[c.15 - 21 August 1778]
This a general resolution.
Letters shewn & insinuations made.
Did you or the Committee desire a settlement of Accounts?
Mr. D. to settle his accotts with Commissioners.
He was frequently called on to settle.
Gave a list of partial expenditures - Ves[se]ll in Hol[lan]d - Arms.
Mr. D. left his papers.
Was he to leave his Vouchers - with an enemy.
Said one Getn. shd. be Comr. at France and every other place. Redescribe the Test of truth.
Approve of the Treaty & now Criminate the Minister for a part of it.
Did not lend his confidence.
Worm out answers to his own Condemna[tio]n.
Gentn. wanted to entrap me - my papers absent.
Lee PapersUniversity of Virginia Archives
1 Although a month elapsed after his arrival in America before Congress invited him to testify on the "general state" of foreign affairs and on Congress’ "commercial transactions in Europe," Silas Deane finally appeared in Congress on 15, 17, and 21 August to give an account of his conduct in France since 1776. Opposed by many delegates and intruded at an inconvenient time, the Deane hearings immediately provoked dissension within Congress and opened an era of sustained factional conflict previously unknown. Although the purpose of these notes can only be conjectured, they appear to have been made by Lee during the course of one of Deane’s three August appearances before Congress. They are written on the verso of a brief "Memorandum of sums received & paid out on account of the United States from January 1777 to April 1778" which Lee endorsed "Mr. Deanes Account of the expenditure of the pub. money, Aug. 1778"; and they are concerned with a number of topics that were probably discussed in the course of Deane’s testimony. See JCC, 11:787, 799, 802, 813, 826; Richard Henry Lee to Arthur Lee, 16 September, note 3; and Gouverneur Morris’ Proposed Resolve on William Carmichael, 18 September 1778. For a discussion of the scope of the factional conflict in Congress that was occasioned by Deane’s return to America at this time, see Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 246 - 74. And for an assessment of Deane’s public career in the context of his conduct of family and business affairs before the war, which concluded that his activities and responses during the Deane-Lee controversy "were prefigured and influenced, if not determined, by the events of his earlier life," see Kalman Goldstein, "Silas Deane: Preparation for Rascality," Historian, 43 (November 1980): 75 - 97.