NO GUNS, NO GLORY
If it hadn’t been for guns and ammunition purchased through clandestine channels in Europe and the West Indies, the American Revolution would have failed. As early as October 1774, in reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Britain banned the importation of weapons to the American colonies. A brisk contraband trade immediately sprang up, centered on the Dutch-controlled island of St. Eustatius in the Caribbean. General Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of British forces in North America, warned the prime minister, Lord North, that the colonists, in addition, were “sending to Europe for all kinds of Military Stores.”
In New England, an independence movement had gradually won sympathy, especially among merchants who had been buffeted for a decade by ever-harsher British trade restrictions and taxes. Men who had for decades built legitimate commercial networks doing business all over the world now became arms merchants, channeling their expertise into what the British condemned as smuggling.
In 1774, after Parliament closed the port of Boston in retaliation for the Tea Party, Connecticut’s General Assembly commissioned two new independent companies of militia, each recruited, outfitted, and bankrolled by wealthy ship owners. Jonathan Trumbull, the royal governor and a leading importer, had greater allegiance to his business than to the king who had appointed him: He anonymously drafted resolutions ordering all towns to double their arsenals of powder, balls, and flint. Connecticut also mustered six new regiments of militia, more than 6,000 men in a colony of 100,000 citizens. The colony’s assembly, dominated by merchants, dispatched fast ships to the Caribbean to buy weapons and gunpowder and ordered all militia to train for 12 days, double the normal term of service, paying them six shillings a day, twice the wages of a skilled artisan.
In 1775 Franklin opened secret talks with British, Dutch, and French arms dealers.
In the spring of 1775, when he returned from London after a decade as lobbyist for Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin was appointed a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and chairman of Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety. Franklin wrote to a friend in Britain’s Parliament of finding “the commencement of a civil war with all ranks of people in arms, disciplining themselves morning and evening.” Twice in earlier colonial wars with France, Franklin had armed and organized the defense of the Quaker colony against France and its allies. Franklin well knew that no cannons were produced in Pennsylvania. He immediately opened secret negotiations with British, Dutch, and French merchants for shipments of munitions through their colonies in the Caribbean.
