Patriot Pirates (23 page)

Deane had brought along few records of his finances. Once he understood that he’d been recalled in effect to stand trial, he had to depend primarily on his reputation and his countrymen’s appreciation for his public service, both hardly a lock, to exonerate him. His fortunes rose and fell with each submitted letter that defended or attacked him. The result was that stabs such as Arthur Lee’s “Mr. Deane is universally understood to have made £60,000 sterling while he was commissioner” simply canceled out Franklin’s contrary commendation of him as “a man of integrity.”

The hearings were in stalemate in September 1778 when Richard Henry Lee announced a new allegation. It was based on remarks overheard “some time in the last spring or winter” from Deane’s former secretary William Carmichael. Richard’s brother Arthur almost certainly was the eavesdropper, and the charge concerned privateering.

A
lmost a year earlier, when the British spy service was wondering who among the French-based Americans could potentially be bribed into becoming agents for the crown, Carmichael and Deane had topped the list. Neither was turned, but each man’s indicators were the same: fond of bragging, good times, and money.

Meanwhile on the French side, the astonishing speed with which secrets of the American negotiation were getting to Stormont had led Vergennes to conclude that Carmichael was the culprit. (The actual mole, Edward Bancroft, completely escaped suspicion.) In addition to his social proclivities, Carmichael’s callow air of presumption made him ripe for the flattery and promises with which spies were wooed by rival governments.

Not long after becoming Deane’s secretary, for instance, he’d loftily instructed William Bingham on how to spark a war through privateering; he directed the Martinique agent, probably the world’s foremost expert on the subject, to forward those instructions to Congress. More annoyingly to Vergennes, Carmichael had been known to express “a most inveterate dislike of the French” and had loudly predicted “that if America should be successful, she will never grant exclusive rights of trade to France.” None of this was helpful, and as a result Vergennes and the commissioners decided “suddenly, and with but a few hours’ notice,” to send the young man home.

He and Deane met amiably in Philadelphia during the latter’s congressional hearing. Thus Deane must have been dismayed when Carmichael suddenly appeared to testify against him. At issue were the financing of Conyngham’s first expedition aboard
Surprise
and Beaumarchais’s bailout of Deane after the
Tartar
privateer project with Captain Bell fell apart. But what Richard Henry Lee had characterized as Carmichael’s utter conviction (“he knew that Mr. Deane had misapplied the public money”) proved under questioning to be full of doubt: “I apprehended at the time…I think…I have heard…I do not certainly know.”

Of the Beaumarchais connection, Carmichael had seen the Frenchman draw funds “to a large amount” from Hortalez & Company to pay for the government-sponsored shipments of supplies to America. “I thought it was likewise on the public credit he advanced this sum” to pay off Deane’s losses on
Tartar
. He may have been correct—the Hortalez accounts would never be fully unraveled—but his shaky testimony was useless as evidence. Congress dismissed him after a week.

Arthur Lee kept the heat on. Six months after Conyngham’s illegal capture of the Swedish-owned
Honoria Sophia
, he was still going on about the “great offense” it had caused. His alarm wasn’t meant to explicate the international scene. It was meant to harm Deane, whose departure to America two months before the incident didn’t diminish his culpability in Lee’s mind. “From the beginning to the end of this business with Conyngham,” he wrote the Foreign Affairs Committee after the Carmichael fizzle, “it has been so bad that Congress only can correct it by punishing those who are concerned.” Since Deane was known to have directed Conyngham, there was no mistaking Lee’s target.

As with Hortalez, it was impossible to prove whether the financial maneuvers behind Conyngham’s voyages had been driven by greed or by the pressure of wartime necessity. That didn’t stop Congress and most of Philadelphia from fiercely debating the issue for more than a year. It became a referendum on the right of officials to combine public service and private speculation.

One result was that America’s fundamental argument about the role of capitalism in a democracy was sharply delineated. This in turn planted the seeds for early political parties favoring “the localist and power-weakening emphasis in the Revolution” on one side and stability, nationalism, and centralized authority on the other. The Deane inquiry was a nasty start to that grand discussion. Though in the near term it settled nothing, “The rancor it left,” writes E. James Ferguson, “was for years the underlying basis of Congressional division on questions which might better have been considered on their own merits.”

Deane returned to Europe as a private citizen in 1780. There had never been a possibility of retaining his diplomatic post; John Adams, chief among the L’s and A’s, had been named his replacement four days after Congress moved to recall him. As it was, Deane’s release from the inquiry had been a close call. A congressional motion that he be indefinitely detained pending further investigation failed to pass only because the vote was split evenly down the middle.

He left cynical of his country but optimistic about his personal prospects. He was owed hefty commissions for the Hortalez shipments and looked forward to organizing his accounts to support his claim. And he was buoyed to know that after the motion to keep him in Philadelphia had failed, a vote “directing Mr. A. Lee to repair forthwith to America” had passed by a whisker.

Lee’s recall was a rebuke—his diplomatic career was finished. But two years later he would stage a comeback of sorts, getting elected to Congress for a three-year term. His membership on the Foreign Affairs Committee and Treasury Board was vigorous but frustrating. He would write Samuel Adams in 1782, “I can only lament what I cannot prevent, and make vain efforts to redeem an infatuated majority from the bondage of folly and private interest.”

He was being modest, however. Not all those efforts were vain.

1782

P
ORTSMOUTH,
E
NGLAND

After Gustavus Conyngham’s appearance before the Marine Committee in February 1779, Chairman Richard Henry Lee washed his hands of the “complicated affairs of the cutter
Revenge
” and sold the vessel at public auction.

The buyers immediately leased it to the state of Pennsylvania for a two-week cruise with Conyngham at the helm. While chasing a pair of British privateers, he carelessly sailed “into the very teeth of
Galatea
,” an enemy frigate. “I made every effort to escape,” he wrote, “but her teeth were too many.”

He was brought to New York, where, his identity established, he was charged with piracy by the station commander, Sir George Collier, who’d captured John Manley and
Hancock
almost two years earlier. To prove to “that monster” he was a legitimate combatant, Conyngham produced his Continental commission. The document had been drawn up in May 1777 to replace the original lost during his stint in the Dunkirk jail. By an oversight, it didn’t cover the period when he’d captured
Prince of Orange
, the Harwich packet. The technicality gave Collier his pirate.

Conyngham was clapped in irons, “weight 55 pounds.” Transferring him from jail to the vessel that would take him to Britain, the guards stood him “in the hangman’s cart” used for hauling “deserters and others to the gallows and often executed before us close to the prison.” Soldiers looking on grinned, “You will go next.”

This psychological torture was followed by physical abuse (“in the black hole as usual”) once he arrived at Mill Prison. Back in New York, Collier deemed “uncivil” a letter of humanitarian protest sent him from Congress. Due to “this predicament” of his own doing, Collier responded, Conyngham “is therefore sent to England to receive that punishment from his injured country which his crimes shall be found to deserve.”

In Paris, where he now served as America’s diplomatic plenipotentiary, Franklin took up Conyngham’s cause. He praised Congress’s decision to place, as a deterrent to the captain’s execution, three captive British officers “in close confinement to abide his fate.” Through written appeals to friends in Britain (“Your king will not reward you for taking this trouble, but God will”) he secured Conyngham’s transfer from the black hole into Mill’s general prison population. From there, Franklin hoped, the captain might be freed via exchange.

A year earlier, the British government had agreed to begin exchanging captive American seamen for Britons held in France. Nothing had been done since, however. The admiralty wanted men exchanged in blocks of a hundred. Having released those brought in by Lambert Wickes in 1777, Franklin didn’t have that many to offer. He tried to finesse the problem by pledging on his “solemn engagement” that if the prisoners at Forton and Mill were freed, “the surplus” would be made up in the release of British prisoners held in America.

The proposal was rejected on grounds that it would “be prejudicial to His Majesty’s service to exchange prisoners upon account of debtor and creditor.” Franklin scoffed at this reasoning. The admiralty “cannot give up the pleasant idea of having at the end of the war one thousand Americans to hang for high treason,” he wrote.

John Paul Jones hadn’t yet begun his fabled voyage aboard
Bonhomme Richard
; that expedition’s many prizes together with the victory over HMS
Serapis
in September 1779 would net five hundred prisoners for exchange. To fatten the pot in the meantime, Franklin was obliged, despite old age, gout, and his aversion to financial wrangling and disagreeable personalities, to take up Deane’s specialty of outfitting privateers.

He would happily have let French privateers gather the needed enemy prisoners—Louis XVI had authorized his subjects openly to “make reprisals and act hostilely against England” in the summer of 1778—but under the rules of exchange, that would only have benefited Frenchmen held in Britain. Reluctantly, Franklin set about commissioning three American warships to be based in Europe.

Black Prince
,
Black Princess
, and
Fearnot
made multiple cruises around the British Isles between 1779 and 1780. They captured, burned, or ransomed almost two hundred prizes. Yet despite agreeing to make captives a priority, they brought in only ninety-five eligible for exchange. The reason was simple. Captives took up space, ate food, and required men to guard them or sail them back to port, reducing the privateer’s ability to remain at sea in quest of loot.

The captains, Edward Macatter and Luke Ryan (who commanded both
Black Prince
and
Fearnot
), preferred to give Franklin signed “paroles” certifying that captives had been taken and subsequently released. Franklin, in no little exasperation, told them there was no way Britain would exchange live prisoners for bits of paper. “I think it right that you should trust no more to the honor of that nation, which has refused to return us a single man on account of those paroles.”

He was further put out by his obligation, dumped on him by French officials who were disinclined to bother with prizes seized by foreigners, to adjudicate the legality, value, and share distribution of his vessels’ many captures. Documents relating to American prizes carried into France languished on his crowded desk. Vergennes finally decided to commission Franklin’s privateers under French auspices in July 1780. Given their disappointing prisoner-return, it was a move “most welcome” to Franklin.

It turned out badly for his two captains, however. As Irishmen sailing under a French flag, Ryan and Macatter were tried and convicted for “Felony and Piracy on the High Seas” after their capture by the Royal Navy a year later. Scheduled to hang at Portsmouth in May 1782, they were pardoned at the last moment.

Gustavus Conyngham, feared in Britain as “the Dunkirk pirate,” shifted between privateering and service in the Continental Navy. His full due of prize money and fame eluded him as a result. He captured or destroyed dozens of enemy vessels, yet after the war Congress repeatedly ignored his applications for payment and recognition.

Macatter’s subsequent fate is unknown. Ryan died in debtor’s prison in 1789. While sailing for Franklin he’d captured dozens of prizes worth thousands of pounds. The unpaid bill for which he was incarcerated at the end of his life was in the amount of £100 “for the inoculation of three of his children.”

As for Gustavus Conyngham, after two failed escape attempts he “committed treason through his majesty’s earth” and dug his way out of Mill Prison in November 1779. Sympathizers in London smuggled him to Amsterdam, from where he wrote Franklin of his desire, once he recovered from the effects of “irons, dungeons, hunger,” to get to sea again. “I shall always be ready to serve my country, and happy should I be able to come alongside some of those petty tyrants.”