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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IT CONTROVERSIES AND HONORS IN AMERICA Just before leaving France, Commodore Jones had learned of the deposition of Landais from command of the Alliance during her voyage home the previous summer. The first news that greeted him on his arrival at Philadelphia, February 18, 1781, was that Landais had been dropped from the rolls of the American Navy and was therefore forever beyond the reach of the court-martial he had had in store for him since October, 1779. His only comment on this state of affairs that seems to be extant —at any rate, the only one we have found—occurs in a letter to Dr. Bancroft dated February 28, 1781. He naturally wrote to Bancroft about it, because, as previously stated, that gentleman had represented him in the preliminary inquiry conducted by Dr. Franklin in November and December, 1779, at Paris. To Bancroft he wrote : . . . Landais is, happily I think for all concerned, out of reach now. He has been dropped from the navy for other causes than those I have charged against him, and even if he had not been so dropped I am not sure that I could either more fully vindicate myself or more utterly disgrace him by demanding that he be formally tried. It is, however, a gloomy satisfaction that he owes his present misfortune to a quarrel with the man to whom he so base- ly lent himself as the miserable and unthanked tool of vengeance upon me, after he had exhausted every other poor expedient of his feeble nature in vain effort to destroy me himself. After all his crimes, it has been his cruel fate to receive his conge at the hands of his friend, his co-mutineer and his "constitutional adviser," Arthur Lee I Could the irony of fate be more ghastly ? But if the wretched tool, Landais, is beyond my reach I can yet rejoice that his hardly less infamo...
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