At this early date, American commerce, as commerce everywhere, had already established its own peculiar ways. Governments everywhere might enact laws and regulations, but usually provided only the weakest of enforcement. Merchants and shipowners everywhere followed the legal channels if they seemed profitable; if not, or if greater profits could be found elsewhere, the laws be damned. Americans, as well as English or Dutch or French or any other nationality, evaded these laws, perjured testimony, forged documents, and made money. Commerce very simply went wherever merchants willed it to go – governments or laws or pirates to the contrary. It was Robert Morris, perhaps 18th-century’s most successful merchant, who stated the international merchant’s credo when he declared: “A merchant, as such, can be attached to no country particularly. His mere place of residence is, as merchant, perfectly accidental . . .”
New opportunities were beginning to open to Americans everywhere in the world, and they took full advantage of them, until nearly everything that had been lost by the separation from the British Empire was more than replaced by the gains made with France, Holland and the Orient. Traffic in the trade goods of these countries was not unknown even before the Revolution, but the freedom to do business with them was new. The French, in particular, had high hopes of capturing a large share of the American market, a fact which had been one of the goals used to persuade the French king to lend assistance to the American Revolution. The Dutch had equally high hopes, but they talked less and worked harder at the actual business of shipping goods back and forth across the Atlantic. And the American traders proved ambitious enough to go out and open the markets of the Orient for themselves.
The French began by breaking down their imperial monopolies in order to attract the trade of the United States. This policy had begun even before the war, for the French, more rationally than the British, well realized that if Americans wanted to trade with the French islands in the Caribbean, they would do so, no matter what the rules. As early as 1763, the French government had already legalized the importation of American products and the exportation of rum and molasses. A few years later, two ports were officially set aside in Santo Domingo and St. Lucia to serve as depots for foreign merchandise. And in 1778, America was granted most favored nation status and free ports were established in France itself, to which American merchants could bring and sell their products.
It was this direct trade between France and the United States that both sides hoped would reduce the British share of the American commerce. But the fact was that many Americans preferred English manufactures and continued to buy them despite artisans and politicians who denounced continued economic dependence on Britain. Also, English merchants provided credit and they knew the American market from long experience. French merchants often depended on ship captains to sell their goods, and most failed to establish the necessary American connections. Yet if they did supply a limited market in French brandies, silks, linens and other luxury goods which were much valued in America, this in no way interfered with the steady flow of goods between the United States and England. All in all, the French attempts at cornering the American market failed miserably, but the United States gained greatly as a result of the exchange, for France always bought far more from America than she sold.