To Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Selected Writings of Gouverneur Morris

32 • On the Beaumarchais Claim (1807–1808)

473 The New-York Evening Post, February 24, 1807, p. 2; January 11, 1808, p. 2. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. 1. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99) is best remembered as the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, but he was also a secret agent for the French government. In 1776, with the secret financing of the French and Spanish governments, he set up Roderigue Hortalez and Company to provide supplies to the American revolutionaries. 2. Mintz, American Revolution, 117–21, has a good account of the episode and of Morris’s role in it. For the subsequent history of the claim, see Brian N. Morton and Donald C. Spinelli, Beaumarchais and the American Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), 317ff. 32 • On the Beaumarchais Claim (1807–1808) The Beaumarchais1 case was one of the most contentious episodes of the Revolutionary War. As Morris explains in these letters, not only were the claims themselves potentially embarrassing to both France and the United States, but they also gave rise to a factional fight in Congress over the conduct of American agents Arthur Lee and Silas Deane that briefly paralyzed the government. Thomas Paine, as the secretary to Congress’s committee on Foreign Affairs, tried to help the Lee faction by leaking Beaumarchais’s claims to the press in January 1779, impairing relations with America’s only ally by revealing the secret help of the French government before independence was declared.2 As these letters indicate, the case continued to reverberate in American politics. The occasion of these two letters was the presentation of Beaumarchais ’s claim, yet again, by the French minister to the United States in 1807, and the subsequent report of Attorney General Cesar Rodney endorsing the claims. Rodney’s opinion was delivered in a December 7, 1807, letter to Secretary of State James Madison; that report, together with a commentary that does not appear to be by Morris, appeared in the Evening Post of January 7, 1808. Morris had responded briefly to the French minister’s assertion of the claim in 1807; on January 11, 1808, Morris gave a fuller reply to Rodney’s endorsement. 474 chaPtEr 32 3. That is, the article of January 11, 1808, reprinted below. 4. New-York Evening Post, February 5, 1818, p. 2. Ten years later, after Morris’s death, the subject of the Beaumarchais claim was raised yet again in Congress. The Evening Post reprinted the essay with the following introductory note: The Beaumarchais claim. In answer to numerous applications from gentlemen in congress, I re-publish the following article; and shall follow it with a still more satisfactory elucidation of facts, from the same source;3 in the hope, that it will be now put at rest forever. The information contained in the following article was written by the late Gouverneur Morris, and furnished for publication in 1807, when the claim of Beaumarchais was first presented to congress. No man then living was probably so conversant with the facts detailed.4 FEbruary 24, 1807 Beaumarchais. In the revolution war, America received supplies of Cloathing and Military Stores from Mr. de Beaumarchais. It was notorious that this gentleman was incapable of furnishing them from his own resources— it was believed therefore, that he derived his means from the Royal Treasury . Afterwards, when Mr. Franklin, the American Minister, settled our accounts with Monsieur de Vergennes, the United States were charged under three distinct heads, viz: Loans, Subsidies, and Free Gift. The payments under each of these heads was distinctly pointed out, except that of one million given in 1776; and when Mr. Franklin desired to know what had become of that money, he was told that being a gift, no explanation was necessary. Mr. Franklin was, or appeared to be satisfied. Before that settlement , however, Mr. Beaumarchais, who had an agent in America, pressed for payment of supplies, furnished and obtained from Congress Bills for two million four hundred thousand livres on their Ministers in Europe, who, by the bye, had no means of payment. Mr. Gerard, the French Minister at Philadelphia, (brother to Mr. Rayneval, a Secretary in the Count de Vergennes Office) patronized Mr. de Beaumarchais’ demand, which however was represented by some of the public servants in Europe, as wholly On the Beaumarchais Claim 475 unfounded, and a mere scheme to put money in the pockets of individuals . There was much...