AN UNPAID DEBT

 

I would say it was the nastiest letter ever written by Ben Franklin (that we know of). On Saturday, 4 April, 1778, Franklin dipped his talented pen in his long simmering sense of moral outrage to write, “I saw your jealous, malignant and quarrelsome temper which was daily manifesting itself against Mr. Deane, and almost every other person you had dealings with.”

Future historians would invent the story that Franklin was revered at the French Court because on his first appearance he had forgotten his wig, and appeared bare headed. If it happened this would have been a major social faux pas in the French court.  But it was not the old man's bare head that made set the French court all a tremble with excitement, and inspired his nickname as "the child of nature". 

Each winter's morning in his rented house the 70 year old man sat for half an hour reading the newspapers before an open window, stark naked. During the summer months he sat in the garden reading the papers, absolument nu. He called his  "air bath" "most agreeable" and recommended it as "strengthening and enjoyable".  His sophisticated Parisian neighbors were electrified, while their children received an unvarnished American education. You had to travel no small distance to offend the morals of such a man as Ben Franklin.

The object of Franklin's naked bitterness was Arthur Lee (above), youngest son of the powerful Lee family of Virginia, the man whom George Trevelyan described as “… the assassin of other men’s reputations and careers ..." 

Mr. Trevelayn dared to add, "The best that can be said of Arthur Lee (above) is, that in his personal dealings with the colleagues he was seeking to ruin, he made no pretense of friendship…and his attitude toward his brother envoys was to the last degree, hostile and insulting.” (pp 455-456 “The American Revolution Part III” Longmans Green & Co. 1907.) This man Lee was so filled with hate and bile that he almost destroyed the thing he professed to love, the American Revolution. And the man he hated the most was Silas Deane.

Deane was a lawyer/merchant from Connecticut who had been dispatched to France in 1776 by the Continental Congress to buy guns. There were three men in the delegation, Deane, Ben Franklin and the pus filled Mr. Lee.  Clearly, Arthur Lee felt that he was more qualified to negotiate than either the geriatric nudist or the country bumpkin.  But in truth, Deane's only qualification was that he was very smart and rich enough to buy the desperately needed muskets while Congress dithered, and he carried a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin to a friend of Franklin's living in England, Dr. Edward Bancroft.

When Silas Deane arrived back home from France in 1778 he brought with him the muskets he had paid for. With him arrived a treaty pledging French military and financial aid, which had been primarily been negotiated by Franklin.  

Accompanying Dean was Conrad Alexandre Gérard de Rayneval (above), the first official representative of the court of King Louis XVI.  And it seems by all accounts that M. Gerard  thought of Mr. Lees as a stuck-up pain in the derriere. 

Deane rightly expected to be received as a hero bearing gifts. Instead he was treated like a traitor and grilled about the locked boxes of secret dispatches he had carried home to the Congress from the American delegation in France.

When those boxes of secret dispatches were opened, they were found to contain nothing but blank pages. Clearly whoever had penetrated the American security arraignments must have been rushed, as they had no had time to laboriously copy the dispatches before replacing them.  And by not replacing them the British agents had made a much bigger impression than the theft itself.  But, alas, the Congress of 1778 was no brighter then the Congress of 2023.  Congressional paranoia took flight. And it was a darned impressive bird. The ship’s captain was jailed and questioned.

When it finally occurred to the investigators that the person with six weeks to time to steal and copy the dispatches during the crossing from France, would have been the Captain. But he had not copied them, then the captain was released. But in the Continental Congress, as in any legislative body, the level of intelligence is usually in indirect proportion to the position of authority. So as soon as the Captain was released the senior members of Congress ordered his re-arrest.

But it was obvious to Mr. Deane that certain members of the Congress now suspected him of being a British spy, and were trying to force the captain to implicate him. This the captain steadfastly refused to do. Still, it was also obvious to Silas Deane that they had been encouraged in their suspicion by his fellow diplomat in Paris, the poisonous Arthur Lee. And indeed, that was true.

Lee even alleged in private letters to friends of his in Congress that Deane might have destroyed the dispatches because the dispatches contained letters accusing Deane of profiteering. Such letters, if they existed, would have come most likely from the poisoned pen held by Arthur Lee.  So why bother to steal these anti-Deane dispatches, since obviously, Lee was free to write more? But Lee even went further, to hint that “Dr. Franklin himself…was privy to the abstraction of the dispatches.” 

So, now we have ask why Franklin would have stolen them? And a moment of logical thought will dismiss such naked accusations against Ben. And yet there were members of Congress who were convinced that a grand conspiracy was at work here, a plot to betray the nation and insult the character of... Arthur Lee.  It was insane, of course, the kind of loopy idiotic illogical thinking, that only the brain of an elected politician would believe. But the Congress of 1778 was just as jammed packed with psychotics and nincompoops as the Congress of 2023.

The special Congressional hearing listened skeptically to Deane’s spur of the moment defense. He claimed the account books which would have disproved the charges of his profiteering were back in France. He would have brought them but he had no idea they would be demanded. Deane was then forced to wait for Congress to issue him further instructions and reimbursement for the money he had spent on muskets which were already killing British soldiers. The instructions - and the money - never came.

Finally, short of funds (which by itself should have disproved the charge of profiteering), Deane did something foolish. He went public. In December 1778 he published his defense - a pamphlet, "An Address to the Free and Independent Citizens of the United States" - in which he identified the problem in Paris as Mr. Arthur Lee. He also reminded the public of all the weapons and supplies he had bought in France for the American army with his own money, and for which the Congress had not yet repaid him.

The public reaction in America was immediate and vicious. “The educated public saw in his (Deanes’) publication a betrayal of an official trust, and the public regarded it as effusion of an angry and detected man”(ibid). The public now joined the members of the Congress in believing Silas Deane of theft and betrayal.

No less a powerful voice for America than Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense”, and now serving as Secretary to the Foreign Committee of Congress, came to Arthur Lee's defense in a Philadelphia newspaper. He wrote that the supplies, “which Mr. Deane…so pompously plumes himself upon, were promised and engaged… before he even arrived in France.”  Bluntly, that was not true. 

And even if promised, they had not yet been paid for. And if not paid for, they would not have been delivered. Paine was merely repeating a lie which Arthur Lee had made back in 1776 in his private letters to relatives and allies in America. But that one lie, uttered by Thomas Paine, came close to unraveling the entire American Revolution.

The British were thrilled with Paine's story because for the first time the Americans had revealed a rift within their own ranks. And more importantly, if the supplies had really been promised and assigned to America before Mr. Deane had even arrived in France, as Paine claimed (as Lee had lied about), then the King of France, Louis XVI, had lied when he publicly assured the British and the Spanish that he was not helping the Americans prior to 1778. Worse, Louis had violated the Treaty of Paris signed in 1763, which had ended The Seven Years War (known as the French and Indian War in America.) To call the French King a liar and say he had violated a standing treaty was to say that his word was worthless. Royalty does not take kindly to being called things like that.  Especially by upstart beggars depending on France for support.

The brand new French ambassador, M. Gerard, was enraged. He demanded an explanation. The Congress, recognizing they had been put out on a limb by Mr. Paine (and by Mr. Lee, although they didn't seem to have realized that, yet), beat a hasty retreat and announced that “…his most Christian Majesty…did not preface his alliance with any supplies whatever sent to America, so they have not authorized the writer of said publication to make any such assertions…but, on the contrary, do highly disapprove of the same." Ignoring that they had just validated Deane's defense, Congress now recalled what was left of the Paris delegation, both Franklin and Lee. They were replaced with one man, Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Paine was forced to resign his post, and became estranged from the revolution he had helped so much to create and succor. Following a logic which would have been instantly understandable by any member of a local Parents' Teachers' Association, Paine's friends in Congress blamed Silas Deane for Paines' stupidity in believing the liar Lee. And Mr. Deane, who had first been maligned and smeared by Arthur Lee, and then had been accused and maligned by Thomas Paine and his allies in Congress, also found himself estranged from his American Revolution.

Deane returned to Paris, intending to obtain his account books to prove his loyalty to the cause. But the books had been destroyed; by whom it was not clear. Dejected and angry, Deane swore he would never return to America. He moved to London, where he re-newed his connections to Dr. Edward Bancroft, and struck up a friendship with that other disabused American patriot, Benedict Arnold. That friendship did nothing to help Deanes' cause in America.

In the summer of 1780 Deane unloaded, in a letter to his family, suggesting that America would never win the war and should think about negotiating with the British to be accepted back into the empire. The ship carrying Deane’s letters was captured by an American privateer and Deane’s letters were published in a Connecticut newspaper, appearing in print just after the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.

It was a nasty case of very bad timing. The public reaction was so negative that Deane's dreams of returning to America had to be put on hold for another eight years. He spent the last month of his life preparing for that return voyage. But he died (in September 1789) before his ship could sail, and he was buried in England.

In his obituary published by a London newspaper Silas Deane received the final defense he should have received from the American Congress. “Having (been) accused of embezzling large sums of money entrusted to his care…Mr. Deane sought an asylum in this country, where his habits of life …penurious in the extreme, amply refuted the malevolence of his enemies. So reduced, indeed, was this gentleman, who was supposed to have embezzled upwards of 100,000 pounds sterling,...that he experienced all the horrors of the most abject poverty in the capital of England, and has for the last few months been almost in danger of starving.”

And what about Arthur Lee, the source of all this venom? After the war Arthur Lee was elected to Congress and for the first time his friends and allies got an up-close view of him in action. They found him so “…perpetually indignant, paranoid, self-centered, and often confused” that his fellow Virginians, Jefferson and Washington, avoided all contact with him. I wonder if any of them ever gave any thought to how they had depended on this man in their judgement of Silas Deane? Evidently not.

Arthur Lee opposed the new American Constitution, and after losing that fight he ran for a seat in the new Congress anyway. He was defeated. Arthur Lee died "embittered" on his 500 acre farm in Virginia in December of 1792.

It was not until 1835 that Congress finally acknowledged the debts Silas Dean had incurred in helping to create America. His desendents were paid $38,000 (the equivalent of almost a million dollars today). It was generally admitted that this was but a fraction of the money Silas Deane had spent in helping to create our nation.

Thank you, Silas; for whatever that thanks is worth.

And a post script; it was not until recently that letters from various English and French sources revealed that the true source of the leak in the American ministry in Paris, the real "snake in the grass", which had resulted in the stolen messages from Paris, had been the sloppy bookkeeping and slipshod security arraignments of the pompous and the paranoid Mr. Arthur Lee of Virginia. The conduit who took advantage of his failure was Dr. Edward Bancroft, a British secret agent inside the English opposition to King George III, and the man recommended to Silas Dean by  Ben  Franklin.  And that is the naked truth.

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WAR AS EDUCATION

 

I hate to admit it but that the effete, arrogant, pompous, intellectual, asthmatic and snobbish Frenchman Marcel Proust (above)  was right about at least two things - first, when he observed that “We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history”, and second that “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

Both of those profound insights struck me again recently when I stumbled upon an article in the  archeology magazine "Antiquity", which illuminated a forgotten memory of the work of a quiet rock hound named Gerald Clark Bond. It may seem a complicated train of events, but please bear with me, while I try to explain how my mind works. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Professor Bond collected and cataloged rocks from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Bermuda. This may have once seemed an esoteric pursuit, but in that seemingly meaningless me'lange of bottom cores, which Professor Bond drilled through,  were thin layers of limestone pebbles,  which had nothing to do with the ocean floor nor the great rivers which dumped their detritus onto the Continental Shelf in that region.

How did they get thousands of miles south and hundreds of miles off shore into of the Atlantic Ocean?  Professor Bond concluded the only delivery method that made sense was that an ancient glacier had ground against limestone cliffs, scrapping off pebbles and holding them trapped in its grip.

When the glacier then calved icebergs into the Atlantic, these floated south until they melted, and then dropped their limestone pebbles into the abyss. With extraordinary perseverance, Professor Bond matched those pebbles with a specific limestone cliff along the Canadian coast. And when other rocks from the same drill cores were identified as coming from nearby areas to those cliffs, the professor's suspicions were confirmed, and with it a way to measure climate change. 

More pebbles in a given core layer indicated more melting ice bergs, which hinted at warmer temperatures and rising sea levels.  Fewer pebbles thus meant cooling seas, and more water locked up as ice in glaciers.  What was amazing to Professor Bond was that there have been eight cooling periods, now called Bond Events, since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. 

Bond Events come in roughly 1,500 year intervals, giving an almost respiratory aspect to our planet's atmosphere. And like a smoker who develops a cough, the deposits on the sea floor, as well as ice cores drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic have recorded the increasing impact of humans burning fossil fuels on our planet's health, from wood fires to coal to oil. But they also record something else, equally as ominous.

See, when the weather cooled for Bond Event Seven -about ten thousand years ago - it seems that humans responded with the invention of agriculture.

Bond Event Four occurred about six thousand years ago, and it seems humans responded with the domestication of sheep and the invention of bronze. 

And Bond Event Three, which came four thousand years ago, brought on the collapse of great empires in Asia and Egypt, and, of more interest to this story,  in an act of war at a crossing of a slow, meandering river about 80 miles northeast of Berlin, Germany.

The river is the somnambulist Tollense (above). For more than ten thousand years, beginning in its namesake lake, the Tollense  has followed a sinuous 58 mile course through forests and bogs, winding this way and twisting that, as it hesitantly approaches the Peene River, which winds another 30 miles to the Baltic Sea just below the island of Usedom. 

In the peat bogs lining its banks and the mud of it's bottom, the Tollense has preserved for the last 3,200 years a record of one day, an example of humanity and inhumanity, and a desperate battle for survival in the high summer of  about 1250 BC.

The invaders were from the forests and mountains to the south, and were members of the Unetice culture. They were armed with bronze daggers, spear heads and hand axes. They were adorned with engraved bronze bracelets and wooden shields, and their robes were held together with bronze pins. They came mounted on horses, which ate millet, which did not grow this far north. That suggests rations, which suggests an organized raiding party, perhaps what would one day be called an army.

The Frisian villages close to the Baltic coast were the likely target of the Unetice. The Frisians buried their dead in stone crypts, and prayed to the earth god Inguz, who drove his chariot across the sky as easily as he dived beneath the sea. The villagers enjoyed probably the best diet in Europe, with plenty of surf and turf. They fished in the lakes and the sea from long plank canoes and hunted the forests with curved bows. They raised cattle corralled behind their village palisades. But their weapons and tools were stone axes and baseball bat like wooden clubs. 

The bronze age was late in coming to the Frisian Baltic coast. Copper and tin had to be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit before they would form bronze, and that takes a lot of wood, and a knowledge of ceramics. A culture cannot afford that technology unless it has something to sell. And it was not until recently that these proto-Scandinavian tribes had organized and improved the production of their “metallum sudaticum”, amber. 

With each successive Bond Event, with each successive glacier pulse, the level of the Baltic Sea rose and then fell, Over and over great coastal pine forests grew, matured and were then drowned in the Baltic basin.  And with each storm tide more fossilized pine tree sap from those long dead forests washed up on the sandy Baltic beaches as amber.

Villagers gathered the amber in hand held nets, then carved it into beads, rings, bracelets or even Venus religious figures (above), and then traded them southward, up the "Amber Road" that reached all the way to Rome and Egypt.  On the return trip traders brought ceramics, bonze rings and gold pins. But few weapons.

By 3,400 years ago the Amber Road was a well established trade route, increasing the wealth of the villages on the namesake lake of the Tollense river, where Baltic amber could pause, be collected and worked, before moving on.  And the wealth of these artisans, fishermen, farmers and herders, 

attracted the interest of the Unetice forest peoples to the south and east. 

After a generation or two of escalating raids , about 4,125 years ago, shortly after the summer solstice, perhaps a thousand occupants of the scattered Frisian villages along the Tollense valley decided to gather their tools and their children and flee north, beyond the reach of the raiders. 

The logical place to rally the farmers was on the western bank of the Tollense, where a 10 foot wide causeway (above), had been built and maintained for over some 300 years,  about 7 miles south from where the Tollense' river joined with the Peene River. 

For a wooden causeway to have been maintained for so long (above), the western bank must have been a traditional gathering place, perhaps with religious connotations.  

It seems likely the Frisians waited for the indecisive or the cautious to join up. Perhaps the old were too slow.  But it seems the farmers and herders were slow in discovering the causeway  across the river and bogs represented a bottleneck in their line of retreat.  Because it was here the raiders with their bronze axes fell upon the famers and herders with their stone arrow heads and wooden clubs.

The first indication of the death along the Tollense saw daylight in 1996, when a human femur  surfaced. Jutting from the base of its ball joint was a stone arrow head (above).  Rarely does archeology find such conclusive proof of a murder. Early excavations uncovered more human bones and wooden clubs. 

When the raiders were seen approaching, the livestock, the elderly, the women and children were sent downstream, with a small escort of the best fighters. But the majority of the Frisian men stayed behind, sacrificed to delay the attackers at the causeway.   

In 2007 massive excavations were begun, and have continue up and down the valley.  By 2018, after the bones of at least 100 individuals had been uncovered, it was estimated at least 5,000 men were caught in this battle, mostly young men of draft age - between 20 and 40 years old. The estimated death toll ranges from 750 to a thousand souls. 

Most of the bones carry injuries inflicted shortly before death; broken faces, damaged skulls, bronze arrow heads embedded in arm and leg bones , even one penetrating a skull (above).  One fractured thigh bone was discovered displaying an injury still commonly suffered by horseback riders. 

A genetic sample of the bones uncovered so far show that none of the adults possessed the thymine nucleotide which would have allowed them to digest the lactose in cows' milk, something which only developed in European humans some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In addition, five horse skeletons have been found, with bronze bridle fittings, hinting at an officer class among the invaders.  

The fighting at the causeway was desperate, with bodies left along the riverbank, and no quarter given.  The Frisians stone daggers and wooden clubs killed some of the first attackers, but the heavier bronze swords allowed the Unetice warriors to maim from a greater distance, and for longer.  Gradually the invaders cut down the outnumbered defenders. 

As with all battles before firearms, once the shield wall was broken the slaughter truly began. Running for their lives, the Frisians were struck down from behind, or, if they turned to fight, they were overwhelmed. Many of the bones show the cutting slices of bronze swords - although no bronze swords or axes were left on the field. The bodies lay were they fell, later being stripped of any metal of value, as the pursuers murdered their way up the valley toward the Peene.

Using ground penetrating radar to locate likely dig sites (above),  a mass of human bones were found  downstream a mile north of the causeway site. It seems the bodies were left unclaimed and unattended until a storm washed them downstream to a bend in the Tollense, where the current buried and preserved about 140 bodies in the mud and peat (above), "... like an ancient memento left between the pages of a forgotten diary". 

The wounded and crippled Frisians left behind were dispatched, often with a quick and brutal club blow to the head (above). We do not know yet how far down the valley the slaughter continued.  Nor do we have any accounts of the battle. Written history of this region would not begin until the old high German runic inscriptions carved 800 years later. 

But we can safely assume the Uentice and Frisian story tellers (above) sang about the honor and courage of those who fought, and the sacrifices of the brave men who died along the ancient banks of the Tollense. And we know the battle of the Tollense Valley had a major impact on the lives of people in the region. But, why in God's name were these young men murdering each other? Was it amber or gold? Was it slavery or freedom? Was it fish or faith? 

We have known for a hundred years that shortly after this battle, that we did not know about until recently, the people of northern Europe no longer lived in scattered settlements. Within a generation they began building fortified settlements (above), living safely behind walls with their animals and commuting daily to and from their farms outside.  And it seems logical to believe this change was all because of a 3,000 year old battle which we were ignorant of until 25 years ago.

Marcel Proust (above) began his most famous work, with the following words; "I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive... in some inanimate object...until the day...when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice...We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. "

But Proust wrote something else, while confined and working for three years in what would become in 1922 his death bed (above). "Remembrance of things past", he wrote, "is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”  The same can be said of the warriors of the Tollense valley. 

The latest thinking by the archeologists digging along the banks of the Tollense is that the battle was not a war but a robbery on a large party of traders.  Academics will likely argue the issue for decades, But to call it a war or a robbery is a game of semantics. Three thousand years after the event such definitions have little meaning.

Whatever the reality along the Tollense 3,000 years ago, we can be certain the elders of the Uentice and the Frisians both sang of the honor and courage displayed by the participants. But their religion, their nations, their cultures, their languages, their  homes, their hatred and their love, all they murdered and died for has long since turned to dust. They no longer matter. They are all dead and gone. Until we dig them up.

Excavated, they live again,  because we choose to make them live. We choose to resurrect their bones and recreate their world in our minds and our hearts. And in doing so, we recreate our own world. As Proust put it, "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

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