MAY 14, 2015

INTRODUCTION: A PERSONAL PERSEPCTIVE

Obviously, I am a fan of James Swan,

as expressed by the lengthy, three parts of my Blog devoted to him. He lived an incredibly adventuresome life in two countries, the United States and France, each involved during his tenure in separate but intertwined revolutions. I hope that I haven’t bored you, but you don’t face a final exam and can skim if you choose. However, the random encounters from historical knowledge is what fascinates me most about history and, I hope, you as well. The variety of Swan’s life has promoted me to research him so exhaustively and be so verbose in these posts. Encountering personages familiar to Swan continues to surprise me in their current relevance. For example, Swan’s lifelong pal, General Henry Knox,

basically unknown to me before I encountered Swan, is the source of the name for the United States gold depository Fort Knox and, like Swan is another “Dead White Man” interesting to know.

For example, in Part Two of this Swan series, I mentioned passingly a person named Joel Barlow, who like Swan, was an American living in Paris during its revolutionary period. My wife and I were taking a walk yesterday in a hilly area of Washington. D.C. located next to Georgetown called Kalorama, where many of the foreign diplomatic residencies are located. Why this area is called “Kalorama” has been a puzzle to us, derived as it is from the Greek and means “Good Vista,” although it does enjoy a pleasant elevation. We came across a non-functioning, decorative old fire alarm of a type that dot the area, which are now painted in strong colors with gilt trim. Typically, they bear, historical facts pertinent to the vicinity where they stand. The first such fire alarm we saw was dedicated to Joel Barlow,

and states, among other things, that he moved to Washington at the urging of Thomas Jefferson. Significantly, he named his house “Kalorama” located in the area of the fire stand now bearing that name. Knowing something about Joel Barlow and learning how “Kalorama” became “Kalorama” gave an added kick to our walk.

I would greatly appreciate knowing what thoughts or questions you might have on Swan or anything else I post/

SWAN’S WAY TO THE END

Royal France’s generous financial and military aid to the American colonials in their War of Independence played a major role in enabling the colonials to defeat their English master. Indeed, many historians believe that without France’s financial and military aid, the colonial Patriots would not have won its revolt against England. In aiding the colonials, Royal France was motivated primarily, if not entirely, by its desire to harm and humiliate England, its ancient archenemy and not to support the colonials’ aspirations of freedom from English tyranny.  This is not true, however, in the case of individual Frenchmen, such as Lafayette and Rochambeau who fought alongside the colonial Patriots and whose sympathies with the Patriots’ cause of liberty were paramount to their participation.

The monetary cost to France in supporting the American War of Independence had dire consequences for the Ancien Regime, which came on top of the cost it had incurred in the Seven Years’ War with England (incorporating the part of that war fought on the American continent, called the French and Indian War, in which France lost its American colonies). Not only did its involvement in both those wars severely cripple Louis XVI’s ability to reestablish economic stability in the last years of his regime’s existence, the American war against England  intoxicated all levels of French society with the scent of republicanism; one for example, Count Mirabeau, a French nobleman who was an early leader of Revolutionary France and another, Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orleans,

who became Philippe Equalite and voted with the new formed French National Assembly for the beheading of his cousin Louis XVI. Louis Philippe was ultimately guillotined as well. “It is beyond doubt,” Lafayette wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “that the principles of the United States opened the gates of the Bastille,” the Royal prison in Paris destroyed in 1789 by a revolutionary mob, which was the first event that galvanized the commencement of the French Revolution in earnest. Equally unfortunate for the Ancien Regime and subsequent French governments, its British enemy wasn’t adversely affected for any long period of time after the loss of its non-Canadian American colonies. Its increasing mastery of the seas continued unabated during the balance of the 18^th Century well into the first quarter of the 20^th Century.

 

New France needed repayment of the American debt as badly as did its Royal predecessor. Due to the United States’ inability to raise revenues until 1790 under the newly adopted Constitution, the new Nation stopped payments of interest on its loan to France in 1785; it also defaulted on principal payments of the French debt in 1787. The US resumed payment on its French debt obligations in 1790, but this was too late to benefit Royal France, which by then was a failed financial state. Ironically, it was Revolutionary France through the efforts of James Swan that ultimately was repaid in 1795 of the monies so imprudently lent by Royal France in the 1770’s to aid the American war effort and thereby cripple England. In 1795 Swan personally assumed the outstanding amount of the United States debt to France at a somewhat higher interest than on the original US debt to France, and then resold the debt largely in the US at a profit. One can speculate that had the United States service its debt obligations to Royal France on a timely basis before 1789, that country probably would not have avoided revolution, but may have been spared the financial desperation of the 1787-1791 period and have accomplished revolution without the horrific Reign of Terror

 

and the mindless destruction of everything the Revolutionary satraps didn’t favor. It is interesting to note that the United States was also indebted to Dutch investors, but was more assiduous in paying off those debts, as it cannily and correctly believed that the Dutch would be (and were) a more likely source of new loans than France during the post-war era.

 

After Swan returned to the United States in 1797, it is not clear exactly where he spent most of his time and in what pursuits he was engaged. However, he still maintained a good reputation in some quarters of consequence, including Robert Livingston

who brokered the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleonic France. Livingston was a signer of the Declaration of Independence of which he was a principal author and a direct descendant of the first Robert Livingston to arrive in American in 1623 where he received a land grant from Charles II

and became the Lord of the Manor of some 400,000 acres along the Hudson River in New York. Livingston the Signer was also an inventor who joined and sponsored Robert Fulton on the invention of the steamboat. In Charles A. Ceramic’s book, “Jefferson’s Great Gamble”, the following appears:

 

“In the back of (Livingston’s) mind was the one subject far removed from Louisiana that could bring a smile to his lips-the thought of returning home (from Paris) in the fall of 1803 to make a run for the U.S. vice presidency. His friend James Swan, a very active foreign trader and speculator who had major cash claims against France, was still talking being his campaign manager, backed by a group of other claimants who would all show their gratitude to Livingston if he succeeded in getting France to pay their claims.”

 

Swan returned to Europe about 1800 and spent time in Hamburg, Germany doing exactly what, I don’t know. However, in 1808, Swan was sent to debtor’s prison, St. Pelagie,

in Paris by reason of a debt claimed to be owing to his former business acquaintance, Luppert. There, Swan spent the next 22 years of his life. Debtor’s prison as an institution for deadbeats had been abolished in 1793 by the Revolutionary Government. However, in 1807, France passed a new law reestablishing incarceration for unpaid debts incurred by foreigner not domiciled in France (which Swan was not at that time), if they lacked funds within France to cover the money owed. For years, Swan disputed the legality of his imprisonment on the basis that the law was not retroactive to an unpaid debt existing before 1807. However, in 1809, the Supreme Court of France confirmed the law’s application to Swan. He brought several other actions to challenge the unlawfulness of his continued imprisonment, one in 1816 and another in 1817 but all were rejected.

Most writers on Swan state that the 22 years spent in debtor’s prison resulted from the one contested, but relatively modest indebtedness to Lubbert. These sources claim that Swan could have paid this debt at any time from his personal “fortune” and be released but that he refused to do as a “point of honor.” If his prison accommodations were indeed simple as no responsible authority on Swan seriously contests, why would this man who had spent most of his adult life in luxurious circumstances and footloose “buccaneering” have resisted freedom by reason of pride alone. Honor might have been a cause for spending a few years in prison. But even if his accommodations at St. Pelagie were truly comfortable, was this deprivation of liberty on a point of honor to have been acceptable for a score and two years to person like Swan unless he were deranged, a condition never claimed for him?  In 1817, when Swan was petitioning for his release from St. Pelagie, a French newspaper claimed that he was very rich and could pay for his release at any time. Swan himself wrote a letter to the paper wherein he claimed that the 700,000 francs demanded of him by Lubbert would if paid impoverish his “large family”. Whether true or not, this claim was verifiable.

I have had the opportunity to read a series of letters from Swan to Thomas Aspinwall, a fellow Bostonian, written from St. Pelagie and spanning from 1818 to 1830, in the MFA archives.  (FN: the collection of letters was given to the MFA by a woman named Mrs. Howard Parker who most likely was a daughter of Elizabeth Howard Bartol who gave the Swan furniture and Gilbert Stuart portraits to the MFA in the 1930’s.) The constant thread of those letters is Swan’s fervent and unrelenting application to Aspinwall for loans of money in various sums, offering one form of collateral or another, but principally his large real estate holdings, i.e., Swan Island off the Maine coast,

his enormous real estate holdings in what is now West Virginia and maybe even Pennsylvania. The first letter in the MFA archives dated April 25, 1818, ten years after his incarceration, Swan refers even to earlier letters to Aspinwall during his imprisonment also asking for loans. All the letters strongly suggest that Swan was financially strapped and desperate for money. Incidentally, there are no indications that Aspinwall ever succumbed to lending Swan the money he solicited. The Small’s book records that Swan did mortgage some portion of his Maine islands to a man called Martin O’Malley for “X” in 1819.  It is not determinable whether this was a real transaction or false one with a crony to protect Swan from actually losing the property to real creditors.

I believe that even were Swan’s debt to Lubbert small enough to be paid by him at any time, there most likely was an avalanche of financial problems facing Swan on both sides of the Atlantic as well as grown children who beset by their father’s creditors were not especially keen for his return to Boston. According to Smalls, “repeated attempts were made to get at (Swan’s) estates in Boston, as having been purchased with creditors’ funds.” This must have been disagreeable at best for the Swan progeny, particularly his three daughters who at that time were married to proper Bostonians.

In Europe, there were the sub-agents with whom Swan dealt in his supply business that also might not have received full payment by Swan. Both in Europe and the United States, there were probably a small army of co-investors in Swan’s West Virginia “empire” who had lost the lands they believed to have owned or found that their purchases were 100,000’s of acres smaller than described to them or forfeited to governmental authorities for failure to pay real estate taxes.

Swan very well could have been under the threat of being placed into other debtor’s prisons not quite so agreeable as St. Pelagie were he released from that incarceration. Many surprising inmates populated debtor’s prisons in 18th Century America, including Robert Morris,

one of the richest men in American prior to the Revolution and who on his own financed a large part of the colonial war effort to his lasting honor. However, he, like Swan, got involved in major acquisitions of West Virginia land, totaling some 8,000,000 acres, and also was placed in debtor’s prison from 1788-1801 for defaulting on mortgages payments.

Another indictment of Swan’s dire financial straits is that when he died in 1831, his heirs and creditors anticipated that his estate would be substantial. They were disconcerted to find that it was insolvent. There is or was extant an inventory of Swan’s estate but I have not been able to locate more than a summary of the Estate’s assets and debts.

In a letter dated July 6, 1818, Swan tells Aspinwall that he would be released from prison (“his suffering”) on or about August 8 of that year for the apparent reason that he was recognized as having been Lubbert’s creditor not his debtor. In a subsequent letter of August 17, 1818, he mentions “my time of liberty approaches.” However, in a letter dated October 1, 1818, Swan reports that he had not yet been liberated. It is only in 1830 that he tells Aspinwall that his creditor had died and by reason of that event would attain his freedom. Most sources on Swan state that his release occurred by reason of a general amnesty offered to imprisoned debtors in the course of the so-called July Revolution of 1830 overthrowing Charles X, Louis XVI’s last and youngest brother. For whatever reason, his Swan’s release did actually occur in that year.

The cost of Swan’s keep at St. Pelagie under French law was to be borne by the creditor who had him imprisoned which was set at the rate of twenty francs a month, totaling more than 5,000 francs for the 22-year period of Swan’s imprisonment. It would appear that this went for naught as Swan’s alleged debt to him was never paid inasmuch as Lubbert had expired prior to receiving repayment or Swan was released of his obligation or this death or by reason of a general amnesty in 1830. Lubbert, probably a Frenchman, according to John Goldworth Alger had been ruined financially by Napoleon’s continental blockage against England. This serves a major reason why he so fiercely pursued Swan’s indebtedness to him. Totally irrelevant but nonetheless interesting is Alger’s note that (1) a relative of Lubbet’s was the judge who read Louis XVI’s death sentence and (2) Lubbert’s son who was a composer in France went to Egypt after 1830, converted to Islam and became the entertainment master for Mehmet Ali and Abbas Pasha, the rulers of Egypt.

At the end of his life, Swan is generally described as having a bald head, dressed in long dressing gowns, sported an unfashionably long beard and resembling the elderly Benjamin Franklin. This image seems very divergent from the natty and prettified gentlemen depicted in the Gilbert Stuart’s portrait. After his release, Swan went to see his long time friend, Lafayette at the Hotel de Ville in Paris and some sources report that upon mounting the building’s steps he suffered a heart attack and dramatically died on at Lafayette’s feet. Others sources say that he died as he was voluntarily returning to his prison after three days of freedom. John Goldworth Alger cites an article, possibly Swan’s obituary, in the Angeline Seating in 1831, a contemporary prestigious German periodical, as stating that Swan died “under circumstances which could not be decently mentioned”, suggesting a death in flagrant delicto along the lines of a Governor of New York State in the second half of the 20^th Century. In any event, his date of death is generally reported as occurring on March 18, 1831.

Swan’s prison accommodations at St. Pelagie are described either as humble, or modestly comfortable with access to a garden. It is also claimed in several texts that Swan rented a grand apartment across the road from St. Pelagie, fitted up at great expense to entertain his friends and acquaintances. The dining table at the apartment was set for all of Swan’s guests and had one additional place setting that never occupied as he was confined at St. Pelagie. The same sources report that Swan kept a carriage to carry his guests to and from the apartment to enjoy entertainments sponsored by their incarcerated and thereby absent host. I think these tales can be taken as hyperbole. Smalls states that Mrs. Swan paid the rent of that apartment. However, in contradiction, other sources state that Swan periodically transferred funds to his wife for her support as her wealth had been much diminished by him. Mrs. Swan was likely to have been astute enough to keep intact some of her inheritance.  In point of fact, she was the only female partner (albeit via a trust) in Mount Vernon Proprietors, the exclusive and savvy group of Bostonians that developed Beacon Hill in Boston,

an area that remains one of the smartest addresses in the United States. Given their estrangement, it is unlikely that she helped Swan out and even one text reports them as being divorced.

Aside from the unlikeliness of his keeping a separate apartment outside of St. Pelagie, Alger reports Swan was said to have a passion for blackberries and that his body rubbed with their juices before going to bed was stained purple. We do know that Napoleon rarely bathed but preferred to have cologne sponged on his body every morning. Given the probable scarcity of frequent bathing in prison, this could have been the prisoner’s equivalent to a cologne rubdown, however odd it might now seem. Alger writes also that Swan had four mistresses during his time in prison, two of whom were sisters and that he fathered a child with one of the sisters. All this is possible but really impossible to establish with any degree of certitude. What is clear, however, about Swan is that did write some remarkable and scholarly documents before and during his 22 years of incarceration.  In 1790, he wrote a respected treatise on the creation of major trade between the United States and France. It has been described as dealing with many topics–

“and nothing is too trifling to be cited in support of his object. One page he eulogizes spermaceti candles; on another he relates the foolish objections made in France to the introduction of labor-saving machines. He dwells with wonder on the fact that in France salted meats are practically prohibited while in the US they are eaten twice a day and amongst us the men are as healthy and robust as anywhere”.

How he assembled the data from a prison boggles the mind.

Swan’s will dated and signed in Paris on September 9, 1824 does cast light on his family connections. First, it makes several specific bequests, including one to his sister Margaret for whom he promised his father to supply a dowry on her marriage to one David Swan. This might indicate that Swan wasn’t orphaned at the time he left Scotland in 1765 and perhaps had contact with his father while he was in Boston. Also, inasmuch as the bequest references Swan’s pledge to his father to provide a dowry for his sister, it can be read to shed light on his father’s financial situation in his not being able to make the dowry himself. Another bequest is to his brother, David Cooper (?) who he commends for helping him in his various ventures in Europe. Possibly, he or the party that actually wrote or transcribed Swan’s will mixed up the name David Swan as the one marrying his sister with David Cooper as being his brother.  A third bequest is to his son, James Keadie Swan, that recites Swan’s enormous disappointment as a father and states that his son was a wastrel Swan leaves nothing to his wife but makes her an executor of his estate. The will states that Swan was a resident of Dorchester, Massachusetts and signed the will in the presence amongst others of Sam Brown, a professor of Medicine at Transylvania University, U.S. and John Gray of Boston. The will was found in his Dorchester house. It was entered into the Will Book No # 1, Kanawha County, Virginal, presumably because of his real estate interests.

Mrs. Swan never visited Swan in Paris during his imprisonment or are there records of their communication during that period. There is reason to believe that neither of them had much affection for each other at that stage of their lives. John Goldworth Alger relates that “Hepsy” once threw a knife at her husband. He “coolly picked it up, returned it to her with bow and walked out of the room.” Whether or not apocryphal, this story gives some indication of Swan’s non-commercial character. Alger adds that Swan, his wife and his son, according to someone named Hess “were alike unscrupulous”. Some writers on Swan suggested that one of the reasons in stayed jailed in Paris was to avoid living with his wife in Massachusetts.

A blog of the “The Forest Hills Educational Trust”, which is related to the cemetery in which Mrs. Swan is now buried, dated November 15, 2009, gives some indication of her character: “(She) enjoyed the rapt attention of many, she was also said to be a pendant to no one man in particular…”.In this regard, buried originally in the garden at the Swan house in Dorchester was General Henry Jackson

who was Mrs. Swan’s companion and financial advisor during her husband’s long absence. Indeed, he lived with her during that much of that period. Possibly, they had been lovers. This is somewhat discounted by Jackson’s enormous girth and that he was a misogamist except for his affection for Mrs. Swan. One acquaintance jibed that the General by reason of his large belly was unable to see fish on his plate, suggesting that he was able to bring food to his mouth by long and frequent familiarity with the process of eating. However, 18^th Century people at all levels of society were more than sturdy and determined as well as less fastidious than present day counterparts and thereby able to overlook a number of obstacles that might currently seem insurmountable. In any event, when Mrs. Swan died, she was buried also in the Dorchester garden, but afterward both she and the General were reburied together along with some of her descendants in the Forest Hill cemetery when Dorchester became a part of the city of Boston.

 

SWAN’ FURNITURE AND THIERRY VILLE D’AVRAY

The suite of furniture at the MFA, was made by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sene upon an order from Marc-Antoine Thierry de Ville d’Avray.

 

The appellation “de Ville D’Avray” was added when Thierry, long a trusted valet to Louis XVI since 1774 was made a Baron, the only one to bear that title in France at the time of the Revolution. As the “premier valet de chamber” to the king, Thierry occupied an important and intimate position of trust to Louis, as his duties truly were essential to the king’s private existence and affairs. For example, Thierry would escort the King to the Queen’s bedroom through the back halls of Versailles, holding a candelabra to light the way. He even carried the King’s petty cash. In July 1792 during the early Revolutionary period, the Girondins, the group that ran the country at that time communicated with the King through Thierry.

Thierry accumulated substantial monies during his time at court that enabled him to purchase a 68-acre property in Ville d’Avray (from which his title was derived), destroy its existing castle and in 1787 replace it with a charming neo-classical house that still exists.

Presumably, Thierry as the King’s valet was able to offer at price an ear to his Majesty. Fortune continued to favor Thierry when in 1788 he was made Administrator of the Garde-Meuble that entitled him to the use of a spacious apartment in the building for himself and his family. He ordered furniture for the apartment from the firms that produced Royal furniture and that was paid for from Government funds. The set that exists in the MFA was upholstered in leftover fabric that was originally made exclusively for Louis XVI’s gaming room at Fontainebleau. Two furniture labels exist, one for a bed and another for an armchair in the suite which permitted tracing of extant records at the Garde Meuble that record the suite’s use to furnish Thierry’s bedroom. A note in the Bulletin of the MFA (XXXVIII) states that the apartment is still more or less intact and that—

“According to legend, one of these rooms was used byMarie Antoinette on her visits to Paris but unfortunately the authority for this tradition dates back only to a late nineteenth-century Baedeker”.

Possibly that is where she might have met Count Axel Fersen, her long time friend and perhaps lover who  financed the cost of the Royal family’s abortive escape that was interrupted in the town of Varennes.

The Royals had no access to pocket money after being brought to Paris in 1790. Fersen did seek reimbursement for this ‘advance” from the reestablished Bourbon dynasty in the early 1800’s, but I don’t believe he was successful in gaining repayment.

On the 13^th of July 1789, a mob broke into the Garde Meuble and took antiquated weapons stored there which they used in the attack upon the Bastille on the 14^th of July, which date is generally considered to be the beginning of the Revolution. A pamphlet circulated in 1790 accuses Thierry of living in “Asiatic sumptuousness” at the Garde Meuble, in stark contrast to the dire conditions of ordinary Frenchmen. Although Thierry was not charged with corruption or any other impropriety, he was nevertheless arrested shortly after the King was “dethroned”, presumably being tainted by his proximity alone to the King. He spent two years in the Prison de l’Abbaye

without having been tried. This was one of the venues for the vicious and never really fully understood massacres in September 1792 of prisoners. The prisoners were told they would be freed and their cells were unlocked. They ran to the main gate in the courtyard of the jail that to their horror was locked shut. A waiting mob of charged-up, riff raff chased the prisoners against the gate and butchered them with knives, spears and any other weapons that could be used to kill other humans. When Thierry Ville d’Avray was about to be murdered, he cried out “Long live the King.” The September massacres in Paris led to the creation of the words: Septembrists, a noun for the murderers of September 1792; Septembriser, a verb for massacre; and, Septembrisade, a massacre.

Like Thiery, none of the victims of the Septembrists had been tried or otherwise found guilty of any offense, or were they all noble or rich or other than simply innocent. Some were servants at the Tuileries and others were members of the Swiss Guard employed to protect the embattled Royal family. Also killed were some 30 children who were in prison for no known reason. The cowardly  Septembrists recorded that the children were surprisingly the hardest to kill.

By virtue of the exacting homage paid to maintaining its legal pronouncements by the otherwise lawless Committee of Public Safety, Thierry’s widow was able to obtain an official death certificate that her husband was murdered at the Prison de l’Abbaye. With this document she was able to vouchsafe all of her husband’s properties other than the furnishings of the Garde Meuble apartment (which I presume must have been viewed in the nature of “office furniture” and therefore Royal and not personal to Thierry). The rule at stake promulgated by the Revolutionary Government was that the properties of a noble would not be confiscated if he or she remained in France rather than emigrated (which of course didn’t insure the maintenance of their heads). This enabled Madame Ville d’Avray with her certificate confirming her husband’s murder within France to live with her children unmolested and in more than comfort throughout the Revolutionary period and thereafter, probably living at the lovely villa in Valle d’Avray.

Thierry’s apartment at the Garde Meuble according to Howard Rice in the Bulletin of the MFA states was sealed with its contents in 1790’s. How Swan actually obtained the bedroom suite of furniture is not presently known. as there is no record of its being auctioned and, most probably, was the result of a private deal that Swan made with the revolutionary government as a bartered payment

Albeit the Thierry/Swan group of furnishings at the MFA collection is splendid, it is certainly finite in quantity and couldn’t and doesn’t represent all of the furniture and decorations brought from France to furnish the Swans’ spacious house in Dorchester, including pieces that various sources allege came from the Tuileries Palace where the Royal Family was taken to live after being evacuated from Versailles, as well as from Thierry Ville d” Avray apartment. There clearly were other pieces of 18^th Century French origin that didn’t reach the MFA. The Swan’s three daughters, Mrs. William Sullivan, Mrs. John Howard and Mrs. John Sargent, received furniture from the Dorchester house. The furniture that went to Mrs. Howard remained in family hands and constitutes the major portion of what was given to the MFA in the 1920’s by her granddaughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Howard Bartol, a painter, along with three Gilbert Stuart portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Swan as well as one of Mrs. Howard, all commissioned by Mrs. Swan. Mrs. Sullivan’s share was divided among her heirs and may still remain in the hands of some of them. However, the line of the furniture’s descent is no longer clear and those pieces have merged into the general legacy of fine 18^th Century French furniture lacking a provenance. Mrs. Sargent’s portion was sold at auction in 1867. Some Swan pieces undoubtedly will emerge from time to time but sadly most of those pieces are likely to have lost any clear Swan pedigree.

A copy of a letter dated April 17, 1938 written to Howard Rice by Ogden Codman, an interior and landscape designer of impeccable taste and Massachusetts lineage (and co-author of a garden book with Edith Wharton), relates that several pieces of Swan furniture derived from Swan descendants were bought by an architect, James Gregerson, who was building a new house on Beacon Street (now a club) for Mrs. Charles Amory (who, incidentally, was the great granddaughter of John Singleton Copley). Gregerson may have bought these items at the Sargent auction. Mrs. Amory was moving from a larger house on Mount Vernon Street, also on Beacon Hill, that she sold before the new one was completed. All of the furniture from the Mount Vernon Street house along with the new “Swan” purchases referred to in Codman’s letter were placed in public storage while awaiting her move. Sadly, the storage facility suffered a devastating fire in which all of Mrs. Amory’s stored possessions were incinerated. Codman states that the Swan furniture destroyed in that fire included a chair, a possible mate to the excellent pier table at the MFA, a “splendid set of armchairs and a sofa”.  Mrs. Amory, Codman, adds–

“…went to Paris, where she spent much time at the Hotel

Drouot (an auction gallery now a part of Christie’s) buying beautiful furniture and hangings, some from the Palace of the Tuileries, which was sacked by the communists (not the Soviet variety but 19^th Century Frenchmen in revolt against one regime or another), and it happened to be a time when priceless things were going cheap”.

Swan’s son, Robert, who was an alcoholic and died young, also received furniture from the Dorchester house. He had married a daughter of General Henry Knox, and the furniture inherited from his mother went to fill the very beautiful Federal-style Knox mansion, Montplasier, in Thomaston, Maine. It remained there after he died and his widow remarried. The Knox family fell on hard times and was forced to sell Montplasier and its contents in the 19^th Century. General Knox had also bought furniture directly from Swan in the 1790’s that arrived from France and was used to furnish the Thomaston house along with what young Swan installed after his marriage to Knox’ daughter. That Swan furniture probably remains is extant, but is likely lacking a clear Swan chain of ownership. A large, mirror fronted bookcase with gothic trefoil mullions now at Montplasier enjoys the legend given by Henry Knox’s grandson, Henry Knox Thatcher, to a Knox biographer that this bookcase once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Apparently, this is common story attached to many period pieces on the Maine coast, whether of French origin or not.

The archives of the MFA have a few letters and a memorandum dating from 1942 regarding 5 gilded items of furniture, a canapé and four chairs, compose a charming tale of possible Swan provenance. A lady of more than 70 years then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts wanted to donate the five pieces to the MFA and was visited by a cultivated gentleman apparently not employed by but somehow connected with the MFA, to see the her “Swan Furniture”. He described her house as shabby and surrounded by a dense and damp garden, but nonetheless was an “island of gentility” in a sea of tenements. Every surface of her parlor furnished by the alleged “Swan” furniture was covered with “good, amateur” watercolors (done by her sister) that had to be removed from the canapé and four chairs in order to see them. The visitor was impressed by the quality of the gilding on the wooden frames and, while not having examined the pieces “carefully,” opined they might have been products of the Louis XVI or late Louis XV periods. He sent a letter and memorandum to the then MFA curator of Decorative Arts, recommending the furniture as a “desirable acquisition” by the Museum provided “they seem genuine to you”. The memorandum notes that the lady inherited the pieces 55 years ago from a gentleman who was a benefactor to Harvard and M.I.T and had purchased the “Marie Antoinette” Suite that had been in the Swan mansion in Dorchester.” He adds that she herself had visited Versailles some years before where she had taken with her a piece of her furniture’s  fabric. At Versailles, she saw some furniture upholstered with the same color material, and therefore she “knew that her canapé came from there.” A note written from the MFA curator on the bottom of the letter enclosing the memorandum of recommendation, states tersely:

“EJH (the curator) called and found only a coarsely detailed sofa, probably Louis XVI, in bad order and 19^th C chairs. No connection with Swan”

Truly an instance of nothing ventured, nothing gained.

All in all, James Swan is a personage who still deserves to be reckoned with and whose convoluted life remains to be further exhumed and resolved.  Curiously, other than his letters to business associates, American and French political types, those from St. Pelagie to Thomas Aspinwall that are for the most part restricted to finances, a few letters to Henry Knox, the several pamphlets on slavery, agriculture, and the benefit of a paper currency  to the new United States as well as  his last will and  testaments, Swan remains strangely mute, especially when one considers that he came from an age when people wrote copious letters regularly and often kept diaries. I have not seen any diaries or others letters to his family and friends that would elucidate his reactions and views on the extraordinary events he witnessed in his life, from the time he arrived presumably alone on the wharfs of Boston as a boy, to when he disguised himself as a Mohawk Indian to throw tea crates into Boston waters,and  to what and to whom he must have encountered daily in Paris at the time of the Terror. Perhaps letters covering these and similar proceedings may exist buried in the vaults of one or another historical society or still in the attics of his descendants that may come to light in the future. However, the only truly personal note I have read by Swan is his description of his imprisonment in a letter to Aspinwall as his “suffering”and his negative view of his son written into his will.

I don’t think that Swan viewed the fine furniture he received in barter as aesthetically stirring and would have preferred to receive hard currency. I can’t really imagine him as an aesthete evaluating the gilding on rare bronzes or the rake of a cabriole leg, but then again I can’t imagine him quite as “Bartleby the Scrivener” who took all that he witnessed in his remarkable life on an equal plane without any emotional or intellectual response. What Swan really needs may be a scriptwriter who can give an inner voice to his extraordinary outer existence. However, we can be thankful that if he were indeed obtuse, totally insensitive to all about him other than commerce or were otherwise a tedious plodder, we don’t have to know it and can believe him to have been as stimulating as his exploits.

 

 

 

PART TWO OF THREE PARTS

A DEAD WHITE MAN YOU SOULD KNOW

MAY 1 2016

In 1787, James Swan left Boston for France to forge a new business career overseas and most likely to escape his stateside creditors. It was suggested by Prince Talleyrand,

the wily nobleman/archbishop whose diplomatic career began with Louis XVI, then Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Charles X, wrote that Swan was actually in bankruptcy at the time he left the United States. In Paris, Swan sought out Lafayette, Rochambeau, and other well-situated French noblemen whom he had met and befriended during their mutual involvement in the American Revolution.

His relationships with these liberal aristocrats undoubtedly directed his choice of France as a venue for beginning anew. Albeit of Scottish birth, he was unlikely to have had equivalent connections in United Kingdom that so recently had been an enemy of the United States. Moreover, the Colonial Tory population  who fled to England by reason of the Revolution were still very much “licking” their American wounds due to their loss of status, homes, and wealth. Needless to say, the Tories were actively hostile to new United States citizens who sought to tread on their reluctantly new home ground.

Swan’s French friends opened doors for him to the highest French levels during the last days of the Ancien Regime, enabling him to establish a mercantile business under the name of Swan D’Allarde et Cie. Swan most likely was introduced to his partner, Pierre-Gilbert Leory D’Allarde, an aristocrat, by one of his French noble acquaintances, when prior to 1792, such an alliance was still of value in France and elsewhere in Europe. The partnership initially began selling American food products, gunpowder, as well as saltpeter used in making gunpowder to the French army. Historian John Goldworth Alger writes that in 1792, the French were exhorted by their new leaders to scrape the floors of cellars, stables, and sheds in order to collect saltpeter tobe turned over to the new government and used in the manufacture of gunpowder.

France had suffered several years of harsh draughts and consequently poor harvests requiring importation of basic foods. The real hunger suffered both by both rural and urban poor ultimately lit the fuse for the fiery uprising of French masses in 1789, enflamed by the inspirational tracts penned by liberal writers of the time. During 1789, Swan is known to have delivered large consignments of wheat and other foods from the Americas to stave that hunger. It is not clear what happened to Swan D’Allarde et Cie, however, it is likely that D’Allarde, as a nobleman, became a persona non grata after the revolution began in earnest, and was fortunate to keep his head in the new turmoil.

Incidentally, Swan, being a man of broad commercial vision,  began a distillery for the production of rum outside of Paris in Passy that previously had been imported from England. I am not aware of any other rum distillery in Continental France in that or earlier periods. Also, a brother of Swan’s named David whose name I had never came across otherwise than in Swan’s will, joined Swan in the publication of bibles in France and, possibly, in the rum distillery.

As the French Revolution advanced, the increasingly radical individuals who directed the new Republic leftward into anarchy and terror succeeded the liberal aristocrats who initially fostered Swan’s fledging business in Paris. Swan dealt deftly with the new Jacobin ruling caste, probably because they accepted him as a surviving co-participant of a revolution against Royal (British) tyranny. But more likely, they recognized in Swan a “neutral” who proved since he arrived in France that he had access to foreign sources of supplies that that France so desperately needed and, more importantly, knew how to bring goods safely into France without interception by the fiercely-effective British sea blockade. France was precluded from bringing in needed supplies by safer, overland routes, as it was entirely surrounded on land by hostile neighboring nations.

Although Swan’s initial ventures in France were not unnoticed, it was only in the 1790’s that he gained a broad reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his successful trading pursuits. At that time, the US officially was interested in stepping up the export abroad (and especially to France to which it remained deeply indebted) of its bountiful agricultural (rice, pork, beef, cornmeal, etc.) and other products (gunpowder, saltpeter, timber, leather, etc.) for whatever else France couldn’t produce in sufficient quantities within its borders. A letter from James Monroe to James Madison

dated September 20, 1794, attests to Swan’s notoriety. Monroe recommends Swan as a merchant that resided in France for “some years” and was returning to the US–

“for the purpose of purchasing and shipping to this country the production of ours and relies much on the advances to be made by our gov’t for the means. He will be the sole agent in that line of this republic in America…. I beg you to the attentive to him in regard to it.”

 

In a letter dated November 15, 1795, Prince Talleyrand in New York, relies to a request for information by “what American houses were furnished the supplies that this vast continent has sent to France”. Talleyrand replied that the principal agent of the French is a Scotsman became an American, who was bankrupt in Boston some years ago, and whose name is Swan.”

It certainly must have helped that Swan spoke French. The French language was not entirely unknown in colonial and early Federal Massachusetts, but, for the most part, was spoken or known only by diplomats, other highly educated individuals with university degrees or those of French ancestry.

The latter were generally French Protestants, the Huguenots, who were persecuted in France in the 16^th Century under Francis I and again in 1685 by Louis XIV, many of whom had emigrated to New York and Virginia, but some also to Massachusetts including the family of the Patriot and silversmith Paul Revere. It is uncertain how Swan learned French, not falling into any if the categories above. Thomas Jefferson

most probably spoke French well, having studied the language at William and Mary College in Virginia.

Benjamin Franklin, who spent several years in France, believed that he spoke French but admitted he didn’t pay much attention to grammar or accent. The French found his conversation baffling, albeit charming. Gouveneur Morris from Philadelphia who was the US Ambassador to France

at the end of the Ancien Regime and until 1793 spoke French; his mother came from a prominent Huguenot family called Gouveneur, hence his first name that had nothing to do with his having been a governor. I have not been able to ascertain if Swan spoke French well, but that was probably a prerequisite in his business dealings with the various French governmental authorities notwithstanding a French partner.

 

In recognition of Swan’s prowess to import essential supplies to France, he was appointed in 1784 by the Committee of Public Safety, the bizarre name of the de facto body that governed France, as an official agent of France for the purchase of goods in America.

The French had some dealings with Swan and were aware of his ability to bring goods safely into France without seizure by the British blockage. However, Revolutionary France was at a critical stage, being close to bankruptcy and desperately needing food and war supplies and had experienced unsatisfactory dealings with some American shippers who either disappeared with their cargoes or were unable to evade the British ships. The Commission des Subsistances was a new revolutionary department set up, inter alia, to obtain vitally needed goods, Its head, Jean-Claude Picquet, introduced Swan to a Swiss named Johann Caspar Schweitzer

who had moved to Paris in 1786. Schweitzer had developed strong ties with the ruling Jacobins and, especially, with Count Mirabeau

whom Schweitzer had met shortly after arriving in France. Although Schweitzer had inherited substantial wealth, he was a committed revolutionary who had chosen to live in Paris in order to become involved in the city’s heady pre-revolutionary milieu.  In fact, he was adored by the Jacobins, notwithstanding his capitalist exploits and high style of living.

As a means of monitoring Swan, the French Government “suggested” that Swan form a business alliance with Schweitzer as his partner in order to run the import/export business; the resulting partnership was called Swan & Schweitzer. Swan is said to have bristled at this business relationship imposed upon him and once he arrived in America equipped with French funds for making the required purchases of products to bring to France, he ignored his partner. Probably to disguise its operations from the British blockade also operated under the name of Jones & Gaspard.

The Revolutionary French fiat currency, the assignats,

was backed by recently confiscated Church and Royal properties as well as the properties of noblemen who fled from France, the so-called émigrés. When first issued in 1789, it was more of a promissory note bearing 5 % interest per annum. However, its value was greatly discounted or even disregarded by reason of the new Republic’s instability and its relentless printing of the notes. It was transformed in 1790 into a non-interest bearing paper currency but that had little effect on its perceived value. Very few foreign suppliers were willing to take assignats in payment for valuable commodities that France required for its survival. Swan wouldn’t either; however, he was willing to barter the indispensable goods that he obtained outside of France in exchange for luxury items that France had in abundance and still could produce such as silks, brandies, etc., but were non-essential and “politically incorrect,” or even life threatening for the French to enjoy at that time.

The French Revolutionary government had tried to raise hard currencies by running auction sales of former Royal, Church and noble properties, largely comprising decorative arts confiscated by the new governing authority. The sales at the Palace of Versailles alone ran one year or more even though Louis XVI sent what is described as masses of furniture and decorations from Versailles to fit out the largely empty Palace of the Tuileries at one end of the Louvre where the Royal Family was taken unwillingly from Versailles to reside by the revolutionaries in 1790 at the outset of the Revolution. Such sales were replicated at the chateaux of Marly, Fontainebleau, St, Cloud and other prior Royal as well as noble abodes who owners had left to flee abroad.

The effect of these mass sales was to create a market glutted with astonishingly good decorative pieces sufficient to fill at bargain prices any empty corners in the palaces of English milords, German graffs, and Russian princes et al. The idea of selling these goods on a less wholesale basis made more economic sense to the Revolutionary Government than placing them on seemingly perpetual and overflowing auction blocks. That Swan was willing to accept such forms of payment which was the only expenditure that France could well afford made him the right man at the right time to provide food and other essential stuffs to France. There is no certainty that Swan himself developed this concept; Possibly, it was suggested by his wife or even Count Mirabeau, the aristocrat who led the Jacobins rulers.

The amazing quality of the French goods that Swan accepted in payment insured their strong market value in countries not undergoing the same turmoil as France. These countries then included the fledging United States that by 1790 had begun to shake off its post war doldrums. The new Constitution the Republic gave the Federal Government the right to impose excise type taxes.  It also begun to prosper by reason of its savvy business community, its natural resources, and its endless ocean frontage, and safe harbors. Finally, its sharp businessmen were untrammeled by the severe trade restraints previously imposed upon them by their English master.  For example, prior to the War of Independence, England dictated that colonial manufacturers of textiles could not sell their goods outside of the colony where manufactured, in order to protect manufacture in the mother country. Howard Rice, in an article entitled, “James Swan: Agent of the French Republic 1794-1796”, writes:

“…. there was in the United States a market for fine furniture, statues, mirrors, clocks, and other articles

from the former mansions of royalty and the nobility.

Silks, taffetas, satins, laces, now scorned by the good French Republicans as the livery of tyrants, might still be sold in America. He (Swan) even specified the colors preferred in taffetas…. There was, too, a demand for silk stockings…. fine wines and brandies….”

 

While clearly Swan brought French luxury good to the United States for sale generally as well as to furnish his own residence, there appears to be no information as to how the goods arrived in the US, i.e., what ships bore them, what ports did they enter, whether the ships were owned or chartered by Swan himself or carried by independent shippers, what losses or damages occurred, etc. Or is there any hard information as to how Swan sold the furniture in the United States or elsewhere that he didn’t keep for his own use. However, there is statement in a memorandum in the MFA’s Swan archives to the effect that advertisements were placed in the 1795 Boston Chronicle for the sale of French furniture, presumably by Swan.

 

The Talleyrand letter of November 15,1795 describes Swan as having “very considerable funds at this disposal” and sub-agents who “travel for him”. He adds that—

“…Mr. Swan is now engaged in fitting out two expeditions

for India (from the United States?) where he believes that a

large number of commodities that he has exported from

France, will be saleable. He has a great deal of wine, brandy

and an immense supply of jewels. It appears that all the

jewelry found or seized in domiciliary visits, has been

instructed to him to sell…”

 

John Goldworth Alger provides the only specific details as to Swan’s actual cargos that he brought to France:

1. On January 15, 1793, Swan agreed to supply 30,000 barrels of pork and 100 hides (from cattle, horses or other?) from Brazil to France;
2. On March 14th, 1794, he contracted to send 12 or 15 cargoes

to France of American corn and pork. In this venture, he was partnered with a man called Huger whose “hospitality Lafayette had enjoyed on his first landing in America”.

Another intriguing note as to other goods under Swan’s aegis, there is a reference by Swan in a letter to Thomas Aspinwall dated March 5, 1830, wherein he offers as additional collateral for a requested loan “a catalogue of 136 paintings in the hands of Pitcairn, Brodie…at Hamburghe which I received from the Government in 1794 out of the Emigrants property”.  The “Government” he refers to is undoubtedly that of the French Republic and the “Emigrants” being the French nobles who forfeited their properties in France when they fled the Terror to save their heads. In a subsequent letter to Aspinwall, Swan writes that the paintings were disposed of without any indication of how or to whom. I have been able to establish that the specified merchant firm of Scot nationals, Pitcairn, Brodie, did operate in Hamburg, Germany during the relevant period, but have been unable to establish the nature of its relationship with Swan, the identity of the paintings or who obtained possession of them. It is intriguing to speculate what those 136 paintings comprised and, if extant, to whom they now belong.

Swan’s business in France flourished and once he became an official agent of the French government, he received from the Revolutionary Government gold bullion melted down from seized ecclesiastical paraphernalia such as vessels, reliquaries, candlesticks, etc., to be used for payment for goods essential to France’s survival in addition to decorative arts. We know that Swan did obtain French decorative arts legitimately in payment as a supplier of needed goods to the French Revolutionary Government, but whether he received such goods as a consignee or as final payment isn’t entirely clear. However, an unflattering tale is told of Swan in Herman Wesley Small’s 1898 book, “The History of Swan’s Island, Maine”. The author states that Swan induced a group of French nobles to emigrate to the United States (perhaps to his West Virginia land) and his ships were stowed with their –

“…valuables in advance of their embarkation. As they perished in the Reign of Terror before being able to board, their goods were never reclaimed”.

 

Another quip in the same vein about Swan is that—

 

“Between Madame Guillotine, who took off their heads, and Swan who took off their trunks, little was left of those unfortunate Frenchmen.”

 

The story is repeated at least in one other book, “The Town of Roxbury: Its Memorable Persons and Places (1878)” and elsewhere, giving it some degree of credibility although possibly all versions had their origins in a single source antagonistic to Swan.

Another legend of how Swan acquired Royal French furniture involves him in a plot to rescue Marie Antoinette and take her to Wiscasset, Maine

aboard his ship, “Sally” which had previously belonged to his father-in-law. The Sally, captained by Stephen Cough of Wiscasset, was captured in French waters by a French warship and impounded in France. Clough’s daughter who had been on board the Sally appealed to the American minister to France for the ship’s release and somehow met Prince Talleyrand along the way (although he was clearly staying in London at the time with fellow émigrés and would risked death if found in France). Somehow, Miss Clough was placed in the same prison as Marie Antoinette and had access to the Queen in her own cell.

Some unidentified party told Miss Clough that he would obtain release of the ship if it would take a small group of people to America. Miss Clough and her father agreed to this. According to the tale, the imprisoned Queen was to be a member of that group with some of her furniture and six angora cats, all of which were stowed aboard the Sally in advance of her arrival on board. Ultimately, either the Queen refused to leave without her children or the plot was uncovered, or never existed, but, in any event, the Queen as we know never left France.

There was in fact at that time a foiled rescue plot whereby a nobleman, the Comte de Rougeville, somehow was admitted to the Queen’s quarters at the Concierge and dropped a carnation at her feet. Upon picking it up, she found a note on paper tucked into the petals of the flower that set out a plan for her rescue.  According to one version of the “Carnation Plot”

described in a four-volume series called “The French Revolution”, by George H. Allen (1925), the Queen mistakenly believed that one of her jailers, Gilbert by name, was an accomplice to the rescue plan. She gave him a torn shred of paper on which she wrote her response to Rougeville in a code of pinpricks. The treacherous Gilbert passed her reply on to the wife of the Administrator of the Concierge. There is, however, no mention in the Allen book of Clough, Swan or any other American as being involved in that particular plot (although Gouverneur Morris is associated with another rescue plot). The sad scrap pin pricked paper is now in the Archives National in Paris and a facsimile of the torn paper is included as an exhibit in the Allen book. (FN) The discovery of this rescue plot led to the Queen’s placement in more secure quarters, the “Cachot de la Reine” or the Queen’s Dungeon, from which of course she never left except to be killed.  In 1816, the Cachot was converted by the then King of the French Louis XVIII, (the first younger brother of Louis XVI to succeed to the throne after Napoleon), into the exquisite but deeply pathetic “Expiatory Chapel”, its walls painted in black with an allover pattern of falling white tears.

A number of sources recite variations on the “Sally” rescue tale and state that the ship did not sail with the Queen, but took Prince Talleyrand and the Queen’s six angora cats and furniture to Maine. The Queen’s cats escaped upon arrival in Wiscasset, mated with local shorthaired cats and produced the large and furry Maine Coon Cat.

The Queen’s furniture in the Sally’s hold was then divided between Swan and Talleyrand. What the Prince could have done with the furniture is equally mysterious; but, if indeed if he did receive a share of Royal furniture, he would have sold it as being basically without funds during his sojourn he was in the United States. Perhaps. We do know, however, that Swan was a very resourceful man and did have some of Marie Antoinette’s furniture.

One continuing puzzle about Swan and the furniture which he sold or kept for his own use is that there is not real information as to how, when and where it arrived in the United States. Also, while Talleyrand did go to the United States at that time, it is most likely that he left from England where he had previously sought safety for his own head as he had been designated an émigré by the Revolutionary French government. Émigrés were French nobles who escaped France during the revolutionary period whose properties remaining in France, i.e., chateaux, agricultural lands, mines, furniture, and the like, were confiscated to finance the financial challenged new regime. Returning to France without removal from that category resulted generally in death. Talleyrand was fortunate to have his name removed from that death sentence list in 1795 and did return to France in 1796.

In any event, stories as to the presence of furniture once belonging to Marie Antoinette abounded in the State of Maine for many years. We know that Swan’s friend, Henry Know did buy French furniture from Swan for his house in Thomaston, Maine. Fort Knox is named after Henry Knox.

While Swan was in France, he also actively and successfully marketed his West Virginia land to French and other European nobles and even to some German royals, all troubled by their proximity to the French revolutionary spirit and looking to a possible safe haven in America. This group included, inter alia, the King of Wittenberg and a Prince von Furstenberg, an ancestor of the first husband of the clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Responding to Swan’s undoubtedly effective pitch of “green and pleasant lands” on which to reestablish fiefdoms free from the shadow of the guillotine, these Europeans bought land they would never see without having any real assurance as to actual size, boundaries and locations. As mentioned above, they like all other of Swan’s land investors lost their respective chemises in the deal and they and their heirs were involved in the ensuing avalanche of law suits. Swan was one of several Americans who bought large tracts of vacant land and marketed the property to Europeans. One man in particular, Joel Barlow,

like Swan enmeshed several generations of Europeans in litigation that ended in total loss in the twentieth century.

Mrs. Swan accompanied her husband to France in 1787 and remained there at least during the initial stages of the Revolutionary period. It is likely that she participated effectively in the choice of what was offered by France in barter to her husband and may have stipulated what would be kept for their personal use in Massachusetts. A writer named William Dana Orcutt wrote that when in Paris Mrs. Swan purchased “draperies from the Tuileries palace as well as a Gobelin tapestry that was hung in the Dorchester house”. There is no indication that Swan had developed an aesthetic taste for the decorative arts other being appreciative of their value as readily saleable commodities. Mrs. Swan is generally described as having been an elegant, cosmopolitan and erudite lady as well as a superb hostess, all of which traits are often accompanied by having an interest and some elevated level of taste in furnishing. At some before mid-1794 while the French Queen was still alive, Mrs. Swan left France to go to London and then returned to Boston. It is claimed that passersby in London were startled by Mrs. Swan’s resemblance to Marie Antoinette who was then imprisoned in Paris, enough to think that the unfortunate Queen might have escaped. The portrait of Mrs. Swan by Gilbert Stuart shows a highly self-possessed, dark haired woman with a distinctive “beakiness” and what was then referred to as an “ample bosom”.

Aside from those three prominent aspects, there would seem to be little in her appearance to be confused with Marie Antoinette. I would presume that h

er lofty carriage and richness of dress still available for foreigners to purchase in Paris during the early 1790’s were certainly arresting enough for people to stare without her being a clone of the Queen. After returning to Boston, she probably never went back to France. Some tracts on Swan state that Mrs. Swan joined her husband in France not out of any conjugal affection for him, but to get her hands on valuable decorative pieces to replace monies that he misappropriated from her inheritance for his own benefit.

Although Swan traveled to and from France from his original commencement of business there in 1787, he returned accompanied by his partner Schweitzer to the United States in 1797 from Europe in order to consolidate his new ventures. It is likely that the French Government requested that Schweitzer go to American with Swan to keep an eye on the wily gentleman. They opened an office in Philadelphia, then the capitol of the fledgling United States. By the end of 1795, he boasted that he had sent 105 shiploads of goods to France and only 17 were captured by the predatory British navy. Swan engineered this success by his crafty “neutralization” of the ships bound for France; that is, using the names only of American suppliers for cargo wherever collected, American crews, shipboards festooned with American flags and documentation showing false ports of call that never included any in France. Swan in letter dated October 11th, 1794 from Paris to James Monroe requests Madison’s help in obtaining for him a new US passport that would show his name as James Keadie (his mother’s maiden name) so as to evade capture by a British blockage vessel searching the ship he would use for returning to the United States. The reason he gives for this subterfuge is that his own name was “marked” by the British as the agent of France and the British interest in bringing him into England–

“in order to baulk the business for which I am going (to the US), and this is most likely to be done on my voyage, as it is the Marine only that is instructed to stop vessels which have been fitted out by me.”

 

His request was never granted even though he offered to give up this new passport to US Secretary of State or destroy it upon arriving safely in the United States.  Rice’s article also states that, as additional cover, Swan used a Danish company to insure his cargo bound for France and contracted with a firm in Hamburg, Germany called Lubbert & Dumas to pay the insurance premiums so as to further disguise his presence. This latter arrangement was one that Swan would one day come to regret.

Swan enjoyed a reputation both in France and in the United States for getting things done. He is aptly described as a man who “had an uncanny ability to be in be in the right place at the right time”.  In 1795 was given authority to negotiate its behalf the long delayed repayment of the United State’s revolutionary war debt to France in the new and then increasingly strong US currency. Rice states that the ability of the French Government also to obtain credit for its purchases in the United States depended upon Swan’s business acumen and reputation.  However, no less a personage than James Monroe in a letter dated June 30, 1795 who requested James Madison in the prior year to help Swan describes Swan as “a corrupt, unprincipled rascal.” Also, Gouvenor Morris who enjoyed a good reputation and whom Swan sought to join him in one of his ventures bringing American wheat to France in 1794 refused, stating that Swan was a “schemer”. In all, Swan seemed to be the type of person who could be relied upon to accomplish his goals, but at the same time one whom one would have to watch carefully so that he didn’t take off with other than his own share.

 

To be continued in James Swan: Part Three of Three.