how did the french alliance contribute to the american revolution how did the french alliance contribute to the american revolution

Hundreds of privateers were at their work of economic attrition, wearing down Britains strength by blows against her merchant shipping. During Franklins years in London he had watched the old power pattern repeat itself. Nor had Vergennes, who was extremely cool in his calculations. His Reprisal , a full-rigged ship in an age of sloops and brigs, flew under the strong westerlies and completed the voyage in five weeks. Tobacco and rice, strictly reserved to England, were now rushed across the Atlantic to Amsterdam or Lorient and exchanged for cannon, powder, teas, and other goods which Americans could not do without. But somehow, even when he acted in a cheap way, Silas Deane was not cheap. Franklin found that the American stock had lately plunged to its lowest point. The French Revolution began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. France did not wait for the announcement of July Fourth. With British warships on the prowl the voyage was dangerous, but Franklin had brought his grandsons along. American merchantmen picked up contraband all over Europe; the British, Dutch, and French sent some cargoes direct to the thirteen colonies, but far greater amounts to their islands in the Caribbean, to be picked up by American traders. Thus torn from its context, the military side of the Revolution is implausible.). To formalize the colonial complaints against Parliament. But Franklin and Deane knew what to expect from Arthur Lee. February 6, 1778. Grimaldi told him that the King was presenting the Americans stores of arms, clothing, and blankets which their ships could pick up at New Orleans and Havana. As a result of Lees carelessness in leaving his portfolio in his room when he went out to dine, the commissioners had to abandon the building of a great frigate in Amsterdam, and she was sold to Louis XVI at cost. Within 50 years, the European empires in the Americas would shrink and new nations would spread across the whole of the Americas. Nothing came of these appeals, and meanwhile Franklin and Deane had been working at a highly secret project which might prove more effective in precipitating a Franco-British war. Almost consciously Lee longed for that consummation. Deane and Beaumarchais were already fast friends, working in harmony to load the Hortalez fleet with war supplies. And so the man who believed that there never was a good war or a bad peace, old Dr. Benjamin Franklin, a man laden with the worlds honors who might easily have pleaded age and weariness, set out for France in his seventy-first year to secure these necessities for his country. Lack of food. And Franklin, Voltaire, and Rousseau were linked together as the presiding geniuses of the century. Because the future could somehow work in him he had become the sort of man coming generations would repeat. Conyngham hastily sailed back to his berth and unloaded the powder. Nearing France, Dr. Franklin changed the captains orders. He had made Saratoga possible. The warehouses lining her one street, a mile long, were crammed with munitions, ships stores, bolts of cloth; sacks of sugar and tobacco covered the very sands, and the roadstead was packed with merchantmen. Carmichael, who was still the liaison man between Passy and Dunkirk, found an obliging British subject as the ostensible purchaser of the Revenge , and while he was about it he sold the Surprise to a French buyer and sent her around to Nantes to join the privateer fleet. Which French foreign minister and supporter of American independence convinced the French king to form an alliance with the Patriots? On Christmas Day Washington wrote Congress: Our want of powder is inconceivable. Three weeks later there was not a pound in his magazines. He was evidently buying arms and setting up a smuggling base in the Low Countries. However, over time divisions of opinion became apparent between federalists and anti-federalists. He waited until the Revenge was safely out of Dunkirk, and then he and the commissioners exchanged letters, purely to clear the record, about the necessity of France abiding by her treaties, which meant no more violations by American privateers. Short as it was, the crossing was a godsend. It was plain that Vergennes rather disliked him and gave every evidence that he was dealing with him only because he represented someone important. Finally the almost moribund Board of Trade and Plantations was given the assignmentwhich doubtless proved profitableof issuing permits to merchants wishing to export warlike stores. Anything he could learn about the missions connections with Spain and other countries was wanted. Stormont was instructed to tell Vergennes that the Rebels game was up. The Stamp Act riots were noisy on the land, but the seas were quiet and busy. Edmund Pendleton was, according to John Adams . By the middle of July Vergennes had made up his mind to ask the King for armed intervention. Podcast: Libert, Unit, Egalit. The British had many other secret agents in France, and other avenues of information. He was the dark personality of the family: a paranoid constantly haunted by the most fantastic suspicions of the people around him; a captious, hypercritical man who never married or made a simple friendship; a man with inflated notions of his own Tightness and genius who suffered tortures of jealousy of anybody above him. A number of ill-advised financial maneuvers in the late 1700s worsened the financial situation of the already cash-strapped French government. The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774-1787. Franklin resolved to break through any limitations put on his mission by Congress. Intended as a defensive alliance, it saw France provide both supplies . Morris was as stubborn as George III about refusing to believe bad news, but when he was finally convinced of his mistake he was full of contrition. By 1763, France had suffered a crushing defeat in the Seven Years' War (more commonly called the "French and Indian War" in the U.S.), losing all its claims to mainland Canada and the Louisiana Territory. He already knew Deane, and wished not to know Arthur Lee, but he was consumed with curiosity about Franklin. For one thing, he worshiped Franklin and wanted to be useful to him; for another, he enjoyed hobnobbing with the rough sea captains he was assigned to help. was part of a larger war between Britain and France. only affected North America. Most of the supply was still down in the Caribbean, but the fact remains that there must have been more powder on the continent than the various colonies and the merchants were willing to release to Congress. Franklin soon warned Congress not to enlarge its connections with this questionable pair. Britain won the Seven Years War and imposed the Peace of Paris which bred the next cycle of conflict with the Continental powers. This must not happen again. Late in October, 1776, Benjamin Franklin sailed for France to direct the foreign sector of the extraordinary war into which his young country had been plunged. Behind the benevolent smile lurked the master of intrigue, skillfully maneuvering the vacillating courts of Europe. If France refused armed intervention, the Americans prayed the wise kings advice, whether to try to get help from some other power, or to make offers of peace to Britain on condition of their Independency being acknowledged.. The two men had been on fairly close terms in Congress, where Deane had sat from the first day as a delegate from Connecticut. The Americans' victory over the British may have been one of the greatest catalysts for the French Revolution. He burned some and sent others to America, the West Indies, or whatever theater of war seemed to need their cargoes most. When Deane arrived in Paris in the summer of 1776 Arthur Lee rushed over from London. The greatest suppressed scandal of the war was the British trade with the enemy on Statia. This long-range program was necessary, but it did not change the fact that the lumbering and inefficient British war machine had at last got itself oiled and repaired for a heavy assault upon the United States. Franklin had already planned his mission to France, where he would be joined by his fellow commissioners, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. On May 3 Vergennes wrote his royal master that he proposed to call in Sieur Montaudoin of Nantes and entrust him with forwarding funds and arms to America. She threaded the colonies and Britain with her spies; Versailles knew much better than Whitehall how the Revolution was shaping. But Montaudoin and all Nantes had begun to increase clandestine trade with the thirteen colonies about 1770, long before Franklin decided on his personal break with England. Similar to MORE Vergennes, facing a furious Stormont, knew he had been caught red-handed in a raid on the English mails by a ship fitted out in a French port. It happened that Franklin and Morris were the only members of the Committee of Secret Correspondence in town when the courier arrived, and they resolved to keep the news to themselves. On the third day of May he seized the Prince of Orange and brought her into Dunkirk, along with a British brig picked up on the way. The copies of his early correspondence with Beaumarchais proved that he knew better. Franklin had already urged that France and Spain conclude treaties of amity and commerce with the United States, and his letter went farther, offering these powers a firm guarantee of their present possessions in the West Indies, plus any new islands they conquered in a war growing out of their aid to the United States. Strengthen unity in the event of war with France in the west. With a fur cap on his unwigged gray head, Franklin took up his studies of the Gulf Stream where he had dropped them on his voyage home from England. While Spain's influence on the Revolutionary War was significant, perhaps the most profound impact was the broader American Revolution's impact on Spain. No doubt the colonies hoarded local supplies for their own defense, and the merchants hoarded their stocks for higher prices. Now she was acknowledged as a nation in her own right, a nation whose treaties protected her commerce on the seas and her growing space on land, a rising people for whose friendship Britain and France must compete. But the early ratio of seven British merchantmen captured to one American lost was rapidly declining, and Britains patrol of the seaboard was making it difficult to maintain a supply line of military and civilian goods. (We must remember that all this was happening before Lexington.). In terms of violent behavior, the American Revolution can't hold a candle to the French Revolution. This move had been made after Franklin left Philadelphia, and the bad news would not reach Paris for months. On the surface Deanes rapid rise might seem the result of clever opportunism in marrying and winning the friendship of the right people. Franklins hosts were the merchants Pliarne and Penet, who had little standing in Nantes, but who may have been subsidized by Vergennes. Since George III was violently against a war with the Bourbons these warnings disturbed him, but they did not change his fixed purpose to bully the colonies into obedience. Vergennes himself could not have stated the Bourbon feelings about Britain more accurately. 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. They all hated and feared Britain as the newly dominant nation of Europe. For his part, Gardoqui promised to ship other stores on liberal credit. Somehow the wild Irishman, repeating the maneuver of the sound and sober Wickes, created an infinitely greater reaction. A photograph of Edouard de Laboulaye from the Galerie Contemporaine collection. A courier was on his way to Madrid, and the decision of Charles III should be known within three weeks. The French support NATO modernization efforts and are leading contributors to the NATO Response Force. 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. Franklin immediately got to work at this dismal situation. The trouble with Silas Deane was tragically simple: he was never quite sure who he was. Between 1775 and 1825, revolutions across the Americas and Europe changed the maps and governments of the Atlantic world. As Americas sole diplomat Franklin had done all that one man could do to influence the ministries of Europe. Since Charles III had already contributed a million livres to Hortalez & Company, and allowed New Orleans to become an American privateer base, he may well have thought that he had done his share. The Revenge was owned half by Congress and half by Hodge and David Conyngham, a wealthy cousin of the captains who was on a business trip to Europe. During 1775, in London on a royal errand, he was in close touch with the American patriots. Now he felt the reinforcement of those thousands of his countrymen who had won the campaign in the North. The prize crew of five Americans and sixteen Frenchmen were put in prison, and the prize master was forced to confess that Conyngham had made other captures. The chief French ammunition dumps were Martinique and Cap Franois (now Cap Haitien) on Santo Domingo, known to seagoing Americans simply as the Cape. The Spanish shipped to New Orleans and Havana, and the British chose islands convenient to Washingtons chief arsenal, the Dutch island of St. Eustatia. Even though some consider King Louis to just be a contributor he . He wrote home that in the fighting there had been good order and readiness equal to anything of the kind in the best ships of the kings fleet.. To the citizens of Nantes the alliance was not merely a commercial bond, but a blend of credos and enthusiasms which they shared with their friends overseas. The prevention of anarchy and civil unrest. That switched him to the Caribbean trade. There was no good news at Passy. During the last eighteen months Conyngham had been in and out of the port, always hull down before the British realized he had vanished, and this time they were determined to get him. It inspired the French to launch their own revolution for liberty and equality. On May 2, 1776, Louis XVI signed documents committing France to action as a secret American ally, in violation of her treaties with Britain. He was also making them a gift of 375,000 livres. The merchant was the intendant for supplying clothing for the French Armyand of late the American Army, for he had given Beaumarchais a million livres worth of clothing on credit. Besides, five British warships blockaded the harbor. The fight for American independence piqued the interest of Europe's most powerful colonial powers. The historian Henri Doniol, who edited the secret French archives of the period, claimed that Franklin did more than coach the Whigs; that he in fact started an international gunrunning ring by quiet negotiations with certain arms manufacturers and exporters in England, Holland, and France. Vergennes, who had confidently hoped to receive these protests under very different circumstances, was forced to buy a little more time at the expense of his American friends. By the summer of 1777 Arthur Lee openly accused Deane and Beaumarchais of appropriating 200,000 which he said the Bourbons had intended as a free gift to America. These three phases reveal an orderly progression in Franklins mind. As a past master in the art of making the other man feel that he was acting solely for him, Vergennes recognized this basic technique in diplomacy. Later Congress backed up this pledge and authorized all tenders necessary to get Bourbon help. He had high connections at the court, which did not at all disapprove his heavy shipments of arms to American merchants, and later he was appointed ambassador to the United States. The new physiocratic school had its followers on both sides of the Atlantic. When Deane left Philadelphia on his mission to France, Franklin suggested that Edward Bancroft would be a useful consultant on European affairs, and so it proved. This was a bitter blow to Vergennes and a calamity to the Americans. Franklin and Deane co-operated with him by being very discreet about evading this prohibition, but the year which had begun so brilliantly in maritime operations was in the doldrums. They were sure that the men who were shouldering the executive functions of a nonexistent Administration were in the wrong: Washington, Franklin, Morris, Deane, John Jay, and their hardheaded allies. Because of the Family Compact, Spain would have to approve the alliance with America, and accordingly Vergenness memoir was sent to Madrid with its proposal for a triple offensive and defensive alliance. The United States, far from asking something for herself, was in reality advancing Bourbon interests and fighting their war. On the very day the French ministry decided for the alliance, Paul Wentworth was back in Paris. Just a year after independence was declared the Americans lost Fort Ticonderoga to Burgoyne, and on September 26 Howe entered Philadelphia. It is true that these countries, and to some extent Spain, had for some time been shipping out contraband for America, mostly through their Caribbean islands. She anchored in Quiberon Bay with her prizes, and Franklin made a bone-racking journey overland by post chaise. Franklin insisted on British recognition of American independence and refused to consider a peace separate from France, America's staunch ally. In March the Doctor was given a charming house at Passy on the grounds of the Htel Valentinois, which belonged to the merchant prince Donatien le Rey de Chaumont. Then he captured the Kings packet Swallow , running between Falmouth and Lisbon. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, under Franklin, engaged agents abroad to explore the possibilities of foreign alliances. In August, 1774, Sir Joseph Yorke, for years the British ambassador at The Hague, wrote his superior, the Earl of Suffolk: As the contraband trade carried on between Holland and North America is so well known in England I have not thought it necessary of late to trouble your Lordship with trifling details of ships sailing from Amsterdam for the British Colonies, laden with teas, linnens, etc., But now he had something serious to report: My informations says that the Polly , Captain Benjamin Broadhurst, bound to Nantucket has shipped on board a considerable quantity of gunpowder. But the accident was symbolic: Hortalez & Company had suffered a bouleversement . Bancroft is entirely an American and every word he used on the late occasion was to deceive; perhaps they think Mr. Wentworth has been sent from motives of fear and if that is Franklins opinion the whole conduct he has shewn, is wise and to me it [unravels] what other ways would appear inexplicable.. These prospects were bleak enough in December, 1775, but Franklin sent Bonvouloir back with such a rosy report that they immediately improved. So too was our want of guns, supplies, and everything needed in a war against one of the major powers of the earth. Franklins household, the unofficial American embassy, was never lonely, even when Benny was sent off to school. His, Privateers could accomplish wonders, but they could not fight the great British ships of the line.