how did the french alliance contribute to the american revolution

Whereas French intervention in the war would help turn the tide in favor of the Americans, the debt it incurred would contribute to the later French Revolution (1789-1799 . Question 5. The story goes that he was rushing to play the stock market, and no doubt he was. She was starting out as a beggar at the court of Versailles, and she would have to keep on begging until the war was over. He left the rack ruined in fortune, health, and mind, and openly went over to the British. Ferreiro, Larrie D. Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France & Spain Who Saved It. But once these two great steps in the right direction were made, it was easy to push through resolutions for negotiating foreign alliances. Arthur was installed in the place where he could counteract Deane and that wicked old man, as R. H. Lee called Franklin. The trouble with Silas Deane was tragically simple: he was never quite sure who he was. He gave Franklins courier a verbal message: due to Mr. Lees unflagging labors with the French embassy in London, Versailles had been persuaded to send goods worth 200,000 (Hortalez had said 25,000) to the Caribbean as an outright gift. 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. The only source for salt during the war was the Turks Islands beds at the tail of the Bahama chain, long a Bermudian monopoly. 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. Athur Lee, who became Congress agent in London after Franklins departure, had been in conspiratorial relations with Beaumarchais during his visits to England. By then Congress had set up two secret committees on both of which Franklin was extremely busy. The United States, far from asking something for herself, was in reality advancing Bourbon interests and fighting their war. His widening circle of intimates included people of great influence: Masons, scientists and scholars, men and women of the aristocracy. One of Conynghams prizes was recaptured by the British, who took her into Yarmouth. 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. February 6, 1778. He could not punish Conyngham, who was in parts unknown, so he had William Hodge arrested and sent to the Bastille. If this scheme can be executed, it will disconcert all the plans at one stroke, without an appearance of intention, and save both the public and me.. A phenomenal number of men escaped Old Mill Prison at Plymouth; they scaled the walls, dug long tunnels under them, or bribed the guards to let them through the gates. George III now realized that the purpose behind the Wickes and Conyngham raids was to stir him up against France, which only increased his fury. Franklins arrival in Paris set off an extraordinary wave of public excitement that bordered on hysteria. The involvement of France in the American War of Independence (1775-1783) was not only significant in the progress of the war itself but also as a critical moment for France. He refused, when his mission was over, to return to his once beloved Paris. Stamp Act of 1765. Tom Morris was dragging out the last months of his wretched life, and Lee saw no point in beating a dead horse. Silas Deane was invaluable. Since Nantes was the key port for American purposes, Franklin made a personal sacrifice and sent his grandnephew Jonathan Williams there as the special agent for the commissioners. In his plain dress, still wearing his comfortable fur cap, he was the natural man Rousseau had taught the French to revere, and a symbol of Utopia. He signed only his initials. France's Debt Problems. This wealthy and devoted young Marylander had been educated in England and was qualified for diplomatic assignments. Franklin insisted on British recognition of American independence and refused to consider a peace separate from France, America's staunch ally. All that was needed was to add up the amount of money the mission had received, and then tell the Adams-Lee bloc in Congress that Franklin and Deane had stolen it. Patrick Henry delivering his famous speech on the Rights of the Colonies, before the . All this was so familiar to Franklin that it did not discourage him; he simply had to be on his guard for the moment when Vergennes would stop playing for the joint interests of both countries and play for France alone. The port records were similarly camouflaged. After the Seven Years' War, Britain found itself in about twice as much debt . His, Privateers could accomplish wonders, but they could not fight the great British ships of the line. France and the American Revolution. As the French Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution, it is easy to determine that the two must have similarities. The first diplomatic exchange between the United States and a foreign power was highly personal: Franklin and Vergennes sizing each other up. Spain had been fighting Portugal in South America and had favored just such an alliance with the hope of getting Portugal as her share of the plunder. Conyngham hastily sailed back to his berth and unloaded the powder. The situation at home was alarming. By the middle of July Vergennes had made up his mind to ask the King for armed intervention. The arrest did much to soothe British wrath. Students will analyze maps, treaties, congressional records, first-hand accounts, and correspondence to determine the different roles assumed by Native Americans in the American Revolution and understand why the various groups formed the alliances they did. Besides, five British warships blockaded the harbor. Explain the purpose of a colonial stamp tax, how it would be implemented and which people or groups it would affect. Bancroft was in a balky mood but finally gave the desired information: Spain was not ready for a war with England. He had spent years in Surinam and was an expert on tropical plants; he had written a natural history of Guiana and perfected new vegetable dyes for cloth. 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. Deane and Beaumarchais were already fast friends, working in harmony to load the Hortalez fleet with war supplies. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. B.) Inequality of Rights. As for the French islands, the Cape developed into a prime source for munitions, and Martinique became an American privateer base before Franklin sailed. The United States fought all the way through the war without a government. Almost every transaction carried out for Congress was a mixture of public and private business, an accepted practice. 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. Franklin and Morris could hardly have believed Captain Wickes news on his return to Philadelphia if a courier had not come back from Europe at the same time with even more wonderful tidings. 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. Anthony Todd, secretary of the General Post Office, read Franklins letters to people in England. These were led by Libertadores - like Simn . But the, In a few swift parries Franklin suggested what his technique of dealing with the ministry would be. This tax was given to the people to help settle the debt of the war, and it started an argument of "taxation without representation". Offered the bait of gunpowder, Congress swallowed the hook which Franklin had prayerfully included and ruled that any vessel bringing war supplies to the seaboard would be allowed to load up with produce. The end of 1799 may be conveniently taken as the . Louis XVI was helpless; he dared not begin the war without Spain. Franklins experiment had been a complete success in the laboratory sense; the sea raids had brought England and France to the verge of war. In France, however, this separation of function was impossible. By April American privateers had taken so many British seamen prisoner that the British fleet was not half manned, and Stormont hinted to Vergennes that peace could not last much longer if France continued to arm the United States. His beloved wife had died, and his best friend Robert Morris had thrown him over because he had told the truth about Tom. Once he was installed as sole envoy in Paris, I should have it in my power to call those to account, through whose hands I know the public money has passed, and which will either never be accounted for, or misaccounted for, by connivance between those, who are to share in the public plunder. He was to evoke this nightmare more than once, but it never lost its effect. But Bancroft was in the most strategic position of any informer, and his conduct at Passy was mysterious. Britain had acquired a massive debt fighting the French and Indian War. For once Wentworth brought the King good news, the only kind he could ever believe. Gunrunning to America was certainly going on in 1774, and no doubt Franklin knew about it. He and his friend the Marquis de Bouille, the new governor of Martinique, had a privateer fleet with American masters and French and Spanish crews which was making itself felt in the Caribbean. At the same time he yearned to be a statesman like Franklin. The American victory secured critical financial support from the French. The American was adulated, wined and dined. C.) It encouraged the French to adopt the government system of popular sovereignty. Franklin and Deane now wrote the committee urging action in every sea where British carried on commerce. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. Though he knew that affairs at Nantes were in a frightful state, William Lee lingered in Paris until August to confer with his brother about rearranging American foreign affairs to enhance the family glory. A clever negotiator could have done much there, for Frederick the Great despised the British and the little German states that sold them mercenaries; he took a lively interest in the progress of the American war and was ready to expand Prussias trade with the Americans, which so far had been clandestine. He was the Edward Edwards of the secret service, the master spy of the century. Delays which were not the fault of Deane and Beaumarchais held up most of the fleet for months after lading. 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. It was three weeks before Wentworth managed to get an interview with Franklin, and he spent the interval in terror of imprisonment and even assassination by the French, whose agents were around him in clouds. French involvement in the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 began in 1776 when the Kingdom of France secretly shipped supplies to the Continental Army of the Thirteen Colonies when it was established in June 1775. No doubt the colonies hoarded local supplies for their own defense, and the merchants hoarded their stocks for higher prices. His friend Sieur Montaudoin bought a great Dutch ship and named it Benjamin Franklin . The prevention of anarchy and civil unrest. He was overimpressed with titles and high connections and had made the serious blunder of sending a stream of idle young aristocrats overseas to serve under Washington. Gardoqui proposed a sensible solution: he and the retiring foreign minister, Grimaldi, would arrange a secret rendezvous just across the border, and Lee would not enter Spain at all. William Lee opened the campaign against Deane in a letter to Francis Lightfoot Lee. 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. 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. 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. His key man for American contacts was Paul Wentworth of New Hampshire, who before the war had been the London agent for that colony and after the war was elected a trustee of Dartmouth College, to which he had presented scientific apparatus. 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. Early in 1774 Franklin had written from London to a friend at home that he wished Americans might know what we are and what we have. After much private groping and anguish he had discovered what he was: not a colonial American, but that new man, an American. His discretion was fathomless, and he may purposely have avoided emphasizing his old friendship with the man who carried out some of the ministrys most secret work for America. And Franklin, Voltaire, and Rousseau were linked together as the presiding geniuses of the century. Vergennes would promise to investigate the matter, which meant that Stormont had lost a point. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce recognized the U.S. as an independent nation and promoted trade between France and America. A smuggling mechanism had long since been perfected, to the general salvation. The Doctor was adept at working through trusted friends, and his friends were legion. In a few swift parries Franklin suggested what his technique of dealing with the ministry would be. They sent eight of them to France and got back safely. A week later she was halfway out of the harbor when a British sloop and cutter were sighted. But before this blackout settled down Congress managed to get dispatches through, which in effect begged Franklin to manage his side of the desperate crisis as he saw fit. There was no good news at Passy. 1783. He terrorized the towns on the east coast of England and Scotland. The Estates-General was a meeting of the three estates (clergy, nobles, everyone else) that could be called by the French King and was famously and infamously called in 1789 out of a desperate desire to try to push through reforms that would keep France from going bankrupt. 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. No charge was made against Deane, but for two years Congress kept him in Philadelphia at its pleasure while the press vilified him. When Vergenness orders came through to sell the Revenge , nobody was alarmed. And Franklin, Voltaire, and Rousseau were linked together as the presiding geniuses of the century. 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. As for the Reprisal , anchored at Lorient, she suddenly sprang a leak, and international usage allowed a ship in distress harbor privileges until she was fit to sail. On February 6, 1778, Benjamin Franklin was in France signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance. 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. However, Franklin had boarded the Reprisal for that very purpose. The American Revolution was by no means a purely American-British conflict. On January 24 Wickes sailed out of Nantes with a French pilot and several French seamen aboard, strengthening the desired impression of collusion with Versailles. It looked like a checkmate. Franklins household, the unofficial American embassy, was never lonely, even when Benny was sent off to school. French Empire wanted to take revenge on the British Empire for its defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Deanes griefs were personal. In 1757, Franklin went to England to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly as a diplomat in its fight against the descendants of the Penn . The fact is that Congress had little authority over the coloniesit managed to adopt the Army, but the Continental Navy was a bitter joke. His, Soon Beaumarchaiss coach was tearing down the road to Paris so fast that it overturned and he injured an arm. By late June the captain and his men were released from jail, and the Revenge was loaded with powder and arms. When Stormont appeared at Versailles Vergennes assured him that the Reprisal and her prizes had been ordered to leave French waters within 24 hours. Behind the benevolent smile lurked the master of intrigue, skillfully maneuvering the vacillating courts of Europe. He masked his powerful and subtle mind behind the benevolent simplicity which was also part of his nature. The country had no President and Cabinet, no executive departments, no constitution. The American Revolution of 1775-1789, which concluded as the revolution in France was unfolding, was perhaps the most significant. 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 Virginia delegates differed upon his appointment. England registered the expected sense of outrage; the whole country seethed with the news. Franklin resolved to break through any limitations put on his mission by Congress. France is a major contributor to the Defeat-ISIL Coalition. 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. As far as brains and ability went, Deane belonged in the first rank of the men doing the hard immediate tasks of the Revolution. In the summer of 1775 Colonel Henry Tucker, whose clan dominated island affairs, came to Philadelphia in a state of worry and resentment. The French Revolution lasted from 1789 until 1799. It led the French to seek an alliance with the Americans to dethrone Louis XVI. Deane was up to his neck in business affairs and was essential to their success, for Tom Morris was clearly unfit to carry out any operation but commandeering cargoes from Congress to finance his endless debauch. The next day the Crown Council decided to conclude the alliance, and Vergennes rushed word to Passy that France would carry out her secret agreement of December 17 and fight at Americas side until her independence was won. British Debt. With the appointment of the mission to France the affairs of the two secret committees were theoretically unscrambled; the commissioners were to take charge of foreign relations, and young Tom Morris of commercial matters. The King was progressing from the swaddling clothes of a dominant mother to the strait jacket of his manic seizures, and even in his long periods of sanity his balance was precarious. Still hopeful that Congress had ships to command, they spoke of raids on Greenland whalers and Hudson Bay fishing fleets, and urged that Navy ships convoy shipping in the Caribbean, since England would now send privateers and heavy units of her fleet there. On May 2, 1776, Louis XVI signed documents committing France to action as a secret American ally, in violation of her treaties with Britain. There must be a breaking point somewhere in his patience. Yet Franklin had a high opinion of the human race and lofty hopes for his particular segment of it. Franco-American Alliance, (Feb. 6, 1778), agreement by France to furnish critically needed military aid and loans to the 13 insurgent American colonies, often considered the turning point of the U.S. War of Independence. The celebrated dramatist Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais now cast himself in his own best role, which he played without applause. France's support deepened after the Americans beat the British in the October 1777 Battle of Saratoga, proving themselves committed to independence and worthy of a formal alliance. Johnson was captured and sent to the Old Mill, from which he soon escaped. In order to make the war effective he reminded Vergennes of things Vergennes could do for the Bourbon cause: release the Hortalez ships, foster the American trade, and lend Congress money. Whenever Stormont got good evidence that France was shipping contraband to America or admitting American prizes to her ports, he drove to Versailles to make a formal protest. George Washington was appointed commander of the Continental Army in 1775. Louis XVI, preparing for the war with England which Vergennes assured him was inevitable whether or not he aided the Americans, had ordered the Navy rebuilt and the Army re-equipped. Franklin looked upon these fleets with the lust of a patriot whose country was in mortal danger for lack of their support. 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.

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