The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service 1776â1924. Revised Second Edition. Charles Stuart Kennedy
legally naturalized is insupportable.”23
David Bailie Warden, born in Ireland, had at an early age ardently espoused the Irish cause. The British authorities, aware of Warden’s activities, gave him the choice of arrest or departure to another country. He left in 1799 for the United States and accepted a teaching position at the Kingston Academy in Ulster County, New York. In 1804 he became a citizen and almost immediately joined General John Armstrong as private secretary when Armstrong went to Paris as the American minister. On Armstrong’s departure in 1810 Warden was appointed consul in Paris and agent for prize cases, which apparently meant that he was to adjudicate disputes over prizes rather than to take charge of all prize cases in France.24
Minister Crawford, Armstrong’s successor, unhappy over the consular discord, wrote Lee that the matter had given him
great pain. The acrimony of the style [of correspondence] is of itself highly objectionable, but the charges of falsehood and of crime on one side, and of ignorance and arrogance on the other, are extremely reprehensible. It is probable that this correspondence has been submitted to the Minister of Commerce. What opinion must he entertain on the character of persons whom the United States thought proper to clothe with a portion of their confidence and of their power? If Officers of the United States in France cannot think better of each other I hope they will cease to publish their opinions and that in their communications to me they will not indulge that asperity of language which I feel much reason to reprehend in this present case.25
Despite his rebuke to Lee, Crawford found that in the case of the Maria the conduct of the consul in Bordeaux had been correct. He noted that Warden was not the consul general in Paris. Warden was removed from his consular position under a cloud for claiming more authority than was rightfully his, but he stayed on in Paris. Later Warden performed a valuable service to the consular establishment by writing a book on the origin and history of consuls. For his part, Lee was almost successful in a plot with some French naval officers to spirit Napoleon to America after Waterloo and the emperor’s flight from the British.
During the War of 1812 other consuls had more important matters than squabbling over the sale of rotting codfish. American privateers used neutral ports to sell their prizes or refit their own ships. As noted earlier, the consuls in Tunis and Tripoli were unable to prevent the British navy from sailing into these supposedly neutral harbors and, with the cooperation of the Barbary rulers, retaking ships that American privateers had sent there as prizes. Consuls’ protests were in vain since the United States Navy had been driven from the Mediterranean.
When the war ended in 1815, American consuls returned to England and other ports they had been forced to leave in 1812. The war in Europe also ended after Waterloo; the systems of licenses and blockades were mercifully stopped so that trade could resume its normal pattern. Even the Barbary corsairs were no longer the menace they had been for centuries, and the Mediterranean was open for merchant ships of all nations.
American consuls returned to their more ordinary activities of promoting trade, reporting on both the quick recovery of the American merchant marine after its devastation during the war years and the growth of commerce between the United States and Europe. Sailors were still being stranded; they ran out of money and raised hell in the port bars and brothels, but these were now comparatively easy matters for consuls to settle with the local police, and there were plenty of American ships to take their wayward charges home.
The long period of the French-British wars, American involvement first with the French and then with the British, and the Barbary problems proved the value of having consuls throughout the trading world. American consuls themselves had shown their own worth at a difficult time. The link between U.S. consuls and their navy was stoutly forged, each dependent on the other when situations became tense abroad, one serving as the eyes and the other as the arms of the growing American influence beyond its territorial waters. The American merchant fleet was also dependent on its consuls for protecting its sailors and helping in trading activities. Considering that the U.S. government paid only the four Barbary consuls and the two agents for seamen in London and the West Indies, while all the other consuls worked for what fees they could derive from their office, the American people got a bargain.
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