Entangling Alliance

THE PEACEMAKERS by Richard B Morris. 572 pages. Harper & Row. $10

"O God! It is all over!" cried Lord North, the British Prime Minister, when he heard of the U.S. victory at Yorktown. He was wrong. It was all over; but the peacemaking--which went on for almost two years before it concluded in the fateful Peace of Paris tha established the U.S. as an independent nation. To retrace the incredibly intricate course of this negotiation, Columbia's Professor Richard B. Morris spent five years puttering in French, British and U.S. archives. He came up covered with dust and glory, clutching original documents that compel a radical reinterpretation of Franco-American relations in the revolutionary period.

The Morris thesis is that France was not, as most historians have assumed, the great champion of American independence. France, he demonstrates, was primarily interested in its war with George III, and considered the U.S. just a handy stick to beat Britain with. Even before the war was over, the Bourbon monarchy did everything diplomatically possible to reduce, partition and even scuttle the brash young nation that had dared dispute the rule of royalty. And during the peace negotiations, France cynically tried to sell the U.S. down the river for the sake of an overall settlement with Britain and Spain.

Master of the Peace. For the historians Author Morris supplies page on page of fascinating new facts, and for the general reader he supplies plenty of human interest. The Peacemakers tells a tall but true and often heroic tale of three shrewd Yankee traders--John Jay, John Adams and Ben Franklin--who sat down with the biggest double-dealers in Europe and played a bad hand so skillfully that they made off with the better part of the pot.

Shrewd was scarcely the word for Adams when he arrived in Paris early in 1780 to take up his duties as U.S. peace commissioner. He was green, scared, pompous, moralistic and tactless. Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, who intended to be "master of the peace," gave a sharp tug on the purse strings and "persuaded" the Continental Congress to divide its peacemaking powers among five commissioners.* A little later he also forced Congress to instruct its commissioners "to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace without the knowledge and concurrence of the ministers of France." To make sure these incapacitating instructions were honored, Vergennes had the commissioners shadowed and their mail opened before delivery.

Adams was indignant, and so was the proud and subtle Jay. But wise old Franklin advised the younger men to wait patiently for the main chance, and in the spring of 1782 it came. Lord Shelburne, soon to be named Prime Minister of England, invited Franklin to initiate a correspondence. A few weeks later Richard Oswald, a sagacious Scot, arrived in Paris with authority to negotiate. Franklin dutifully informed Vergennes, and then informed Oswald of the principal American peace conditions: "compleat independence," territorial integrity, freedom to fish on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, freedom to navigate the Mississippi, no treaty without full French approval.

Jay Strikes Back. Meanwhile Vergennes secretly notified Shelburne that France would not support the American demand for fishing rights. Shelburne, sensing an opportunity to divide his enemies, discreetly apprised the Americans of what the French had said. Franklin was ill at the time and Adams happened to be in Amsterdam, so Jay got the message and he was furious. He had also discovered that Spain, with French compliance, intended in the peace treaty to limit the U.S. to a narrow strip of territory along the Atlantic coast and to take everything west of the Appalachians for itself. It was clear, Jay concluded, that France regarded its alliance with the U.S. as a license to swindle its junior partner--a conclusion powerfully supported, says Historian Morris, by documents preserved in the Quai d'Orsay that spell out a French scheme to split up the 13 states and return some of them to England.

Without consulting either of his colleagues, Jay therefore "broke instructions." He informed Lord Shelburne that he was prepared to hold separate talks with England, but only if England would acknowledge that it was dealing, not with rebellious colonies, but with the United States of America. Well aware that America was the lever that could swing the general settlement, Shelburne was delighted to lift the lever out of Vergennes' hands. He agreed to recognize the U.S., and on Oct. 29, 1782, negotiations began on a semisecret basis --that is to say, the U.S. commissioners truthfully told Vergennes that they were talking with the English, but untruthfully told him that talks were stalled.

A Diplomatic Lesson. After four weeks of discreet conversations, the negotiators completed the "preliminary articles" of a treaty that conceded all the major U.S. demands and envisioned a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to northern Florida--Minnesota, and with it the stupendous Mesabi iron lode, were included by a cartographical accident. On Nov. 30, 1782, the preliminary articles, which for all practical purposes constituted the final document, were signed. Vergennes was promptly informed. He was stunned. But when he protested "the unhappy news," Franklin cheerfully apologized for "neglecting a point of propriety," and then subtly sank the needle: "The English, I just now learn, flatter themselves they have already divided us. I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken."

The New World had taught the Old a diplomatic lesson, not for the last time, and in the process had accomplished what Commissioner Adams called "one of the most important political events that ever happened on this globe." Adams was bragging, but who can deny he was right?

*Only Jay, Adams and Franklin actually served. Thomas Jefferson never left the U.S. to take up his assignment; Henry Laurens was captured at sea by the British, and after his release devoted himself more to private than to public business.

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