Silas Deane had been instrumental in bringing de Grasse’s fleet to America, but he immediately followed that up with an action that ensured that his country would never honor him. In March, 1781, Deane had offered his services to Lord North, and began writing letters from London urging Americans to end the war and stop insisting on independence. His letters were printed in New York just as the nation was celebrating Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. By 1783 Deane had moved on to Belgium, where he was living in cheap hotels and avoiding any face from home.
Thomas Paine, too, had gone to Europe in 1781 to secure aid from the French court. He returned with a gift for America of 2,500,000 silver livres but reaped nothing from his achievement. After Yorktown, he had to remind George Washington that “the country which ought to have been a home has scarcely afforded me an asylum.” Washington contacted Robert Morris, America’s superintendent of finance, and arranged for Paine secretly to be paid $800 a year for his future writings.
Paine had planned to write the history of the American Revolution as Benjamin Franklin had once urged him to do, but when the peace treaty was signed, his clandestine salary ended. He wrote one final Crisis: “The times that tried men’s souls are over – and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” Over the following months, General Washington continued to solicit money for Paine, but a bill in the Virginia legislature that would have awarded him a grant of land lost on its third try. The Treaty of Paris was a year old before the state of Pennsylvania voted Paine a generous payment for his past services.