While the Committee of Secret Correspondence was meeting secretly
in Philadelphia with agents of France, Arthur Lee was meeting in
London with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the successful
author of The Barber of Seville (and later The Marriage of
Figaro)-who was a French agent. Lee's inflated reports of patriot
strength, which either he fabricated for Beaumarchais' benefit or
were provided by Lee's regular correspondent, Sam Adams, won the
Frenchman to the American cause. Beaumarchais repeatedly urged the
French Court to give immediate assistance to the Americans, and on
February 29, 1776 addressed a memorial to Louis XVI quoting Lee's
offer of a secret long-term treaty of commerce in exchange for
secret aid to the war of independence. Beaumarchais explained that
France could grant such aid without compromising itself, but urged
that "success of the plan depends wholly upon rapidity as well as
secrecy: Your Majesty knows better than any one that secrecy is the
soul of business, and that in politics a project once disclosed is
a project doomed to failure." With the memorial, Beaumarchais
submitted a plan proposing that he set up a commercial trading firm
as a cover for the secret French aid; he requested and was granted
one million livres to establish a firm to be known as Roderigue
Hortalez et Cie for that purpose. Beaumarchais' memorial was
followed by one of March 12, 1776, by the French Minister of
Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Vergennes. Royal assent was granted,
and by the time Silas Deane arrived in Paris, French aid was on its
way to the patriots. Deane expanded the Franco-American
relationship, working with Beaumarchais and other French merchants
to procure ships, commission privateers, recruit French officers,
and purchase French military supplies declared "surplus" for that
purpose. On September 26, 1776, the Continental Congress elected
three commissioners to the Court of France, Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson and Silas Deane, resolving that "secrecy shall be
observed until further Order of Congress; and that until permission
be obtained from Congress to disclose the particulars of this
business, no member be permitted to say anything more upon this
subject, than that Congress have taken such steps as they judged
necessary for the purpose of obtaining foreign alliance." Because
of his wife's illness, Jefferson could not serve, and Arthur Lee
was appointed in his stead. With Franklin's arrival in France on
November 29, 1776-the first anniversary of the founding of the
Committee of Secret Correspondence-the vital French mission became
an intelligence and propaganda center for Europe, an unofficial
diplomatic representation, a coordinating facility for aid from
America's secret allies, and a recruiting station for such French
officers as Lafayette and Kalb. In October 1777 the Continental
Army won a crucial victory over the British at Saratoga, and on
February 6, 1778, the French-American treaty of alliance was
signed. On March 30, 1778, Franklin, Lee, and Deane were received
at the French Court as representatives of the United States of
America, and on July 7 of that year Comte d'Estaing's French fleet
cast anchor in the Delaware River. France was in the war; the
mission to Paris had succeeded. Spain, at the urging of French
Foreign Minister Vergennes, matched France's one million livres for
the operation of Hortalez et Cie. But that was not the beginning of
secret Spanish aid to the Patriots. During the summer of 1776 Luis
de Unzaga y Amezaga, the governor of New Spain at New Orleans, had
privately delivered some ten thousand pounds of gunpowder, out of
the King's stores, to Captain George Gibson and Lieutenant Linn of
the Virginia Council of Defense. The gunpowder, moved up the
Mississippi under the protection of the Spanish flag, made it
possible to thwart British plans to capture Fort Pitt.
General
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