Silas Deane (1737-1789)
Sources
Diplomat
Scandal . Silas Deane was a rising star on the American political scene until he was destroyed in a political scandal that reshaped American politics and altered the course of American diplomacy. The scandal of 1778–1779 destroyed Deane’s political and business career, left his chief detractor labeled as unstable and erratic, led the president of Congress to resign, and forced Congress to fire Thomas Paine as secretary to a congressional committee. The Deane scandal developed at the same time as other political disputes, involving issues as different as the structure of Pennsylvania’s government and the proper nature of the new nation’s relationship with France. The Deane scandal marked the first open breach among supporters of American independence and led these political leaders to turn to public opinion to secure support.
Man on the Make. Born in Groton, Connecticut, on 24 December 1737, Silas Deane, the son of a blacksmith, graduated from Yale College in 1758. He was admitted to the bar in 1761 and received a master’s degree from Yale in 1763. An ambitious young lawyer, in 1763 Deane married Mehitabel Webb, a widow with six children and a successful store, which helped launch Deane on the road to success. When Mehitabel died in 1767, Deane again married this time to Elizabeth Saltonstall, grand-daughter of a former colonial governor. In 1769 he was named chairman of the local committee responsible for enforcing the nonimportation agreements, and in 1772 he was sent to the general assembly. Secretary to the assembly’s committee of correspondence, Deane in 1774 and 1775 was sent to the Continental Congress. There he was actively involved in creating a Continental Navy, and with other Connecticut men Deane outfitted a military force to capture Fort Ticonderoga. Connecticut did not send Deane to Congress in 1776, but Congress sent him to France, the first representative of the united American colonies in Europe.
Commissioner. Deane carried secret instructions from two committees of Congress to France. One committee authorized Deane to sell American goods in France or in other countries; the other committee instructed him to buy guns, ammunition, and other military supplies. If possible he was to begin negotiations for French support of American independence. Deane did all these, with great success. Working with French playwright and political activist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (author of The Marriage of Figaro, first performed in 1784), Deane sent eight ships loaded with military supplies to the colonies, which helped the poorly supplied American army win the Battle of Saratoga. Deane also sent French officers to join Washington’s army.
French Officers. Deane reported on the “rage” among French gentlemen and officers for an American military adventure, and he obliged dozens of French officers with American commissions. Washington could not use all the officers Deane commissioned, but he had to make room for them, which might mean displacing his own commanders. After Congress voted not to commission French officers who did not understand English, Congress had to tell Deane this did not mean that he could commission any officer who did understand English. Finally Congress voted not to receive any more French officers, but those already in America insisted on keeping their positions. One French officer, the Irish-born general Thomas Conway, collaborated with other officers and with some Congressional supporters to try to replace Washington in 1778. Another French officer, Philippe Charles Tronson Du Coudray, arrived expecting to be given senior command of the American artillery. The prospect of Du Coudray’s promotion prompted Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, and John Sullivan to offer their resignations. Du Coudray’s extravagant claims to honor and preference were ended when he tried to ride his horse on the ferry across the Schuylkill. Refusing to dismount, Du Coudray drowned when his panicked horse dove into the river, thus relieving “Congress from a very troublesome malcontent.”
Recall. In 1776 Congress had dispatched Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin to join Deane as American commissioners to France. As the three worked on a treaty with the French government, members of Congress, along with Washington, grew frustrated with Deane’s French officers, and in August 1777 Congress began to consider recalling Deane from France. In November 1777 Congress formally asked him to return home, but he would not receive the news before the commissioners signed the treaty with France in February 1778. Deane returned home to answer to Congress and to inform Congress that Arthur Lee’s incompetence threatened to undermine the French alliance. Arthur Lee, for his part, had grown deeply suspicious of Deane and had told his brother Richard Henry Lee that the military aid Deane had sent from France in 1776, for which he had billed Congress, had been intended as a French gift to the Americans. The Lees, joined by Samuel Adams and Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, with whom Deane had endured a frosty relationship (Deane called him “my old Colleague Roger the Jesuit”), suspected Deane of profiteering and corruption.
Deane and Congress. Deane demanded a quick investigation, but Congress did nothing in the fall of 1778. In October, Deane published a series of anonymous queries in the Pennsylvania Packet, charging Arthur Lee with close, traitorous communications with a British agent, and in December, Deane publicly blasted the Lees in a newspaper essay “To the Free and Virtuous Citizens of America.” This marked the first open political dispute among the Patriots, and it caught the Lees off guard. To John Adams the publication of Deane’s defense “appeared... like a dissolution of the Constitution.” The Lees moved to have Congress censure Deane for his public breach, but they failed. Henry Laurens, president of Congress and a Lee ally, resigned to protest Congress’s failure to censure Deane. The Lees then turned to Thomas Paine, secretary to Congress’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, to come to their aid. Paine wrote a vigorous series of essays attacking Deane for profiteering. Deane had risen like a rocket, Paine said, and now he would fall like a stick. But in blasting Deane’s connection with Beaumarchais, Paine revealed too much about French diplomacy, publicly acknowledging that France had supported the American colonies as early as 1776, when France insisted she was neutral. The French envoy to America forced Congress to fire Paine for publishing this information. “I did not see how they could ever trust any of Us again,” John Adams wrote in his diary, saying the scandal “would have the worst Effects upon Spain, Holland, and in England, besides endangering a civil War in America.”
Political Division. Congress divided between a Deane faction, led by Robert Morris and John Jay, and a Lee faction, led by Richard Henry Lee and Samuel Adams. New England and the Lees joined together against Southern delegates and the New Yorkers, whom Adams called Deane’s “Tory friends and Mercantile Abettors.” The issue for Congress was public virtue: by mixing his diplomatic responsibilities with the pursuit of private profit, Deane had betrayed the public trust. On the other hand, Deane’s defenders did not see why public servants such as he should go broke in serving their country. Civil war was averted, but while Congress and the newspapers debated charges and countercharges, Washington’s army was dissolving. Deane had left France without the necessary paperwork to prove his case; to his supporters this was an honest mistake, but to his detractors it looked as though he had something to hide. In 1780 Deane returned to Europe as a private citizen, hoping to recover the small fortune he had spent in 1776 supplying the American army. In 1781, with the British in control of South Carolina and New York, Deane despaired of American victory, and wrote to American friends urging reconciliation. When the British intercepted these letters, and the Loyalist New York press published them, what little was left of Deane’s public reputation was destroyed. He now seemed not only a profiteer but also a traitor. His health broken, his money gone, Deane lived in poverty in Belgium, then in England, where the British government gave him a small pension. In 1789 he tried to sail to Canada, but died just out of the port of Deal on 23 September 1789. In 1842 the United States government agreed that the 1779 audit had been “a gross injustice to Silas Deane” and awarded his heirs $37,000.
Thomas Paine, “The Affair of Silas Deane,” in Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, edited by Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945);
Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979);
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1972).
