A remarkable instance of this happened in the case of Silas Deane;
and I mention this circumstance with the greater ease, because the
poison of his hypocrisy spread over the whole country, and every
man, almost without exception, thought me wrong in opposing him. The
best friends I then had, except Mr. [Henry] Laurens, stood at a
distance, and this tribute, which is due to his constancy, I pay to
him with respect, and that the readier, because he is not here to hear
it. If it reaches him in his imprisonment, it will afford him an
agreeable reflection.
"As he rose like a rocket, he would fall like a stick," is a
metaphor which I applied to Mr. Deane, in the first piece which I
published respecting him, and he has exactly fulfilled the
description. The credit he so unjustly obtained from the public, he
lost in almost as short a time. The delusion perished as it fell,
and he soon saw himself stripped of popular support. His more intimate
acquaintances began to doubt, and to desert him long before he left
America, and at his departure, he saw himself the object of general
suspicion. When he arrived in France, he endeavored to effect by
treason what he had failed to accomplish by fraud. His plans,
schemes and projects, together with his expectation of being sent to
Holland to negotiate a loan of money, had all miscarried. He then
began traducing and accusing America of every crime, which could
injure her reputation. "That she was a ruined country; that she only
meant to make a tool of France, to get what money she could out of
her, and then to leave her and accommodate with Britain.
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