Browsing: Diary of John Adams, Volume 4

8. A mistake for Westfield. This “Native of Massachusetts Bay,” as Julian P. Boyd has remarked in the most searching account yet written of Bancroft's character and fantastic career, “was destined to become one of the most remarkable spies of all time, achieving the astonishing feat of serving simultaneously as an intelligence agent for two nations at war while serving himself first of all, and mastering the art of duplicity so consummately as to conceal his treasons from some of the most astute men of his time and from historians for six decades after his death.... George Bancroft in 1866 made the first, briefest, and still valid appraisal of Edward Bancroft as a double spy. In 1889 Francis Wharton devoted twenty pages to refuting what he considered an aspersion, but the very next year Stevens' Facsimiles began to appear, making it certain that both George III and Arthur Lee—the two contemporaries who trusted Bancroft least—were wrong only in underestimating the extent of Bancroft's perfidy” (Julian P. Boyd, “Silas Deane: Death by a Kindly Teacher of Treason?,” WMQ , 3d ser., 16:165–187, 319–342, 515–550 [April, July, Oct. 1959], cited at p. 176 and note). JA considered Bancroft avaricious and immoral, and he disliked and distrusted him as a satellite of Franklin and a collaborator of Deane, but he clearly never suspected him of treason—even though he knew spying went on in the household of the American Commissioners at Passy (see his Autobiography under 27 April, below). It was Arthur Lee rather than JA who vetoed a proposal that Bancroft be sent on a confidential errand to England early in 1779. Addressing his fellow commissioners on this subject from Chaillot, 7 Feb. 1779, Lee said among other things: “The notorious character of Dr. Bancroft as a Stockjobber is perfectly known to you.... His living in open defiance of decency and religion you are no strangers to. ... You know also that he is the creature and Agent of ... Mr. Deane. ... I have farther to inform you as one of your Colleagues, that I have evidence in my possession, which makes me consider Dr. Bancroft as a Criminal with regard to the United States, and that I shall have him charg'd as such, whenever he goes within their jurisdiction” (PPAmP: Franklin Papers). One may perhaps calculate the discount his colleagues regularly placed on Arthur Lee's allegations against individuals by the fact that neither Franklin nor JA took Lee's charge of treason seriously enough to do anything about it. To be sure, JA told Marbois on the voyage home to Boston in the summer of 1779 that Bancroft was too “irregular and excentric a Character” to be trusted (Diary, 2 July 1779). But soon after his return to Paris the following year he was willing to send dispatches by Bancroft's hand to Nantes on their way to America (JA to Bancroft, 26 Feb. 1780, LbC, Adams Papers); in 1782 he conversed freely with him about peace terms; and three years later, when minister in London where he saw Bancroft from time to time, he raised no objection to Jefferson's proposal (which did not work out) that Bancroft be employed by them as agent to Algiers (JA to Jefferson, 18 Aug. 1785, LbC, Adams Papers, printed in Jefferson, Papers, ed. Boyd, 8:400). In short JA never dreamt of Bancroft's true character.

That character was not yet known when CFA edited JA's Works in the 1850's. But among the Adams Papers are transcripts of two letters written by Bancroft to Lord North, London, 8 and 12 Aug. 1783, pressing in the name of “Justice and Humanity” for payment of the arrears in both Bancroft's salary as a spy in France (“£250 for the quarter of my allowance up to Midsummer last”) and his “original permanent pension” of £500 agreed upon in Feb. 1777 before he went to France as a British spy. These letters add a few details to the now famous memorial that Bancroft addressed to Foreign Secretary Carmarthen in 1784 and are alluded to in that paper (which is printed from the original in the Public Record Office, F.O. 4, vol. 3, by Samuel F. Bemis as an appendix to his article “British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” AHR , 29:474–495 [April 1924]). The transcripts are in a hand (not identified) and on paper of the mid–19th century and were apparently copied from the originals; but the editors do not currently know where the originals are or how the transcripts came into the Adams Papers.