Introduction

Hello, and welcome to American Legends.

Episode 2: The Treaty of Paris

Part 1: The Road to Paris

Only two years before the Revolutionary War began, John Adams was a lawyer and farmer situated right outside of Boston, in Braintree, Massachusetts. He was a short, portly man in his late forties. You can see a portrait of him on the website from 1784. He had gained some notoriety as the lawyer defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston massacre, but little did he know that in five years time he would be negotiating with high French nobility to secure aid to a country that had yet to exist. 

Adams was an irascible and stubborn man, who regularly berated his peers, but had one of the finest legal minds in the colonies. He, along with Jefferson, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and was instrumental in the political wrangling necessary to ensure it’s passage. After first being sent to France as a minister plenipotentiary in 1778, he returned home and drafted the constitution of Massachusetts, which was the first one to have a bicameral legislature, like our modern United States constitution. Upon returning to Europe he was posted to the Netherlands.

Europe, right at this moment, was a mess, but all Adams wanted to do was to secure formal recognition of American independence, peace from the British, and then go home. It had been nearly 8 long years since Adams could call himself a resident of Massachusetts, but the Blue Hills outside his farm still called to him from across the sea. He yearned for rest. Adams said in a letter to his wife Abigail in 1782,

“[Your] Letter of the 10 I read over and over without End — and ardently long to be at the blue Hills, there to pass the Remainder of my feeble days. You would be surprised to see your Friend — he is much altered. He is half a Century older and feebler than ever you knew him.”

John Adams had never taken up arms in defense of his country, but he had spent the last eight years of his life separated from his family, with the exception of his son, John Quincy, who had accompanied him to Europe in 1778 at the age of 11, but by 1781 he had been hired to the staff of Francis Dana, the American minister to Russia. With the exception of two aides he was alone. There also seems to have been issues with communicating with this wife, being so far removed from home, as letters he wrote to her almost never reached her. There are instances in her letters where she laments only receiving one letter a year, as she is constantly plotting various ways for him to transmit his letters more securely, and to write more frequently. This was in no small part due to Britain’s impressive naval superiority, as numerous times couriers had ditched letters when they thought they were about to be boarded, and even Adam’s predecessor in the Netherlands, Henry Laurens, had been captured by the British in 1780 while heading back to Europe. It was these events that required Adam’s presence in Holland in the first place.

His primary objective was to draw the Dutch into formal concert with the Franco-Spanish Alliance with the United States, recognition of American independence, and to secure loans. As we discussed in the previous episode, money was of dire need for the United States to remain solvent, and to keep the army in the field. The Dutch, even though they had been a longstanding ally of Great Britain, had been covertly assisting the rebellion in the colonies via trade loopholes. They had been purchasing goods from the United States via one of the Dutch Caribbean ports in exchange for weapons and gunpowder. They also supplied the French with supplies for their navy, like rope, sails, wood, and masts while the British enforced an embargo on both the French and their rebellious allies. They managed to do this because they remained officially neutral in the war between Great Britain and France. Under a treaty signed in 1674 naval military supplies were not considered contraband, and Dutch merchants decided to take advantage of French supply shortages. This resulted in Britain declaring war on the Dutch in the last days of 1780.

The war was disastrous for the Dutch. Word of the war had not reached the Dutch Caribbean, so in early 1781, half of their military fleet was captured by the British in a surprise naval engagement. This, and the unpreparedness of the Dutch fleet in Europe, allowed the British to expand their operations by taking most Dutch settlements in the Caribbean, their colony in Cape Town, Africa, and all their possessions in India. This hurt the American cause by contributing to the gunpowder shortage in the late stages of the war. This, in turn, made the United States seem like a natural ally to the Dutch, and through months of hobnobbing with Holland high society and constant dinners and negotiations, Adams managed to secure recognition of American independence, but could not quite draw them into an alliance.

It is important to note that in the midst of the stalemate in the American portion of the Revolutionary War, the British were being engulfed in even greater conflict globally. They were actively blockading the French and the Dutch, while seizing Dutch colonial holdings and fending off attacks from the French navy trying to recapture these Dutch territories. Then, in the midst of this in 1782, Adams notes that there was word of war breaking out in Poland, “and upon the frontiers of Turkey and Russia,” but that,

“I don’t see a Probability of a War breaking out. If there should, I don’t see how it can hurt Us. The English however seem to flatter themselves with Hopes, that by persevering, they may give an Opportunity to Time to ripen into Existence, conjunctures, now only in Embrio. They talk of a different Posture of Things on the Continent, which may cutt out Work, for the Bourbon Family nearer home. These however are only the Ravings of the Refugees [Adam’s term for the dispossessed Tories] in Dissappointment and Despair. Such Conjunctures are to give Time to England to blott out the Navies of France and Spain, and after that bring America to Reason. How many Years will this require. And how are their Taxes to be paid and Supplies to be raised?”

Poland was in the interim between it’s first and second partitions. Within the decade Poland was largely swallowed up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and within a few year Russia and Turkey were drawn into another conflict. As a side note, the famous American sailor John Paul Jones, who famously said in a naval battle in 1779, “I have not yet begun to fight.”? Well, through a series of events, he was partially responsible for drawing the Dutch into the war as after said battle, and after seizing two British ships with their 500 crew, sought safe harbor in the Netherlands, much to the consternation of the British. Also, in 1787, he became a rear admiral in the Russian navy during the Russo-Turkic War and lead a campaign against the Turkish on the Black Sea. So yeah, John Paul Jones … he got around.

All this is to say, is that Europe had been engulfed in a nearly endless cycle of wars for the greater part of a century as the old balance of power began to crumble, and enlightenment ideals began to eat away at the established power structures of Europe. In France many national leaders and writers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau were beginning to eat away at established norms, and the American revolution was a testbed for many of these ideas. Great Britain, though one of the ascendant powers of Europe, was being spread thin, with more of her allies switching sides or becoming preoccupied with other wars, and with more wars on the horizon threatening to distort the balance of power even further, the regime of Lord North, which had administered, and largely was responsible for the breakout of war in the first place, was finally booted out by a vote of no confidence in March 1782.

Part 2: Paris

In October 1782, Adams received a letter from John Jay asking him to come to Paris. Jay, the American minister to Spain, was a lawyer by trade and had been one of the leading patriots in New York before becoming one of the rotating presidents of the Confederate Congress. Benjamin Franklin had taken ill and the other two ministers that were supposed to be sent by congress, Henry Laurens and Thomas Jefferson, both declined. This was most likely due to Lauren’s previously mentioned stay in the Tower of London, and then the death of Lauren’s son. The war had drug on for so long that no one really thought that the British were serious about peace — not even Adams himself. However, in that month Adams took a carriage to Paris. Adams didn’t realize that the world he was entering in to was high stakes European Politics at it’s highest stakes. I mean, we are talking about some Game of Thrones level stakes.

Adams arrived to a totally dysfunctional peace conference. Not only was Franklin crippled with goat, he and Jay were also having a terrible disagreement with how to proceed with the British peace commission. Jay insisted on making the United State’s recognition of Independence a prerequisite to negotiation, without it he wouldn’t even enter into negotiations with the British. Franklin, however, agreed with France’s chief foreign minister (essentially our equivalent of a secretary of state) the Compte de Vergennes, that they should not make that a requirement. The British were not allowed to negotiate with the American’s directly, but through the French, and the American’s were bound by congress to negotiate in this way. At no point were the Americans and British to speak directly to each other regarding the peace treaty. When Adams arrived he did not know this.

It took a few days for him to settle in before the real story began to unfold for him. It began with some grumbling from Jay. He refused to speak to the Spanish Ambassador, who had a massively impressive name. Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda. Aranda, the French under Vergennes and Jay had completely stopped talking to each other, and they were supposed to be allies. Jay grumbled on November 5 to Adams:

“He says they are not a Moral People. They know not what it is. He dont like any Frenchman. — The Marquis de la Fayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman. — Our Allies dont play fair, he told me. They were endeavouring to deprive Us of the Fishery, the Western Lands, and the Navigation of the Missisippi. They would even bargain with the English to deprive us of them. They want to play the Western Lands, Missisippi and whole Gulph of Mexico into the Hands of Spain”

Adams remarked in his diary entry that day, “These Whispers ought not to be credited by Us.” They were, in fact, true. Jay, who I have to state plainly, had zero authority from congress to negotiate on these matters. It was Franklin who had the authority, but he was laid up sick, and the two sent to join the peace commission were not there. That left Jay as the only American capable of negotiating in Paris for months, and he only sent for Adams because he needed backup. In as early as August, before Adams’s arrival, Jay had informally entered discussions with Aranda to fix the borders between the U.S. and Spain.

It didn’t go well.

Jay insisted on the east bank Mississippi as the boundary, and the Spanish Insisted on on a spot just outside of modern day Montgomery, Alabama that cut north to south. Jay refused and the Spanish insisted on seeing his papers from congress authorizing him to negotiate on these thing, which he did not have (but pretended to have). From there Aranda and Vergennes began to negotiate borders without the Americans, and even began asking the British if they considered Canada as a part of the negotiations.

The reason this was important, and incredibly troubling for Jay, is that just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the British had folded the Ohio valley into their Canadian holdings. This was after thousands of acres had already been surveyed, plotted, and sold to Americans, in particular many Virginians and Pennsylvanians. This maneuver basically proved to Jay that their allies were wanting to pick apart what was by right belonging to the United States.

That’s right, the whole peace process began to break down as the Americans were cut out by the greater powers. They were going to divy up the United States. The one thing Jay didn’t expect though, was that he had an ally that he wouldn’t expect .. the British.

About this time the British envoy, who Jay was not allowed to have any official contact with, dropped a memo into his hands from the French Ambassador to congress that the French were contesting American fishing right off the coast of Maine. Jay immediately sent one of his aides to London to get the British Ambassador’s orders changed so they could treat directly with him. This validated all Jay’s worst fears about the French. He believed that they would even jeopardize American Independence. He didn’t know, but Vergennes had actually been directly writing to the British cabinet that in the view of France, they did not think that American Independence was necessary.

It was at this point that Adams arrived, and he entered the grand stage of European showmanship. Jay was an anglophile, and was openly hostile to the French and Spanish. Adams, on the other hand, was no friend of Britain. He had been one of the most violent and provocative of rebels in Congress, and had spent a few years in France. No doubt, the French believed they could bring him into their orbit.

To this end, on Nov. 10, Vergennes invited Adams and put on the full splendor of Versailles for him. They discussed politics, the treaty, and laid out a party for Adams to attend, and no doubt people to flatter him, as Adams even makes mention of unknown people coming up to him to speak his praises. He wrote in his diary that night, “The Compliments that have been made me since my Arrival in France upon my Success in Holland, would be considered as a Curiosity, if committed to Writing.” The “finishing Stroke,” which it was “impossible to exceed” was, “You, sir, are the Washington of negotiation.” To which his response in his diary was, “Compliments are the Study of this People and there is no other so ingenious at them.” He was even attended on by Vergennes wife the whole time. It is very important to understand that Vergennes wasn’t just any old Frenchman. He was one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, bureaucrat in France. This was a charm offensive by one of the most powerful men in Europe. However, if Vergennes had hoped to woo Adams in the splendor of Versailles and create a mock friendship like he had with Franklin, then he failed. Adams was one of the first American nationalists, and one of the few Americans outside of Washington’s sphere of influence that thought on a continental scale.

The very next day, the aid to the British Ambassador dropped by Adam’s hotel. Jay’s gambit to get the American’s to negotiate a peace separate from the French had worked. After a few meetings of feeling each other out the two groups of American and British diplomats began negotiation in earnest. It’s actually really fascinating to read Adam’s first official encounter with the British Ambassador Oswald’s aid. He said, “He sat down and We fell into Conversation, about the Weather and the Vapours and Exhalations from Tartary which had been brought here last Spring by the Winds and given Us all the Influenza. Thence to french Fashions and the Punctuality with which they insist upon Peoples wearing thin Cloaths in Spring and fall,tho the Weather is ever so cold, &c. I said it was often carried to ridiculous Lengths, but that it was at Bottom an admirable Policy, as it rendered all Europe tributary to the City of Paris, for its Manufactures.” Its fascinating because at this moment, seven years into the war, that Adam’s must have begun to realize that he had far more in common with his enemies than his allies. They had a shared language, shared culture, shared history, and shared ideals of commerce and free trade. The French, at the time, would have been alien to us. It was an old country, with even older nobility, with everyone vying for some title of nobility over another while commoners starved in the streets.

As the negotiations began in earnest, Henry Laurens returned. He had been delayed due to the death of his son, John Laurens, in a skirmish outside of Charleston, SC a couple months prior. It was at this point that they entered the final phase of negotiations, separate from their French and Spanish allies, who had yet to agree as quickly on so many points as the American delegation.

Part 3: Peace

By January 1783, the preliminary peace treaty was signed and later finalized in the fall, amidst the crisis at Newburgh. There were a ton of provisions within the treaty, like ensuring American fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland, making sure that British soldiers evacuated from American held territory (like New York City) and that they don’t abscond with any American property … like slaves. The two articles that would hold the highest importance to the fate of the United States was freedom of navigation on the Mississippi River, and that all lands east of the Mississippi to the east coast were now in the hands of the US. These lands did not include Florida, which was a Spanish possession, and it did not include Canada, whose border with the US today is largely the same as what it was then. It really wasn’t a mystery, even then, what would happen with these sprawling western lands. John Jay even said in 1779, long before his arrival in Paris, that the western lands held “Extensive wildernesses, now scarcely known or exposed, remain yet to be cultivated, and vast lakes and rivers, whose waters have for ages rolled in silence and obscurity to the ocean, are yet to hear the din of industry, become subservient to commerce, and boast villas, gilded spires, and spacious cities rising on their banks.” But Jay was not the only one wondering about the potential of the west. Washington was obsessed with the Ohio Valley and it’s potential. Through his service in the French and Indian war, and through some crafty politicking and land speculating, Washington had acquired sixty-five thousand acres of land in Ohio and continued to live in a fantasy whereby the Potomac River could be connected to the Ohio valley through a series of canals and channels. Washington even wrote about the Ohio country, “I shall not rest contented till I have explored the western country, and traversed those lines (or a great part of them) which have given bounds to a New Empire.” There was only two major problems that would curtail any settlement of these new lands: the completely inept administration of these lands by the Confederation congress and the people that actually called those lands home. It would be the mixture of these two things that would lead to some of the most violent clashes between Native Americans and invading settlers in the history of the United States. The provisions of the Treay of Paris will be like an open sore to the Americans and other European powers, in less than a years time, almost every provision will be challenged, up to and including American Independence.

For the Book of the week, I will be recommending a book from the historian Joseph J Ellis, called “The Quartet: Orchestrating America’s Second Revolution.” I am a fan of Ellis’s simple style. His eloquent prose has a simple way of cutting through the complexity of the issue and gets to the personal and philosophical heart of whatever topic he’s covering. In The Quartet, Ellis dives into the conspiracy of many of the founding fathers in trying to launch a top level coup against the existing government of the United States. It’s an essential book to understanding this period.

I’d also like to thank everyone for saying such kind things to me about the pilot episode and sharing on Facebook. If you’d like more information about the podcast join me at facebook.com/americanlegends, and I would ask that you consider supporting the show at patreon.com/nerdunion.

Next Time we will be discussing how the Confederacy planned to survive, and take a deeper look at Robert Morris, one of the forgotten Founding Fathers.

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