EARLY MINISTERS ABROAD

As foreign secretary for the Confederation, Jay had much to contend with in the general weakness of the organization. Yet one compensation was his in the ability of his agents abroad. The aged Franklin after repeated requests to leave his post was finally permitted to return to America. Illness and gout had so reduced his strength that the king's litter was a welcome aid in his journey to the coast. But far from a return to die, as he seems to have anticipated, he was spared yet a little while to render further services to his country in the convention which gave it a constitution. Had Franklin foreseen with greater precision the impending revolution in France-that one was coming eventually he seems fully to have comprehended-it is possible that he might have preferred to extend his sojourn. To Jefferson, his successor, fell the supremely interesting rôle of elder brother to the French in revolution. For in the great days of 1789, La Fayette and other leaders in the National Assembly were to appeal to Jefferson for counsel in the mighty events then shaping. In the long list of American ministers to the Court of St. James more names of the first distinction may perhaps be found than in any other calendar of Americans. But when our country was in the making, France and ourselves were equally honored by the choice of two such world figures as Franklin and then Jefferson.

At London, too, our first representatives set a precedent for ability and distinction. Though John Adams was our first official minister to England, America had previously been represented, though informally, by Henry Laurens, of South Carolina, who in 1780 was sent as minister to the Netherlands, but was captured on his journey over, and until the war was ended, was confined in the Tower of London as a prisoner of State. From this enforced retirement, Laurens lost no opportunity to influence opinion. On his release, he mingled with important personages, on whom he never failed to urge the need for healing recent wounds. Commercial freedom he regarded as the proper ointment. When Congress invited him to join with Franklin, Jay, and

Adams on the peace commission, his acceptance was so long delayed that he but slightly influenced the provisions of the treaty. He favored loyal adherence to the French alliance, and disapproved the action of Jay and Adams in violating their instructions by negotiating separately from France. Thus he sympathized with Franklin, and had he been more active might have modified the treaty. As it was, his major contribution to the peace lay in operating upon British sentiment. In this respect Laurens blazed a trail which the most successful of his followers have steadfastly pursued. Unofficially he set a precedent for Anglo-American diplomacy.2 The first official mission of the new republic to the mother country was headed by John Adams. Under the awkward conditions of a first independent mission to a nation which so long had governed us, a resolute attention to his duties was more important for the diplomat than tact or charm or even fame. If the intellectual interests of Adams were less catholic than those of the versatile Franklin and the many-sided Jefferson, his comprehension of commercial matters and his attention to business and detail left nothing to desire.

Arriving at London in May of 1785, Adams was promptly received at Court. The occasion itself possessed diplomatic significance, as the agents of foreign powers watched with profound attention the degree of courtesy which the Court was prepared to manifest, any lack of civility being calculated to injure American prestige. Of his first reception Adams had indeed no cause to complain. Lord Carmarthen, the minister for foreign affairs, escorted him to the palace in a State coach. The King received him graciously. At his departure, the footman summoned with great éclat "Mr. Adams's servants, Mr. Adams's carriage." The minister's standing at Court being assured, the problems of business still confronted him.3

2 Wallace, David Duncan, The Life of Henry Laurens (New York, 1915), pages 355-419.

8 Details of the mission can be found, of course, in standard histories of the United States and in texts. The close student will read Adams' own account, to be found in his published Works.

Formal courtesy was doubtless all that an American agent could anticipate in circumstances so embarrassing to England, and Adams had no previous illusions that his bed would be of roses. Nevertheless the tack which the British government actually pursued was in the highest degree baffling to the man of business that he was. Carmarthen, the foreign secretary, granted him all the audiences which he sought, and Adams was encouraged to enumerate his arguments and expound his case in all the issues under controversy. But the response was a silence complete and impenetrable. Adams would speak at length on the slaves transported by Sir Guy Carleton, on the impossibility of Congressional coercion of states in the matter of the debts, on the unwisdom of a British tariff certain to provoke retaliation, on the losses of the fur trade and the injustice of retaining the frontier posts. The walls alone echoed his remarks, the British minister wrapping himself in an unbroken silence.

After interviews so unsatisfactory, Adams welcomed an opportunity to deal more directly with the real head of the State, William Pitt the Younger, already in the full tide of that great career the climax of which was to be the undoing of Napoleon. Pitt heard him with a courtesy equal to that of Carmarthen. And on one point at least the American minister and the Great Commoner agreed, for Pitt was quick to recognize that compensation was due for the seizure of the slaves. The minister could see no profit in abandoning the tariff, yet while he repeatedly asserted British right to the measures already taken, he conceded America's right to such retaliation as lay within her power.*

For the next three years, until the return of Adams to America, British silence was unvaried. Adams raged at the impotence to which he was personally condemned by the impotence of his government at home, and his constant advice while at London and after his return was to establish a vigorous and uniform commercial policy. No European

4 The relations between Adams and Pitt are discussed from a broadminded English viewpoint by John Holland Rose in his Life of William Pitt. (New York, 1924.)

power, it seemed to him, would grant us any favors save as their refusal might provoke retaliation. Nor would any power make the miscalculation of supposing under existing circumstances that either the Thirteen States severally or their Congress collectively could maintain a united front. If South Carolina should refuse to import goods from a country that taxed her indigo, would New England uphold her by a refusal to export her masts and ship timbers? Hardly. Thus the experience of the diplomat reënforced the lessons of domestic commerce and the disagreements of the various states in their revelation of the need for a strong government.

While Adams was at London, a certain embarrassment inhered in the circumstance that relations were not reciprocal. Great Britain was not represented officially in the United States. To employ a phrase now current in a somewhat different sense, her representatives were "unofficial observers." Lieutenant Colonel George Beckwith, who had been in Revolutionary days an associate of Sir Guy Carleton, was employed by him in his subsequent capacity as Lord Dorchester and Governor of Canada to gather information in the States. Beckwith's findings were referred to Whitehall, and led in 1789 to his appointment by Lord Grenville as unofficial agent to the Federal Government at New York. Here one of his objectives was the fostering of Anglophile sentiment. Another was the cultivation of secession sentiment throughout the West."

Reaching New York before Jefferson arrived from Paris, Beckwith established those friendly relations with Alexander Hamilton which were destined to be continued by Hammond, who in 1791 was the first minister officially appointed by Great Britain to her lately revolted colonies. Contact between the British minister and a personality so powerful as Hamilton's introduced a dangerous wedge into the conduct of American foreign policy. For a British minister, in his dealing with Jefferson as the recognized Secretary of State, could ordinarily feel comfortably assured that Hamilton, whose influence with the Administration was fully 5 Bemis, Samuel Flagg, Jay's Treaty, pages 41-48.

equal to his rival's, would hold quite other views. But this is anticipating. It is sufficient for the present to take note that an evidence of the Confederation's weakness was the unwillingness of Great Britain to reciprocate in diplomatic courtesies. Adams resigned in 1790. Washington then assigned a temporary appointment at London to Gouverneur Morris, but he took care not to commission Thomas Pinckney, our second fully accredited minister, until Great Britain formally sent George Hammond to our shores in 1791.

THE FRONTIER AS A FACTOR IN DIPLOMACY

While Adams was still at London and arriving at no result in the Northwest boundary and its related disputes, the boundary on the southwest offered almost equal embarrassments. At the peace of 1763, France had ceded to Spain all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi. Of this territory, Spain did not take full possession, however, until 1769. England, to whom fell the territories east of the river, was far more prompt in occupying them, and her province of West Florida really amounted to a fourteenth colony. Numerous Loyalists poured into it on the eve of and during the Revolution. The brutal conduct of a certain Willing, who posed as an American patriot, still further clinched the loyalty of the region. At this one point of the struggle Spanish aid really counted, and the valiant Don Galvez, youthful governor of Louisiana, aided some American levies in expelling the British authorities. During the twenty years of British control, West Florida extended from the Mississippi on the west to the Chattahoochee and the Appalachicola on the east, and from the line of 32° 28′ on the north to that of 31° on the south. The rich lands from this second line south to the Island of Orleans and the Gulf had never been British. But when, as we have seen, in a clause of the treaty of 1783, the American boundary was pushed to 31° in defiance of Spanish claims to the conquest of British West Florida, the indignation of His Catholic Majesty was intense. His wrath surpassed all bounds when he learned that by a secret article of the treaty, the Americans