of advocating repeal of all acts upon America passed since 1763 —even the Declaratory Act, which had been an integral part of the shortlived Rockingham ministry. Burke also went so far as to hint that he preferred American independence to continuing the war.

Burgoyne’s defeat galvanized the British and the French. The British cabinet tried desperately to conciliate the Americans and avoid French entry, and was now prepared to offer the old Whig terms of going back to the status quo before 1763. The British secretly conveyed these terms to the American commissioners at Paris; but it was all too little and too late; Americans, after three years of bitter conflict, were not disposed to abandon their independence. As would happen again and again in history, an imperialist power, bogged down in an exhausting colonial war which it could not win, desperately tried to find a way to extricate itself; and the revolutionaries coolly pointed to the simple solution: cease-fire and evacuation of all forces as preconditions to negotiations leading to recognition of independence. But the British persisted in holding “face” to be a more important objective. The Americans, however, used these offers to pressure France into immediate entry into the war.

As early as mid-December, the French hastened to promise recognition of the independence of the United States; on January 8, even after failing to obtain Spain’s agreement, Vergennes informed the Americans that France was willing to sign a treaty of friendship and alliance with the new republic. Finally, on February 6, 1778, France and the United States signed two vital treaties. The treaty of amity and commerce was a revised version of Adams’s Model Plan of 1776; neutrals’ rights were guaranteed, but instead of unrestricted free trade between the two countries, they adopted a convenient “most favored nation” clause. The treaty of “conditional and defensive alliance” pledged a military alliance whenever war should ensue between France and Great Britain. The aim of the alliance was declared to be the protection of the absolute independence of the United States. France pledged itself never to claim territory in North America previously held by the British. The two parties pledged themselves never to conclude a separate peace with Britain, nor “to lay down their arms, until the independence of the United States shall have been... assured.” Each of the two countries also rather rashly mutually extended guarantees to the other’s territory, and agreed not to seek compensation from one another for wartime actions. The treaties were a great diplomatic success, and contained virtually everything for which the Americans could have hoped, with no compromise whatever of American independence.

The English Whigs were radicalized enough by these events to come forth now as open champions of American independence. They and the radicals put up a vigorous and gallant fight to stop the war, led by the Duke of Richmond’s motion in early April for evacuation of the United States and recognition of its independence. The British masses, however, showed little sign of recognizing the folly of pursuing the imperialist war; on the contrary, they began to clamor for war with the ancient enemy France, and since war with France always conjured up William Pitt, it is possible that a united opposition behind Pitt could have toppled the North regime. For Pitt, however, Britain’s imperial role came first and foremost, and he insured the failure of the justly embittered Whigs by roundly attacking the very concept of independence for the colonies; furthermore, he refused any sort of cooperation with such antiempire men as the Whigs. In virtually the last act of his life, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, staggered into the House of Lords to register bitter opposition to Lord Richmond’s notion. Croaking, “If we must fall, let us fall like men,” the dying Pitt collapsed, as Burke acidly put it, “after he had spat his last venom.” Pitt had performed his last betrayal, his last obfuscation, of the liberal cause. But his banner was taken up by his disciple the Earl of Shelburne, and the Richmond resolution was defeated in the House of Lords by a vote of 50 to 33.

In Commons, the American cause was led by Fox, who showed himself the equal of Burke as a political strategist. Instinctively, Fox realized that political ideas remain isolated and quixotic until they become rooted in a social class. He began, then, to reach beyond the narrow circle of Whig aristocrats toward the mass of country gentry, who, while traditionally Tory, were instinctively and inarticulately libertarian; their main concern was in keeping tax rates, and therefore government expenditures, as low as possible. He linked up in their minds the American war to the aggrandizement of ministers and their favorite placemen at home. A successful American war would rivet the power of the executive and of the Crown upon Parliament and the British people. In this session, Fox was able to make a serious bid for gentry support, and succeeded on several issues.

While reviving and unifying opposition to the war with America, however, the British liberal movement was beginning to undergo a deep-seated philosophical rift. Elaborating a conservative-liberal position was Edmund Burke. Much of Burke’s Letter to Bristol was a bitter attack on the renascent radical libertarian wing of the opposition. Burke violently denounced systematic reasoning in political philosophy, as well as the belief in “abstract” natural rights. As against reason and logical consistency, he held up the “instinctive wisdom” of the past, compromise, and ad hoc prudence in political affairs.

Burke was nothing if not provocative, and his Letter to Bristol immediately provoked a pamphlet in reply by the ardent Whig peer, the Earl of Abingdon, who championed the natural rights philosophy. Abingdon, however, was not the intellectual leader of the new libertarian movement. That honor belonged rather to the Dissenting minister, the Reverend Richard Price. Price’s magnum opus, widely and enormously influential in England and America, was his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776). Correctly observing that the Americans were risking all on behalf of liberty as a natural and inalienable right, he set out to examine both the nature of liberty and the controversy with America. Weighing the relative danger to liberty from a despotic government as against a popular mob, Price saw why a settled government is far more dangerous: a mob is by its nature transitory and short-lived, while “despotism wearing the form of government and being armed with its force, is an evil not to be conquered without dreadful struggles....” While representation is a vital check against a king, Parliament’s delegated power, too, must be kept subordinate and limited, for true sovereignty must lie in the people themselves.

The true purpose of government, Price argued, was to protect and confirm liberty and the natural rights of men, and not to infringe them. But power must be continually watched, and particular dangers to liberty are an extravagant budget and a standing army. Parliaments must be subject to frequent elections and be free of corruption. He went on as well to denounce England’s war against America and its claim to tax the colonies; he also trenchantly defended revolution in phrases very similar to the Declaration of Independence which would appear six months later:

Mankind are naturally disposed to continue in subjection to that mode of government... under which they have been born and educated. Nothing raises them to resistance but gross abuses, or some particular oppressions out of the roads to which they have been used... there has been generally been more reason to complain that they have been too patient than that they have been turbulent and rebellious.

In setting forth his theory of liberty, Price came close to a stand for anarchism. The polar opposites in political regimes were slavery on the one hand, and self-government on the other, and self-government or self-direction was the key to liberty, not government by law, since laws can be and are made by one person or set of persons to bind others. To Price, “the mark of the free state was that in it every man was his own legislator, all taxes were free gifts, all laws were established by common consent, all magistrates were trustees.” In short, the essentials of a system of individualist anarchism. In such a society, moreover, there would be no artificial equality of income or position; the equality would be in individual independence and liberty: “Equality is the independence of each on every other. No man could be ruled without his consent, or taxed, or abridged of his liberty.”*

Price’s pamphlet quickly went into over a dozen printings, and was rapidly reprinted in Scotland, Ireland, and throughout the United States in pamphlet form and in the weekly press.

Emerging as leader of the London radicals in this period was Maj. John Cartwright. One of the first open advocates of American independence, Major Cartwright refused to serve in the fighting against the Revolution. In contrast to the Whigs, he and other radicals realized that liberty could never become the guiding principle of the British state until the ruling oligarchy was at least curbed. Hence, in his highly popular Take Your Choice! (1776), Cartwright urged democratic reform of Parliament to bring about a liberal government. He boldly called for democracy to check and limit the oligarchic power of Parliament; specifically, he urged strictly uniform representation, voting by secret ballot, annually elected Parliaments, and universal manhood suffrage. He even advocated the gathering of a great extragovernmental convention which could reform the British Constitution.

While the liberals were becoming increasingly radicalized on the American question, the harried Lord North, restrained by the king from resigning his post as prime minister, slowly pressed forward the former American policy of the Whigs. Overriding the dismay of the Tory extremists, North pushed through Parliament in mid-March the repeal of all the interfering acts since 1763, including the Tea, Coercive, and Prohibitory acts, as well as abandoning any Parliamentary taxation for revenue upon the colonies. Parliament also created a commission under the Earl of Carlisle to go to America and offer peace terms on the basis of home rule. The British concessions, however, made little impact on the United States, which branded anyone who might come to terms with the Carlisle Commission an enemy of the country. Further, the Americans used this offer, as we have seen, to pressure France into entering the war.

Shortly afterward, Congress received news of the French treaties, which were ratified unanimously on May 4 after only two days of deliberation. The Carlisle Commission arrived in Philadelphia in early June 1778, only to find General Clinton evacuating the city, hardly a strong position from which to bargain with the Americans! The commission’s repeated requests for peace talks were met firmly by Congress’ unanimous rebuff of June 17: there would be no negotiations unless they followed the withdrawal of British troops and recognition of the independence of the United States.

It was now only a question of time when hostilities between Britain and France would officially begin—and the clash came at a naval skirmish off Ushant near Brittany on June 17. The two fleets battled to a standoff, and thus furnished an unpleasant reminder to the English that the French fleet was a formidable foe.

With the entry of France into the war, Britain was forced to adopt a defensive strategy in America to permit the waging of a general war. Naval strategy became dominant. Indeed, had French Adm. Charles Hector D’Estaing not dawdled in crossing the Atlantic, he could have intercepted Lord Howe’s inferior fleet engaged in the evacuation from Philadelphia. When he arrived in American waters in July, he and Washington blockaded New York City; D’Estaing considered attacking the inferior British fleet in New York Harbor, but the lack of maneuverability for his heavier ships forced him to desist. From there he and General Sullivan moved toward a land-sea siege of the British base at Newport, but stout resistance and stormy waters beat off the French-American attack and both land and sea forces withdrew. D’Estaing, refusing to aid further in attacking Newport, withdrew his fleet to West Indian waters in November.

British strategy for America in the midst of the wider international war was temporarily to emphasize naval conflict, concentrating its land force in a few coastal bases, such as New York City, Newport, and Halifax, from which to wage blockades and raids on American trade and shipping and on coastal centers. Even Lord Germain agreed that the British war on America must be principally naval. But between the French navy and American privateers, now fully and openly cooperating, British naval affairs were in parlous shape. Before French intervention, British blockades and an efficient convoy system had considerably reduced the effectiveness of American privateers. But now, while North delayed in pushing naval construction, American privateers could raid British shipping from France and boldly strike at coastal areas of England and Ireland. Of the single ships of the tiny Continental Navy, the most prominent exploit was that of Capt. John Paul Jones; in the sloop Ranger, and operating out of Brest in Brittany, Jones raided and fought successfully during April up and down the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The British had decided to center their operations in 1778 on an amphibious expedition of 5,000 of Clinton’s men against St. Lucia in the West Indies. The arrival of D’Estaing’s fleet forestalled this attack, Clinton was not authorized to take offensive action on land, and so the 1778 campaign was frittered away.

* Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 52.

* See Gilbert, Farewell Address, p. 63.

**Ibid., pp. 65–66, 69.

* Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, pp. 337, 340.