Perfidious America

摘要

"I feel myself exceedingly distressed," George Washington wrote to the governor of Delaware on June 19th 1782. The situation, he later confided, had filled him with "the keenest anguish". It was "a great national concern", he told Congress, when asking it how he should proceed. Yet he "never had a doubt" about the propriety of his decision. Others certainly did: the whole Western world was in uproar. "Every humane feeling revolts," lamented Alexander Hamilton, soon to become America's first Secretary of the Treasury. John Adams, who was trying to persuade the Dutch to recognise the fledging republic, worried that Washington's actions would besmirch its reputation. The Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French troops who had helped defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, thought Washington's proposal would be regarded abroad as "an act of injustice and of barbarity". It was. "The public prints all over Europe resounded with the unhappy catastrophe," recalled the Baron von Grimm, a German man of letters. He had just been to the Abdir theatre in Paris to see a play depicting Washington wrestling with his conscience. "The first question asked of all vessels that arrived from any port in North America," von Grimm claimed, was whether Washington had carried out his threat.