but convert strong suspicion into absolute certainty. He had no longer the slightest doubt that there was a conspiracy among those scurvy politicians to pick his pocket of his country's independence. One trifling incident will serve to show how completely he was the prey of Distrust, and, at the same time, how groundless that dis

trust was.

I have mentioned before that the chief secretary to the Count de Vergennes and the secretary to the king's council (offices formerly filled by M. Gerard), was M. de Rayneval: who was as active in negotiating a peace as Mr. Gerard had formerly been in negotiating the treaty of alliance. While Mr. Oswald's courier was bearing to England Mr. Jay's positive refusal to treat under the old commission, word was brought to Mr. Jay that M. de Rayneval had suddenly set out for London. It was given out that he had gone into the country, and particular precautions had been taken to keep his real destination a secret. On the same day, Mr. Jay learned that the Spanish Embassador, contrary to his usual practice, had gone with post horses (Mr. Jay's own italics) to Versailles, and had been in consultation for two or three hours with the Count de Vergennes and M. de Rayneval; immediately after which, de Rayneval had taken his departure. On the day following, Mr. Jay obtained, by an unknown hand, from the French foreign office, a copy of a letter from M. de Marbois, the French minister in Philadelphia, to the Count de Vergennes, in which de Marbois expressed surprise that the Americans should claim the right of fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, and advised the Count to let them know at once that he would not support them in it. These facts taken together, Mr. Jay says, led him to conjecture, that M. de Rayneval had been sent to England to dissuade Lord Shelburne from acknowledging independence, and urge him to keep the Americans out of the fisheries, and limit their western boundary.

Penetrated with alarm, nothing would serve Mr. Jay but to dispatch a secret messenger of his own to Lord Shelburne, to counteract the baleful influence of the French emissary. Mr. Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin's old friend and the editor of his works, was the messenger employed by Mr. Jay on this occasion; and away he sped to England, charged to the brim with arguments calculated to neutralize the reasonings which M. de Rayneval was expected to bring forward. All this was kept secret from Dr. Franklin, who

Still afflicted the soul of Mr. Jay by maintaining that the French court was acting towards them in good faith. "It would have relieved me from much anxiety and uneasiness," wrote Mr. Jay, "to have concerted all these steps with Dr. Franklin; but on conversing with him about M. de Rayneval's journey, he did not concur with me in sentiment respecting the objects of it, but appeared to me to have a great degree of confidence in this court." Time, he adds, will show which of us is right.

Time has shown. Hear the explicit testimony of Dr. Jared Sparks on this point: "I have read in the office of Foreign Affairs in London the confidential correspondence of the British ministers with their commissioners for negotiating peace in Paris. I have also read in the French office of Foreign Affairs the entire correspondence of the Count de Vergennes, during the whole war, with the French ministers in this country, developing the policy and designs of the French court in regard to the war, and the objects to be obtained by the peace. I have, moreover, read the instructions of the Count de Vergennes when de Rayneval went to London, and the correspondence which passed between them while he remained there, containing notes of conversations with Lord Shelburne on one part, and Count de Vergennes' opinions on the other. After examining the subject with all the care and accuracy which these means of informations have enabled me to give to it, I am prepared to express my belief most fully that Mr. Jay was mistaken both in regard to the aims of the French court, and the plans pursued by them to gain their supposed ends."*

M. de Rayneval, in fact, went to London to ascertain, from personal interviews with Lord Shelburne, whether the British Government was sincerely desirous of concluding a peace, and he was ordered not to converse at all upon American topics except to insist upon the independence of the United States as a sine qua non.

Good Mr. Jay was soon relieved of his anxiety. Mr. Vaughan returned in about fifteen days, and with him came a courier who brought a new commission for Mr. Oswald, in which Mr. Jay's country was called by its proper name, "the United States;" "and very happy," he says, were we to see it." Then, and not before, the negotiation could really begin. It was on the 27th

66

* Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, viii., 209.

of September when the new commission arrived, nine months after the first overture had reached Dr. Franklin from Lord North's ministry. The importance which this affair of the commission had assumed in the mind of Mr. Jay may be inferred from the fact, that his principal memoir on the subject to the Count de Vergennes was a manuscript of fifty or sixty pages. He ransacked all modern history for precedents and illustrations, and made a very learned argument. Nevertheless, that was not the way to Canada, which should have been the object of the negotiation, and to the acquisition of which nearly every thing else might have been postponed. Well, said Talleyrand to the clerks in his office: "Above all, gentlemen, no zeal!"

Congress having authorized the commissioners, "or a majority of such of them as should assemble," to appoint a secretary, at a thousand pounds a year, Mr. Jay and Dr. Franklin gave the office to William Temple Franklin. His commission was signed by them on the first of October.

During the month of October, Mr. Jay and Mr. Oswald, Mr. Jay and the Spanish embassador, Mr. Jay, Dr. Franklin and Mr. Oswald, discussed the details of the treaty, without making any great progress towards agreement on the troublesome points. Mr. Jay was still the slave of distrust. One evening, while he was in conference with Oswald, at the hotel of the latter, Mr. Oswald, wishing to refer to his instructions, opened his desk to get them; when, to his alarm, he found the paper missing; i. e., he could not find it. Oh, never mind, said Jay, you will find it in its place as soon as the minister has done with it. "In a few days," adds Mr. Jay's biographer, "the prediction was verified;" i. e., Mr. Oswald found the paper. So convinced was Mr. Jay that the French ministry had spies in their employ who hovered about the lodgings of the diplomatic corps, picking locks and abstracting papers, that he "made it a rule to carry his confidential papers about his person.' He lent a credulous ear, too, to a tale told him by Mr. Oswald, that the Count de Vergennes, in the course of a conversation with "an Englishman of distinction here," had proposed to make a partition of America, France to possess one half, and England the other.

"Life of Jay," i., 156.

October 26th, a gentleman, long expected, arrived in Paris, who was prepared to sympathize with Mr. Jay in his worst suspicions, and to sustain him in any measures growing out of the same; a gentleman who, to a general dislike of Frenchmen, added a particular recollection of a disagreeable collision with the Count de Vergennes. It was Mr. John Adams, flushed with his double success in Holland, in having concluded a treaty of commerce and started a loan.

CHAPTER XVI.

PEACE CONCLUDED.

MR. ADAMS begins his Paris diary by saying, that the first thing to be done after arriving at the French capital, is to send for a tailor, peruke-maker, and shoe-maker; for France had established such a domination over the fashion that neither clothes, wigs, nor shoes, made in any other place, would do in Paris. So he did not see Mr. Jay the first day; still less, Dr. Franklin. On the next, which was Sunday, he called on his younger colleague, but did not find him at home. In the course of the day, however, he found out his old friend Ridley, who told him the news as learned from the friends of Mr. Jay. "Ridley says, Franklin has broke up the practice of inviting everybody to dine with him on Sunday at Passy; that he is getting better; the gout left him weak, but he begins to sit at table; * * Jay refused to treat with Oswald until he had a commission to treat with the commissioners of the United States of America; Franklin was afraid to insist upon it; was afraid we should be obliged to treat without; differed with Jay. * * * Ridley is full of Jay's firmness and independence; has taken upon himself to act without asking advice, or even communicating with the Count de Vergennes, and this even in opposition to an instruction;" (ultimately to be governed by the advice and opinion of the French ministry).

Mr. Adams added a few lines of comment upon Mr. Ridley's version of the state of things: "Between two as subtle spirits as

any in the world, the one malicious, the other, I think, honest, I shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical part to act. Franklin's cunning will be to divide us; to this end, he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuver. My curiosity will at least be employed in observing his invention and his artifice." Horace correctly described inordinate self-love as blind.

He was closeted with Mr. Jay on the day following. I suppose that, corporeally speaking, they merely shook hands, after the Anglo-Saxon manner; but, in a spiritual sense, they rushed into each other's arms, and hugged one another with the violence of true love. "Nothing," wrote Mr. Adams, "that has happened since the beginning of the controversy in 1761, has ever struck me more forcibly, or affected me more intimately, than that entire coincidence of principles and opinions between him and me.” He thought Mr. Jay's compelling Oswald to get the phraseology of his commission changed, "a noble triumph," and regarded Franklin's conciliatory policy as base subserviency. Mr. Jay said, "we must be honest and grateful to our allies, but think for ourselves."

On the fourth day, in the evening, Mr. Adams went out to Passy, and paid his respects to Dr. Franklin. "I told him," says Adams, "without reserve, my opinion of the policy of this court, and of the principles, wisdom and firmness with which Mr. Jay had conducted the negotiation in his sickness and my absence, and that I was determined to support Mr. Jay to the utmost of my power in the pursuit of the same system. The Doctor heard me patiently, but said nothing." Wise doctor! Franklin, indeed, never displayed more wisdom and self-control than in not quarreling with these two rare diplomatists, and letting them go on in their sage way without hinderance. They were a majority, and John Adams was at the head of the commission. A serious opposition on Franklin's part might have retarded the peace, might have broken up the commission; but it could not have gained any solid advantages for his country. That game had been spoiled months ago. So, the first time the commissioners met, Dr. Franklin gave in to Mr. Jay's proposal, which was supported by Mr. Adams, to go on negotiating without consulting the French court at all. This he consented to the more readily, because Mr. Fitzherbert's negotiation with the Count de Vergennes was kept secret from them, and because nothing final or binding could be concluded without the formal con