American Statecraft: The Story of the U.S. Foreign Service

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Photo of U.S. Ambassador Clarence Gauss

Introduction—Closing Pandora’s Box

PART ONE

1. Making a Difference

2. The Militiamen of Diplomacy: 1776–80

3. The Sword Was Sheathed: 1781–85

4. Of Consuls, Commerce, and Confidence: 1784–1810

5. Paying Off the Pirates: 1785–1805

6. One Nation as to Foreign Concerns: 1787–95

7. To Prepare for War Will Be Wise: 1793–1811

8. Drive for Identity and Respect: 1811–23

9. An Early Professional: 1825–42

10. The Spoils System: 1829–48

11. Expansion Westward: 1821–45

12. War with Mexico: 1845–46

13. Consular Reform: 1853–65

14. Japan’s First American Consul: 1856–62

15. The Nation at War with Itself: 1861–65

16. Public Trust, Private Property: 1866–85

17. The Long, Bumpy Road to Professionalism: 1864–97

PART TWO

18. First Steps to Empire: 1898–99

19. Three Diplomatic Friends: 1898–1905

20. Practicing Imperialism: 1898–1905

21. The Main Object of Diplomacy: 1905–12

22. Warm-up for a World War: 1899–1914

23. Well, The Roof Has Fallen In: 1914–16

24. Slaughterhouse Where Madness Dwells: 1915–17

25. America in Armageddon: 1917–20

26. The Russian Terror: 1917–20

27. The New Diplomacy of Oil: 1919–38

28. A Single Unified Service: 1920–45

29. Between World Wars: 1920–39

30. Early Aggressions: 1934–39

31. The Sands Are Running Fast: 1931–41

32. A Rattlesnake Posed to Strike: 1939–41

33. A Very Tragic Moment: 1941–45

34. Foreign Service for a New World: 1946–51

35. The Foreign Service Catches Up: 1946–88

PART THREE

36. Diversity Comes to the Elite Service: 1922–2011

37. China Hands: 1946–89

38. Public Diplomacy: 1941–2012

39. Diplomacy for American Dictators: 1953–89

40. Trujillo and Pinochet—Contrast in Violence: 1960–2004

41. Dangerous Diplomacy: 1960–78

42. Terrorists in the Embassies: 1968–2009

43. A War Too Far—Vietnam: 1952–75

44. Destiny and the Peacock Throne: 1951–81

45. Shuttling Salesman for Peace: 1947–83

46. The Very Model of a Modern Foreign Service: 1970–2011

47. The First and Second Iraq Wars: 1982–2011

48. Fortress America: The Embassy: 2004–07

49. New Challenges for Modern Diplomacy: 1970–2012

50. The Ambassador: 2011–13

Notes

AFSA Memorial List

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Also by J. Robert Moskin

About the Author

Photographs

Copyright

Diplomacy’s work is turning challenges into opportunities.

—Ambassador Thomas R Pickering

U.S. Ambassador Clarence Gauss crosses a river to Chungking, China, en route to present his credentials, May 26, 1941. Photo courtesy of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. (The Library of Congress)

Introduction

Closing Pandora’s Box

We Americans glorify our warriors and ignore our diplomats. Yet our diplomats are the ones whose job it is to keep us out of war, to keep the nation at peace. They have other functions, of course; they shape and sell the nation’s foreign policy, rescue American citizens who get into trouble abroad, find markets for American business—but avoiding war is the crucial function. The men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service see themselves as America’s first line of defense.

How did diplomats get this often-desperate job? French diplomat and historian Jean Jules Jusserand, who served as France’s envoy to the United States for twenty-three years, gave us this answer: Diplomats, he said in 1921 when he was elected president of the American Historical Association, became a necessity among men at the moment … when Pandora’s fateful box having been opened, evils were scattered throughout the world, and prospered.

To an ambassador, the safety of the republic must be the supreme law, Ambassador Jusserand said, quoting Aristotle. He must be rather the maker of peace and concord than of discord and war. Only three years after the horrors of World War I had come to an end, Jusserand, who was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for history, pleaded, The fate of nations must depend in the future on something else than force and falsehood.

*   *   *

The world is now again experiencing what historian Arnold Toynbee called a time of troubles, when the elements of civilization (nations and extranational elements) battle one another. Diplomacy is their least deadly weapon.

Unlike the military, Foreign Service officers do not rush out to meet a crisis; they are already there. Permanent embassies have existed since the fifteenth century. (The British had a permanent embassy in Constantinople in 1583.) Jusserand quoted François de Callières, a powerful French diplomat of the eighteenth century: There are temporary embassies for mere ostentation, for the fulfilling of which nothing is needed but a great name and much wealth, like those for the ceremony of a marriage or a baptism.… But when affairs have to be negotiated, a man is needed, not an idol.

*   *   *

The people in the Department of State in Washington, D.C., call Benjamin Franklin the father of the U.S. Foreign Service. In Franklin’s day, American diplomats were amateurs, members of a small circle of leaders among the colonials rebelling against their British rulers. They had to negotiate with seasoned and sometimes duplicitous European court diplomats. Later, the amateurs were celebrated as the militiamen of diplomacy.

The United States Foreign Service needed years to acquire a semblance of professionalism. Along the way, its members included many dedicated and courageous public servants, and also some political spoilsmen and rogues.

At first, American diplomats were very much on their own. An American envoy would send an inquiry from his post in Europe to Washington and then wait weeks or months to receive instructions. The functions and responsibilities of American diplomats have evolved dramatically over the more than two hundred years during which the United States has sent the Foreign Service abroad. Time and distance have been squeezed by ever-swifter communications. Even so, the heart of the diplomats’ job is still to report home what is being thought and done overseas and to bring the American story to distant regimes and peoples.

For the United States, the conduct of foreign affairs has a built-in difficulty. After serving for forty years, Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen described it, … The American system of separation of powers was not designed for the conduct of foreign affairs. It was designed for the conduct of non-foreign affairs, really.

Today, the United States Foreign Service consists of a community of men and women who sign up to spend a substantial part of their lives in foreign lands working for the benefit of their fellow Americans. They are the nation’s eyes and ears, constantly collecting information and perceptions and, ideally, teaching their hosts how to understand the United States.

Ambassador Jusserand was convinced that there is no kind of knowledge, science, or accomplishment that cannot happen to be of use in such a profession. He added, I should have been greatly surprised … had any one told me, when in boyhood days I was swimming in rivers and climbing rocks, that this ‘accomplishment’ would be of service years later, when, as an ambassador in far-off America, in order to keep company with the chief of state, President (Theodore) Roosevelt, I swam the Potomac and climbed quarries south of the stream. The President and the ambassador became close tennis-playing friends; in 1906 TR wrote Ambassador Whitelaw Reid that Jusserand was one of the best men I have ever met.

Today, U.S. Foreign Service members and retirees of the Department of State belong to an organization of more than 58,000 men and women. American Foreign Service officers serve at some 268 posts in 190 of the world’s 192 nations. They are honed to a professional proficiency.

Inside the State Department lobby as of May 2013 are plaques honoring the 244 American diplomats who have died in the line of duty. In the 180 years between 1780 and 1960, eighty-one died. And the pace has quickened. In the half century since 1960, 163 have died.

Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said plainly at a Foreign Service Day in Washington, Diplomacy has always been a hazardous occupation. And today it has become more dangerous than ever, as the members of the U.S. Foreign Service keep trying to shut Pandora’s box.

In awarding President Barack Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. This is hardly a new idea but, I hope, it is a renewed one.

PART ONE

1

Making a Difference

Today, many Americans cannot identify the U.S. Foreign Service, even though it is the nation’s first line of defense. It is both a highly trained organization stationed in 190 countries and also a community of 58,000 men and women who spend most of their lives in foreign lands serving their fellow Americans.

The members of the Foreign Service—and thousands more who do not pass its tough entrance tests—are motivated, more than anything else, by the desire to make a difference. They want to create and carry out American foreign policy in creative, effective ways.

To make a difference, a Foreign Service officer must have both the ability and the authority to make decisions and take action—often under the pressure of crisis and danger. Here, for example, are the stories of two modern American diplomats who made a difference.

HE WAS ONE OF A KIND, UNIQUE

William A. Eddy masterminded the historic meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia during World War II.

Eddy was born in Syria to Presbyterian missionary parents and grandparents. During boyhood summers, his father sent him to live in the desert with the nomadic Bedouins and learn their language and culture. He played varsity basketball at Princeton, and, after graduating in June 1917, he was sent to France with the Sixth Marines.

Eddy led daring reconnaissance patrols, and, within a few months, received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and two Silver Stars, all for valor, before he was seriously wounded in the battle for Belleau Wood. His regimental commander, Colonel Albertus W. Catlin, a Medal of Honor winner himself, called Eddy a daredevil who loved nothing better than to stalk German sentries in Indian fashion.

After World War I, Eddy earned a Ph.D. at Princeton, taught at the American University in Cairo and at Dartmouth College, and then became president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He rejoined the Marine Corps in World War II and served as a naval attaché in Tangier before the Allies landed in French North Africa on November 8, 1942. The attaché title was a cover; he headed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for North Africa, working with Ambassador Robert Murphy, who represented the State Department, and Brigadier General William J. Donovan, who led the OSS. Ambassador Murphy said of Eddy: He was one of a kind, unique; we could have used a hundred like him.

In November 1943, the State Department asked the OSS to return Colonel Eddy for temporary duty, and President Roosevelt sent him to Saudi Arabia as the American minister. When FDR decided to meet with Ibn Saud on his way home from the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Colonel Eddy organized the secret meeting between the self-taught warrior-hunter Saudi king and the sophisticated, Harvard-educated American president.

Eddy was charged to bring them together aboard the brand-new heavy cruiser USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the Suez Canal. If word of the meeting leaked out, Quincy would be a stunning target for German bomber pilots.

Eddy arranged for the destroyer USS Murphy to drop anchor in Jeddah harbor on Sunday, February 11. It was supposed to look like a routine visit, but no American warship had ever stopped at Jeddah. Meanwhile, Ibn Saud and his entourage traveled overland from Mecca to Jeddah. And Eddy convinced the king to reduce his party on board from a hundred to forty-eight (still exceeding the dozen visitors the destroyer had room for).

When the Murphy sailed for Suez the next day, some Saudis ashore feared their king had abdicated, others that he had been kidnapped. The ladies of the harem dressed in mourning clothes.

To steam to Suez took two nights and a day. The king insisted on sleeping on deck; a tent was raised and rugs spread over the gray steel. His cooks prepared his traditional lamb and rice. At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, February 14, Valentine’s Day, Murphy tied up alongside the USS Quincy; and the king, three princes, and two ministers crossed the gangplank to meet with President Roosevelt, who was sitting in his wheelchair on the cruiser’s deck. The President and king talked for more than an hour. Eddy was their sole interpreter; dressed in his U.S. Marine uniform, he worked kneeling on one knee between the heads of state.

Eddy then escorted the king to FDR’s private suite and to lunch. The only other Americans at the table were Roosevelt; Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the commander in chief; and Foreign Service officer Charles Chip Bohlen, FDR’s Russian interpreter at Yalta.

After lunch, the king and President resumed their talk, joined by the Saudi foreign minister and Eddy. The two most significant topics they discussed were American access to Saudi Arabian oil and the settlement of more Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Palestine. The king favored the first and strongly opposed the second.

Eddy later said that Roosevelt assured the king that (1) he personally, as president, would never do anything which might prove hostile to the Arabs; and (2) the U.S. Government would make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs. Eddy always believed that the meeting on the Great Bitter Lake enabled the leader of Islam to face West and bind his fortunes to ours.

A DARING ESCAPE

A second story of an American diplomat who made a difference is that of U.S. Consul General J. Hall Paxton. When Mao Tse-tung’s Communist armies swept across China in August 1949, Paxton led out the people of the American consulate at Tihwa in China’s remote northwestern corner. The Chinese had already cut the escape routes to the east and halted all air and rail traffic. Paxton had no choice but to flee by the ancient and precarious Leh caravan route over the Himalayas into India.

The son of a missionary, Paxton had first come to China when he was two. He graduated from Yale; he entered the Foreign Service in 1925 and was serving as a vice consul in Nanking in 1927. Ten years later, he was aboard the gunboat USS Panay when Japanese bombers sank her in the Yangtze River. During World War II the Japanese interned him. By 1949, he was fifty years old and in charge at the walled city of Tihwa, only 150 miles from the Russian and Mongolian borders. The primitive consulate had no indoor plumbing, and whitewashed stables served as guest rooms. The Americans were stationed at Tihwa detecting Soviet atomic bomb activity.

Consul General Paxton’s party of ten adults and six children left Tihwa on August 16, just ahead of the Chinese armies. The party included three Americans (Paxton; his wife, Vincoe, who had been a missionary nurse; and Vice Consul Robert B. Dreessen, a former U.S. Marine) and two White Russian drivers; their families; and an interpreter, his wife, and their three-month-old baby.

They left behind Vice Consul Douglas S. Mackiernan, who was actually an undercover CIA agent. A skilled meteorologist trained at MIT, he had been stationed at Tihwa during World War II. Now, the CIA ordered Mackiernan, the last American in Tihwa, to stay where he was.

Two weeks after Paxton left, the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. Eleven days later, twenty-eight-year-old Frank B. Bessac, who had served in the OSS and CIA, arrived in Tihwa. And on September 27, Mackiernan closed the consulate. On October 1, Mao Tse-tung established the People’s Republic of China.

Mackiernan and Bessac tried to escape China through Tibet. They traveled for months, mostly riding Asian ponies. Mackiernan kept in touch by radio with his CIA handler and with W. Walton Butterworth, assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs at the State Department. Mackiernan’s biographer, Thomas Laird, says that the State Department and CIA were feuding and failed to ask the Tibetans for permission for the Mackiernan party to pass through Tibet.

At the border on April 29, Tibetan border guards shot and killed Mackiernan. Permission to let the Americans pass reached the border guards two days after Mackiernan had been killed. He was the first CIA man killed in action and was thus honored by the State Department. Frank Bessac and one White Russian in their party survived and finally made their way home.

After leaving Mackiernan at Tihwa, Consul General Paxton drove an ancient jeep carrying his wife and Vice Consul Dreessen; the others piled into an army truck. They covered nearly a thousand miles, crossing the edge of a vast desert in 108-degree heat. At Kashgar, an oasis on the Russian border, they abandoned their vehicles and hired a caravan.

Five weeks after leaving Tihwa, they reached the last Chinese border outpost. The Chinese border guards allowed Paxton’s party to go on. They entered the Himalayas, climbed through treacherous three-mile-high Karakoram Pass, crossed and recrossed icy rapids, and suffered frostbite and high-altitude nausea. Breathing was painful. Nine packhorses died. For sixteen days they did not see another human being. Near the end, Paxton’s party had to slog ahead and leave the pack train behind.

The terrain on the India side of the mountains was even more difficult, with deep canyons and steep narrow paths. They reached altitudes above seventeen thousand feet and gasped for oxygen in the thin air. When they came to the first tiny Indian settlement, they still had to pick their way over a perilous four-hundred-foot glacier.

After their ten-week ordeal, they staggered into Leh, the capital of Ladakh. A U.S. embassy plane arrived and flew them to New Delhi. Paxton died in 1962 while serving as consul in Isfahan, Iran. His feat of leadership became a Foreign Service legend, encouraging others to take tremendous risks to achieve their goals.

2

The Militiamen of Diplomacy

1776–80

The story of the Foreign Service begins on March 3, 1776, four months before the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. The Second Continental Congress’ Committee of Secret Correspondence, with Benjamin Franklin in the chair, sent Silas Deane, a delegate to the Congress from Connecticut, to Paris as its covert representative to the court of Louis XVI. Deane’s orders said ambiguously that he was to transact such business commercial and political, as we have committed to his Care, in access & by Authority of the Congress of the thirteen united Colonies. He was the first diplomat sent overseas to represent the united British colonies of North America.

Thirty-eight years old, Silas Deane was the son of a blacksmith. He had graduated from Yale, taught school, and practiced law. After his wife died of tuberculosis, he had married Elizabeth Saltonstall, a daughter of a former governor of Connecticut, and gained entree to the leaders of society.

Deane sailed from Chester, Pennsylvania, in the brig Rachell, but an accident forced Rachell to return to Philadelphia, and Deane finally sailed for Bermuda in the sloop Betsey on April 3. From there he sailed to Spain; crossed over the Pyrenees; and, although British intelligence was alerted to him, he arrived safely in Paris on July 7.

In Paris, he posed as a merchant from Bermuda buying goods to trade with the Indians in America. He and a group of colonial merchants were to be paid 5 percent of the value of the goods purchased.

Deane knew no French nor much about France. Paris was bustling with British agents, and Deane sensed he was surrounded by enemies. He communicated in cipher and invisible ink. Not until November did he receive the official copy of the Declaration of Independence he was to present to the French government.

His orders were to ask the French minister of foreign affairs, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, Whether, if the Colonies should form themselves into an Independent State, France would probably acknowledge them as such, receive their Ambassadors, enter into any Treaty or Alliance with them, for Commerce, or defense, or both?

De Vergennes cordially assured Deane he should regard himself under the protection of the French court. Deane stressed the political and commercial advantages of a treaty for France and suggested that without such an agreement the new nation might be forced to establish some kind of reunion with Britain.

Deane arranged through Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a secret agent well connected at court, for loans to buy a hundred artillery guns, fifteen thousand muskets, ammunition, and clothing to equip twenty-five thousand men. By fall, the first shipment of weapons was on its way. Those arms helped the Americans win their victory at Saratoga.

Deane also recruited European officers, including France’s twenty-year-old marquis de Lafayette, who became General George Washington’s favorite; the German Baron Johann de Kalb, and Polish Count Kazimierz Pulaski.

Deane was not above turning a dollar for himself on the arms and supplies he acquired. He had speculated with men like Benjamin Franklin, who invested in the vast Vandalia land scheme based around the Ohio River; and Deane had organized a company with the merchant Robert Morris in order to buy supplies from London. Deane also accumulated a small fortune speculating on the London stock exchange. Few risk-taking Americans of the revolutionary era overlooked the opportunity to profit personally from a public assignment. The lines between public service and private gain were ill defined.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S STATECRAFT

The thirteen English colonies in America had been working together for eighteen months, ever since the First Continental Congress assembled in Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. That first Congress sent a message to King George III asking to be relieved of Parliament’s taxes. The message went through Friends of American Liberty in England, who represented the individual colonies. That fall, for the first time, these agents were asked to act for the United Colonies. Only William Bollan, Arthur Lee, and Benjamin Franklin accepted the assignment. These men had no diplomatic status since there was no national entity to represent. And they were not successful.

The nation being born would be defined both by the trial of arms that George Washington led and by Benjamin Franklin’s statecraft. There was no executive; the nation was run by committees of Congress.

On November 29, 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the five-man Committee of Secret Correspondence to deal with foreign policy. Franklin was its chair, and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, the committee’s first secretary. Its most active member was James Lovell, an eccentric Harvard graduate and schoolteacher whom the British arrested for spying after the battle of Bunker Hill. The Americans would need three years to win France’s support.

At first, efforts to manage a new political entity and fight a desperate war were disorganized. At the end of 1775, the Committee of Secret Correspondence arranged to pay Arthur Lee in London two hundred pounds to keep Congress informed of the attitudes of the European powers toward the colonies. And the committee engaged Charles W. F. Dumas, a scholarly, energetic Swiss who lived at The Hague, as its secret agent to the powerful and potentially crucial Dutch Republic.

The Committee of Secret Correspondence directed Silas Deane to be in touch with his former student, Dr. Edward Bancroft, a Massachusetts-born physician living in London who was a friend of Franklin. Deane paid Bancroft’s way to Paris, and when the doctor returned to London, he sold Deane’s confidences to the British. Neither Deane nor Franklin suspected his double-dealing.

On September 26, 1776, Congress enlarged Deane’s secret mission to France into a formal diplomatic commission made up of Deane, Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. They were the colonies’ first full-fledged diplomatic representatives, and their mission was to rally European support. Of the three, only Franklin had diplomatic experience; his biographer, Stacy Schiff, summed him up, Franklin was a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless.

The commissioners received no salaries, but they were supposed to be paid a handsome allowance for their expenses, effort, and risque. And, three years later, the commissioners were paid $11,111 and their secretaries $4,444 a year. But as the Revolutionary War drained Congress’ purse, their salaries shrank.

Jefferson declined to join the commission abroad because his wife, Martha, was ill, so Arthur Lee was moved over from London to Paris in his place. Lee, the cantankerous, quarrelsome youngest son of a Virginia planter family, had been educated at Eton and Edinburgh. A member of the English bar, he had been living in London for nearly ten years. An ambitious man with an unhappy streak of jealousy, he had met Beaumarchais in London. The French secret agent, who was also the author of the comic play The Marriage of Figaro, established a fictitious trading company, Roderigue Hortalez & Cie, to do what today would be called laundering French and Spanish government funds for the rebellion in America. The first arms were shipped clandestinely from French arsenals in Haiti and Martinique and from gunpowder stores on the tiny Dutch island of St. Eustatius.

The other commissioner, Benjamin Franklin, was the best-known American after George Washington. He held honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford and the Copley Medal from the Royal Society.

The revolutionaries’ treasonous affairs of state required secrecy, until the Declaration of Independence made that unnecessary. On April 17, 1777, the Committee of Secret Correspondence was renamed the Committee of Foreign Affairs, and it became the forerunner of the U.S. Department of State.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Deane’s presence in Paris aroused Lee’s jealousy. Lee felt that he had been superseded, and he disliked the prospect of working with the newcomer. Lee became convinced that Deane and Franklin were plotting to cheat Congress. Two years later, Lee denounced Deane and precipitated his recall. Beaumarchais, who knew them both, thought Deane honest and Lee an insidious politician.

Thomas Paine also attacked Deane for profiting from the Revolution and leaked to a newspaper the information that Louis XVI had given the colonies support in secret. Since this was enough to cause a war with England, the French demanded, and obtained, Paine’s resignation as the secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs.

*   *   *

Franklin had spent the decade of 1764 to 1775 in London promoting the colonists’ cause. But still he condemned the Boston Tea Party as an Act of violent Injustice on our part. In 1774, the British Privy Council for Plantation Affairs tried Franklin on the charge of circulating stolen letters in order to incite the colonies to break from Britain. The attack on Franklin aroused support for him in the colonies, but London’s social circles ostracized him. For the rest of his life, he resented the humiliation of the Privy Council hearing.

In 1775, when Franklin learned that his wife had died in America, he slipped out of London and sailed for home. While he was at sea on the six-week journey, Patrick Henry in Virginia was asking for liberty or death, and a skirmish in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, left ninety-nine British soldiers dead and 174 wounded. Franklin arrived in Philadelphia to find men drilling in the use of arms. In Boston, militiamen lay siege to the British army.

Now just short of seventy, Franklin was a generation older than Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams. He was fat and square-built; his hair was gray and thin. His body was tortured by gout caused by his indulgent lifestyle. But his charm and magnetism were still powerful, his eyes were bright, and his mind as quick as ever. Like Deane, he worked on the side for his own account; Franklin speculated in vast tracts of land acquired from the British government west of the Alleghenies.

Franklin was promptly chosen a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. After the British victory on Long Island, he led a delegation to a futile talk with Lord Howe, who was in command at New York.

The American revolutionaries distrusted a strong executive—with good reason. As a consequence, their foreign affairs were conducted by a committee that often lacked authority and continuity. The committee had no permanent chairman. Its members changed as the membership of Congress fluctuated. It was nearly another four years before the need for a more permanent institution was acted on.

The Continental Congress sent Franklin to Paris secretly; he left Philadelphia on October 26, 1776, taking with him his two young grandsons. After a brutal month’s voyage, they landed in a forlorn corner of Brittany, and it was late in December before they arrived at the same hotel in the rue de l’Université where Deane was lodging. The next day, Lee arrived from London. The British soon grasped the difficulties these American commissioners, and especially the popular Franklin, could cause them.

The three Americans immediately wrote to the comte de Vergennes that they were empowered to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce between the United States and France. Five days later, the foreign minister received Franklin and Deane in secret. An experienced diplomat, Vergennes used secrecy as a weapon. When the Americans presented their credentials and proposed articles for a treaty, Vergennes sharply warned them not to deal with anyone else in the French court. And when they proposed to buy eight ships of the line completely manned, he politely turned them down. They reported to Congress that the French would not negotiate formally for fear of angering the British but that French ports were open to American ships and Americans could buy and export French goods.

DIPLOMACY AS THEATER

In March 1777, Franklin moved to Passy, at that time a lovely village a mile outside Paris and seven from Louis XVI’s palace at Versailles. He and Deane were put up in the Hotel de Valentinois, an extensive estate with formal gardens, owned by a friendly French entrepreneur who sold supplies for the American army. Franklin made this estate his home and headquarters for the next eight years, during which he never left Paris and its suburbs.

From this peaceful base Franklin used his considerable skills to twist help from a sympathetic but class-conscious and corrupt ancien régime that itself would soon prove ripe for revolution. Although Franklin’s French was imperfect, he was a consummate actor, marshaling his amazing charisma and even his plain dress, a brown coat with a fur collar, bifocals, and a fur cap. He understood that politics and diplomacy were, in significant part, theater.

Britain’s capable spymaster, William Eden, planted a man inside Franklin’s headquarters; he was the same Dr. Edward Bancroft with whom Deane had dealt earlier. This amoral young physician, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a purported friend of Franklin’s, was a double agent. Dr. Bancroft stayed in Passy for nearly a decade, passing information to the British and interrupting shipments of supplies to the colonies. Franklin’s casual style of living made Bancroft’s job simple; Franklin left papers strewn about and found codes too tedious to bother with. George III received information from Franklin’s desk before the Congress it was intended for.

In fact, codes were not very effective. British agents intercepting messages had no trouble with the American ciphers. And communication across the Atlantic took so long that secrets quickly became obsolete. On average, an exchange of correspondence between Philadelphia and Paris required two months. It was common to send four copies of a document by different routes in the hope that one would arrive safely. Important documents were delivered by special courier. Most of the time, American diplomats abroad depended on their own devices and judgment.

THE COMMITTEE OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

By the spring of 1777, General Washington’s forces had won battles at Trenton and Princeton, and Congress returned to Philadelphia from a frightened three-month exile in Baltimore. The Committee of Foreign Affairs decided to expand its efforts in Europe.

Many capitals did not welcome representatives from the breakaway colonies. When Arthur Lee was appointed to the Spanish court, he was authorized to offer Pensacola, in Florida, to Spain in return for a declaration of war against Britain. But the Spaniards would not even allow him to enter Madrid. And he had no more success with Frederick II of Prussia. Rejected by both courts, he spent as much of his time as possible in Paris.

Francis Dana was appointed commissioner to Russia and spent two fruitless, embarrassing years being ignored in Saint Petersburg. Ralph Izard, a political leader from South Carolina, was appointed commissioner to the grand duchy of Tuscany, but he never left Paris. And William Lee, Arthur’s brother, was sent as commissioner to Vienna and Berlin. He and a Dutch banker drafted a treaty between the thirteen united states and the seven provinces of Holland, but it merely vouched for Dutch interest in trade with America in case she did win independence.

William Lee spent months in Vienna, even though the British ambassador prevented his gaining an audience with Empress Maria Theresa. Her son, the arrogant, brilliant Joseph II, who succeeded her in 1780, hated all rebels and supported George III in his battle against his impudent subjects. Both Lee brothers were recalled in 1779. Years later, John Adams ran across William Lee in Antwerp, a forgotten man of Revolutionary diplomacy.

The truth is that the embryonic United States, fighting its British masters, was dispatching amateurs as envoys. John Adams was probably the first to call them a sort of militia. Later, Dr. Francis Wharton, a Department of State editor, named them militia diplomatists and historian Richard Morris tagged them militiamen of diplomacy. They preferred to do business in the open rather than in secret; they had little tolerance for the fancies of court life and courtier diplomacy; they could lean on neither diplomatic training nor traditions. They were often quite undiplomatic.

The amateurishness of American diplomacy in this period was demonstrated by the feud between Arthur Lee and Silas Deane. Lee attacked both Deane and Franklin over the first secret arms shipments. Were they gifts or should they be paid for? Did Deane profit personally from them? The answers were not clear, because the arms were procured surreptitiously, and the lines between public responsibility and private gain were shadowy.

A MAJOR DIPLOMATIC VICTORY

On December 4, 1777, the American commissioners in Paris received word that, although the British had occupied Philadelphia and Congress had fled to York, Pennsylvania, British General John Burgoyne had on October 17 surrendered his army of 5,700 men at Saratoga in the Hudson River Valley. In appreciable part, the Americans who fought and triumphed there were armed and clothed by France. This was the first significant American victory, and potential allies began offering support.

The American commissioners promptly wrote Vergennes asking that he act on their year-old proposal for a treaty of amity and commerce. Eight days later, the Americans stole off to a rendezvous outside Versailles. A coach met them and whisked them to a house where Vergennes and Conrad-Alexandre Gérard de Rayneval, the future French envoy to Philadelphia, were waiting. In this hideaway, the foreign minister encouraged the Americans but insisted that nothing could be done openly until Spain joined their cause against Britain. Eighteenth-century diplomacy demanded patience.

After receiving the news of the Americans’ victory at Saratoga, King George III could no longer hold out against his government. Frederick, Lord North, the British prime minister, fashioned offers of reconciliation. Victory in battle had an undeniable impact on diplomacy. A historian quoted Franklin, Diplomacy can convert military victory into political gain.

By year’s end, the British were trying to prevent an alliance between the Americans and the French. Various emissaries from London visited the American commissioners and tried to persuade Franklin that Britain and America, acting as one, could make the strongest empire on earth. But their proposals would not guarantee independence, and Franklin was blunt: The Americans would be satisfied with nothing but independence.

This was the terrible winter of Valley Forge, where the American army camped without enough food or shoes. Franklin and Deane were promised safe-conduct passes if they would come to London and discuss peace terms short of independence. Franklin refused. But he used the new British attitude to worry the French with the prospect of an accommodation between Britain and the United States. Only then did Louis XVI’s council inform the Americans that it was prepared to recognize the colonies’ independence. Franklin had won a diplomatic victory.

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On February 5, 1778, Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, who was representing the French, was in bed with a cold, and negotiations were put off. The next evening, Franklin, Deane, Arthur Lee, and Gérard signed a treaty of amity and commerce, as well as a military alliance in case of war between France and Britain. France thus became the first nation to recognize the United States of America. It would take the British another five years.

France pledged to maintain the independence of the United States. Both parties promised not to stop fighting the British without the consent of the other. The United States was given a free hand to seize Canada and Bermuda, and France could take the British West Indies.

Now, things moved more rapidly. France sent Gérard to Philadelphia as minister plenipotentiary and consul general to the United States. He lodged with General Benedict Arnold, then still the respected commandant of the city.

Louis XVI, twenty-four-years old, weak, and facing bankruptcy, received Franklin, Deane, and Arthur Lee for the first time at Versailles on March 20. They were accompanied by Ralph Izard and William Lee. Franklin chose to dress severely plain for this formal and colorful occasion. An observer wrote of him, But for his noble face I should have taken him for a big farmer, so great was his contrast with the other diplomats, who were all powdered, in full dress, and splashed all over with gold and ribbons.

When the Americans were introduced, Louis XVI said graciously, Assure Congress of my friendship. I hope this will be for the good of the two nations.

Franklin thanked him in the name of the United States and added, Your Majesty may count on the gratitude of Congress and its faithful observance of the pledges it now takes. As the departing Americans crossed the courtyard, an assembled crowd greeted them with cheers.

Congress ratified the treaties on May 4. By June, Britain and France were at war.

WE HAVE KNOWN A MEANER SIDE

The few American representatives abroad, even the aging Ben Franklin, performed the functions of both diplomats and consuls. As consuls they acted not government to government but served and protected their fellow individual citizens. (The roots of consular duties went back into antiquity. And, later, the city-state of Venice and the Hanseatic League placed consuls in foreign ports to help their citizens abroad.) Among the Americans’ consular duties were the protection of seamen and the disposition of prize vessels seized by the Continental navy and American privateers.

The principle has not changed much since then. Maura Harty, a twenty-first-century assistant secretary of state for Consular Affairs, has explained, From our very beginnings, we have known a meaner side of a countryman’s trip abroad—an arrest, a death, destitution or illness. We are ready to be at an American’s side for all those things and others not foreseen. It almost, sometimes, feels like a marriage!

During the American Revolution, the Philadelphia firm of Willing, Morris, and Company controlled much of this nonofficial business. In one case, Thomas Morris, the illegitimate half-brother of the Revolution’s leading financier, Robert Morris, was sent as a commercial agent to handle consular matters at the French port of Nantes. Thomas Morris proved to be a hard-drinking, free-spending failure; and Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin dispatched Franklin’s grandnephew, Jonathan Williams, later a superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, to Nantes to replace him.

This maneuvering ended in a shambles. William Lee sided with Thomas Morris against Jonathan Williams; and when Deane was recalled, the commissioners simply left the matter in Lee’s hands. Then, Thomas Morris died, and Lee appointed his allies as commercial agents in Nantes and Bordeaux. It was an ugly mess of commissioners appointing relatives, manipulating political influence, and slicing commissions off government goods passing through their hands.

When John Adams reached Paris in April 1778, he complained to Congress’ Committee of Commerce about the chaos and waste he saw. He wrote, I find that the American affairs are in a state of disorder. Franklin and Adams wrote the president of Congress on July 20, urging that Congress finally appoint consuls and separate diplomatic and consular work. Since the treasury had no money to pay consuls, they suggested that the consuls should be allowed to take commissions and conduct private business.

THE TRAGEDY OF SILAS DEANE

Just days after being received at court and under attack by Lee, Silas Deane sailed for America with the French fleet that also carried Conrad-Alexandre Gérard to his post as minister to the American government. Deane carried a letter from Franklin to the president of Congress, Henry Laurens, praising Deane’s contribution to his country. Through Deane’s yearlong political hearing, he was supported by Franklin, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and John Jay. Nothing wrong was proved against him, and he was dismissed without censure. Congress voted him $10,500 but did not settle his financial accounts. He was ruined.

During the following years, Deane grew embittered and outspokenly critical of the United States. His friends tired of this and deserted him. He returned to Europe, but in the summer of 1789, ill and impoverished, he set out for home again. In September, he died suddenly on board a Boston packet homeward bound and was buried in Deal, on the coast of Kent. He was fifty-four. Conspiracy devotees whispered that Dr. Bancroft poisoned him to conceal his own misdeeds. In 1842, long after Deane’s death, Congress cleared his name, and the House of Representatives finally awarded Deane’s heirs $37,000 on the grounds that an earlier audit was a gross injustice to Silas Deane.

*   *   *

Deane’s departure left two antagonistic commissioners in Paris. Lee attacked Franklin throughout the rest of his life, and Franklin called Lee the most malicious enemy I ever had. Deane was replaced in Paris by sober, blunt John Adams, a Boston lawyer and a member of both Continental Congresses.

Adams and his ten-year-old son, John Quincy, traveled for nearly six weeks to reach Paris. On his first evening in Paris, Adams discussed with Franklin the treaties of commerce and alliance that France and the United States had previously signed. The commissioners’ work seemed finished.

Adams accepted Franklin’s invitation to stay with him in Passy; before long, the straitlaced Adams came to loathe Franklin’s easygoing lifestyle. Adams, about five foot seven, portly and physically awkward, could seem aloof and pompous, and lacked small talk. He had an explosive temper as well as serious doubts about his own abilities. But he had the facility to see a problem whole, and he worked hard. He respected capable women, especially his wife, Abigail, on whom he laid endless responsibilities.

Adams’ crucial principle was that government must be based on the consent of the governed. Adams was a conservative, one historian concluded, a great conservator of what had been achieved in America before the onset of the troubles with the parent state. But another differed, As an American agent in France, he was worse than useless.… He was a complete egotist who suspected himself to be a universal genius.

Franklin took Adams to meet Vergennes, and then Adams criticized Franklin’s handling of the French and announced he would deal with them more forcefully. Adams became the commission’s de facto administrator, drafting correspondence and keeping its books. And the three Americans oversaw the safety of American shipping, as well as complaints concerning American businessmen, the Barbary Coast pirates, and prisoners-of-war exchanges.

Appalled by the continuing feud between Franklin and Lee, Adams decided that a single representative would care better for the nation’s affairs than three quarreling commissioners. He repeatedly cast the deciding vote between the two antagonists and came to dislike them both. He wrote, I wish Congress would separate us. He judged Lee to be an inadequate diplomat, and complained that the seventy-two-year-old Franklin, nearly thirty years his elder, never found time for work. Adams’ harping became so infuriating that Lafayette wrote George Washington begging him to intervene. Adams, the newcomer, tried to compete with Franklin’s popularity through hard work, a strategy that was not always persuasive in decadent prerevolutionary France.

England’s ships attacked France’s ships, and the two powers went into an undeclared war in June 1778. The American commissioners set out to convince the French to destroy the British whaling fleet and to support more privateering. Vergennes lost all patience with Adams and wrote him archly, The King has no need of your solicitation in order to occupy himself with the interests of the United States.

When Lafayette returned to France in mid-February 1779, the commissioners were shocked to learn that the previous September Congress had dissolved the commission and replaced them with the United States’ first minister plenipotentiary to the court of Versailles. And he was Franklin.

From this, Franklin is regarded officially as the first United States diplomat abroad, and Paris as its first diplomatic post. Congress gave Adams no new assignment, and so, on June 17, 1779, he and John Quincy sailed for home in La Sensible, the same French frigate that carried the Chevalier de la Luzerne, France’s new minister, to the United States. They arrived at Braintree, Massachusetts, on August 2.

The clumsiness of having a legislature manage foreign affairs was demonstrated when, on September 27, 1779, Congress changed its collective mind and decided unanimously to send John Adams back to Paris. This time he would go as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain. He had been home exactly eight weeks.

FIRST FEELERS FOR CONCILIATION

In March 1781, at age seventy-five, Franklin offered his resignation. Congress insisted that he serve another four years. Despite his age and painful gout, his rank as minister plenipotentiary required Franklin to appear in court every Tuesday and to attend assorted tedious ceremonies. And at Passy he had to take care of endless bureaucratic tasks.

The British began to explore conciliation, and unofficial envoys from London came to talk with him about peace. He would not discuss it until the colonies were granted full independence. The British government repealed some of the laws to which Americans objected and offered them the equivalent of home rule—everything but independence.

The war in America had now dragged on for five years. With difficulty, the Congress tried to define its war aims. A committee chaired by Gouverneur Morris drew up instructions for Minister Adams, and they were adopted by Congress. They specified the terms that Britain must include, in addition, of course, to independence: acceptable boundaries on the Mississippi River and the 31st parallel, including southern Canada; access to the Newfoundland fisheries; and a commercial treaty with Britain.

Adams had no forewarning of his new assignment. He was given his own official secretary, Francis Dana, of Boston, a future chief justice of Massachusetts. With his two older sons, Adams set sail again back to Europe. After a terrible midwinter journey in a leaking ship, they landed in Spain and then, by mule, reached Paris two months later, on the afternoon of February 9, 1780. Adams immediately paid Franklin a visit but, ever distrustful, did not tell him the purpose of this second crossing of the wintry and dangerous Atlantic.

Franklin and Adams called on Vergennes at Versailles, and Adams, to avoid speaking in front of Franklin, asked permission to write the foreign minister about his mission. Adams’ letter disturbed Vergennes, who told Adams that if he initiated a bid for peace, the British would think the Americans were weakening. Vergennes also feared the possibility of a separate peace between America and Britain. He prohibited Adams from having any contact with Britain and permitted his publishing only a vague statement about a future peace.

Vergennes, a starchy, old-style diplomat, was unhappy with Congress’ choice of this blunt, rough-hewn lawyer. He wished the Americans had appointed the more experienced and diplomatic Franklin. And he offended Adams by making his displeasure apparent.

The inactivity that Vergennes imposed discouraged Adams; he found the war interminable and doubted that Britain was ready to make peace. He carped about France’s lack of effort for peace but did not ask Franklin to press the French. Frustrated, Adams wrote to friends in England and anonymous articles for British newspapers. French intelligence informed Vergennes of these activities, and Adams became engaged in an intense letter-writing debate with Vergennes, who then used Adams’ letters to try to have him recalled.

Finding he was powerless in Paris, Adams moved to Amsterdam to seek Dutch support for the United States. He hoped that Dutch aid would dilute France’s hold over the United States. Economic statecraft was a crucial part of American foreign relations.

Congress, its finances overextended, desperately needed loans and sent another militiaman of diplomacy, Henry Laurens, to the Netherlands in the summer of 1780 to secure a $10 million loan and a treaty of commerce. Laurens, a wealthy South Carolina planter and merchant who had served as president of the Continental Congress, was short, swarthy, wealthy, and abrasively self-assured. Earlier, he had made a fortune in the slave trade.

Laurens’ voyage was marred by an event that was dreaded by all Americans crossing the Atlantic. The British frigate HMS Vestal intercepted his ship off Newfoundland. The Americans threw all their papers overboard, but Laurens refused to part with his personal trunk. The trunk was finally cast over in a bag weighted with iron shot, but it failed to sink quickly, and British sailors recovered it. Inside, they found the draft of a treaty with Holland. The British used this draft treaty as a pretext for declaring war on Holland.

Ignoring Laurens’ plea of diplomatic immunity, the British imprisoned him in the Tower of London. Franklin tried through Edmund Burke, a leader of the parliamentary opposition, to exchange Laurens for General Burgoyne, who had been captured at Saratoga. The British turned him down. Franklin wrote Burke, Since the foolish part of mankind will make wars from time to time with each other, not having sense enough otherwise to settle their differences, it certainly becomes the wiser part, who cannot prevent those wars, to alleviate as much as possible the calamities attending them. Burke supported Franklin by reading his letter to a hostile House of Commons.

Learning that the British had captured Laurens, Congress named Adams commissioner to the Netherlands. He approached the Dutch government despite French and British efforts to prevent him. But it took months before he could meet a significant Dutch official.

He found more interest among the businessmen of Amsterdam than the politicians in The Hague. The Dutch businessmen suffered from the rivalry with Britain. Adams did an energetic job of what today would be called public diplomacy, seeking the support of the Dutch elite instead of their government. In time, riding a wave of colonial battlefield victories and the sympathies of the anti-British businessmen, Adams secured aid from leading Dutch bankers. As expected, Britain responded with reprisals against Dutch ships, thwarting any possibility that Dutch merchants would openly support the United States.

A year after war began between Britain and France, Spain also declared war on Great Britain. Spain still refused to recognize the United States’ independence; but France and Spain agreed that neither would quit fighting until Spain recovered Gibraltar and France, the port of Dunkirk. They actually sent a combined fleet to invade Britain, but the flotilla dawdled until gales swept its ships out of the English Channel.

France and Spain had contradictory agendas: France wanted a strong America to stand against Britain; Spain wanted a feeble America too weak to threaten her in the Western Hemisphere, where Spain ruled three-fourths of the land as well as the wealthiest of the West Indies. Charles III, the uncle of France’s Louis XVI, would do what he could to curtail British imperial power; but unlike his nephew, he was not prepared to support rebellion, not even against the British. Charles feared the American rebellion’s contagion in his own colonies. He proposed a truce between America and Great Britain, which would have left the British in control in New York City, Long Island, Rhode Island, and parts of Georgia. Surprisingly, the British rejected the proposal. The Americans in Europe were learning lessons in diplomacy.

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The Continental Congress sent its president, John Jay, to Madrid in 1779 as minister plenipotentiary. He had also served as chief justice of the state of New York. Of Huguenot descent, he disliked Catholics; but he would stay in Madrid for more than two years, with very little to show for them. The tall, thin, sallow Jay, a meticulous lawyer, had originally opposed the Declaration of Independence. But once it was adopted, he worked for independence, while wistfully continuing to hope for reconciliation with Britain.

Jay took to Madrid as his secretary William Carmichael, a controversial character who three years earlier had volunteered to help Silas Deane in Paris. Jay was instructed to bring Spain into the Franco-American alliance and to obtain a loan for the United States at no more than 6 percent interest. The loan was imperative; the new country teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

On April 5, 1780, Jay called on the Spanish secretary of state for foreign affairs, Conde de Floridablanca, a shrewd master of duplicity who opposed American independence and who was negotiating with the British so Spain would not recognize independence until Britain did.

Jay was snubbed in Madrid; he was never received officially. Floridablanca told him that the chief obstacle between them was the navigation of the Mississippi River. Spain had driven Britain off the river, but King Charles had replaced one enemy with another, more dangerous one. The Americans envisioned the Mississippi as their western border and a common waterway.

Floridablanca declined to provide funds for the Americans. He told Jay that money would be forthcoming only if the United States gave Spain frigates loaded with tobacco and provisions.

Floridablanca was stonewalling. The French were alarmed to learn that Spain was negotiating a separate peace with Britain, and they were upset by Jay’s eagerness to conclude peace with the British and bring the American war to an end.

Jay dropped the diplomatic niceties, angrily telling the Count of Montmorin, the French minister to Madrid, Your Excellency, I was sent to Spain by Congress to make propositions, not supplications.… I consider America as being, and to continue, independent in fact.… In my opinion, America ought to rest content with her alliance with France. He was ready to go home.

Isolated, Jay complained to James Lovell about the Committee of Foreign Affairs, Till now I have received but one letter from them, and that not worth a farthing… He was mortified to receive news from home through Spanish officials, who intercepted letters intended for him.

After a long year, by the summer of 1781, Jay began to show some flexibility. He notified Floridablanca that Congress was prepared to make major concessions for a treaty. The Americans would, indeed, give up their claim to navigate the Mississippi below the 31st-degree latitude if they could have a free port below that line. When he received no reply from the Spaniards, Jay told Gouverneur Morris he had given up all hope of obtaining Spanish assistance.

The British conducted their war against France and the American colonies with startling incompetence. Both Britain and France had been beggared by the prolonged wars that had enabled Britain to dominate so much of North America. John Adams perceived Britain’s victory over France for the North American continent back in 1763 had been the first round of the American Revolution because, after that, the colonists no longer needed Britain to defend them against the French. In addition, as the war’s winner, Britain had to bear the cost of keeping troops in North America and taxed the colonists to support them.

Propaganda played a role. Franklin was not above perpetrating a nasty hoax. At Passy, in April 1780, he published a false Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle, which reported that eight large packages of American scalps had been sent by the Seneca Indians to the governor of Canada for the British king and queen. But most of Franklin’s propaganda came from his ability to charm people with his old-fashioned ways.

By June, Britain’s unpopular, expensive war, managed by a manic-depressive king and an unstable prime minister, caused rioting in London. And in Paris, Jacques Necker, the Swiss-born director general of the French treasury, now opposed great-power diplomacy. Horrified by the mountain of public debt, he demanded the war be ended. In December, Necker wrote directly to Lord North in London, offering to end the fighting on the basis of the status quo. George III turned him down.

3

The Sword Was Sheathed

1781–85

As the Revolution dragged on, Congress’ Committee of Foreign Affairs collapsed. James Lovell wrote Arthur Lee, But there is really no such thing as a committee of foreign affairs existing, no secretary or clerk, further than I persevere to be one and the other.

Some members of Congress sought more efficient governance, and, finally, on January 10, 1781, Congress created a Department of Foreign Affairs, transferring the conduct of foreign affairs to the executive branch. The Articles of Confederation were ratified on March 1, 1781, and Article IX began, The united states in congress assembled, shall have the sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war … of sending and receiving ambassadors, entering into treaties and alliances.…

That summer, Robert R. Livingston defeated Arthur Lee to become the first Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Livingston, then thirty-five years old, was the scion of a great Hudson Valley landowning family and a friend and law partner of John Jay. After carefully examining the extent of his powers, Livingston accepted the post on September 23, not quite a month before the American-French victory at Yorktown.

Livingston was charged with the handling of American foreign policy. He was to correspond with American ministers posted at foreign courts and with the representatives of foreign powers coming to America. He dealt only with America’s friends; other nations wanted nothing to do with revolutionaries.

Livingston soon brought some order to the conduct of foreign relations. The men in the Department of Foreign Affairs had to write out by hand five copies of every foreign letter received and every document sent out; they were swamped with paperwork. Livingston employed a first undersecretary, Lewis R. Morris; a second undersecretary, Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau; a translator of French, Jean Petard; and a clerk, Walter Stone. He was allowed to correspond personally, not just on behalf of Congress. He was authorized to advise Congress, settle private complaints against foreign powers, and have access to congressional records. In May 1782, he reported to Congress on the condition of the U.S. missions.

Livingston set up