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How the U.S. forged alliances to secure independence [1]
['Charles Hoskinson']
Date: 2025-05-22 19:01:32+00:00
When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, the American Revolution was already underway. Patriots had faced off against British troops in the battles of Lexington and Concord, and in the coming months Britain would bar all foreign trade with the colonies.
Delegates from the 13 colonies knew they needed friends in other countries. So in the year before the Declaration of Independence, the Congress began reaching out to foreign nations.
The Second Continental Congress “would go on to preside over the Revolutionary War, establish critical international alliances, and maintain unity among the 13 Colonies as America secured its independence and ultimately emerged as a new Nation,” President Trump said May 10, commemorating 250 years since the Congress first convened.
In an early move, the Congress sent a last-ditch peace overture that Britain refused. In November 1775, it formed the Committee of Secret Correspondence, America’s first diplomatic agency, to communicate with sympathizers in Britain and friends elsewhere, notably in France and Spain, and to secure money and arms for the war effort.
The secret committee, led by Benjamin Franklin, enlisted Arthur Lee, a lawyer in London and the brother of two Virginia delegates, to covertly communicate with American sympathizers in Britain.
The Connecticut merchant Silas Deane was dispatched to France to seek military assistance in the form of 100 light cannons and enough supplies to equip 25,000 men. The committee instructed Deane to convey to the French that should the colonies “come to a total separation from Great Britain, France would be looked upon as the power, whose friendship it would be fittest for us to obtain and cultivate.” France began sending clandestine shipments of gunpowder and other supplies to the colonies.
America’s first diplomat
Franklin assumed many foreign policy responsibilities himself. Considered America’s first diplomat, he had already spent years representing various colonies in London, seeking to peacefully redefine their relationship with Britain.
Using his fame and connections in Europe, Franklin coordinated diplomatic efforts that proved vital to America’s success. “Franklin combined a new type of public diplomacy with the old,” writes Robert Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state, in America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. “He personalized his representation of America in ways that appealed to French opinion, even to its sense of style.”
In February 1778, France signed a Treaty of Alliance and began to formally provide support for the war against Britain. After the treaty, Franklin assumed the role of minister to France, becoming the first accredited U.S. diplomat.
Spain would also later declare war against the British and provide crucial financial support to the colonies for the war effort.
Tom Hand, author of An American Triumph: America’s Founding Era Through the Lives of Ben Franklin, George Washington and John Adams, says Spain’s entering the war stretched British war fighting capacity beyond the breaking point, turning a regional war into a costly global conflict.
Near the end of the war, France sent troops and Navy ships, critical aid that helped the Americans secure Britain’s surrender at the Battle of Yorktown. In 1783, a Franklin-led delegation negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.
“Without France we would have been unable to sustain our soldiers in the field,” Hand says.
Read more about what events leading up to America’s independence on July 4, 1776, say about Americans today.
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