The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service 1776â1924. Revised Second Edition. Charles Stuart Kennedy
(1776–1789)
The Revolutionary War period (1775–83) was not the time for the creation of a well-structured consular service. It was a period of ad hoc diplomacy with the niceties of diplomatic and consular titles and their functions being left to agents of Congress. This new Congress itself was in constant danger of being snuffed out by the powerful British armies prowling through the rebelling thirteen colonies. American interests abroad were limited to securing foreign backing, financial and military, obtaining munitions and other essential supplies, and gaining support for the small American naval forces, including privateers, in European waters. During the war foreign affairs were the direct responsibility of Congress; questions of both major and minor importance had to be settled by a vote.
In March 1776, four months prior to the Declaration of Independence, Congress sent one of its members, Silas Deane, to France. He was initially given the designation of “commercial agent,” but he was also to sound out the French as to a possible alliance, thus mixing consular and diplomatic functions, an assignment that would happen often in the American consular service.1
The term “commercial agent” will be encountered again. The duties of commercial agents for the American colonies were almost indistinguishable in most matters from those of consuls, but during the hectic times of the American Revolution commercial agents, starting with Silas Deane, bore greater responsibilities than just seeing to American mercantile interests.
Deane eventually settled in Paris as one of three commissioners; the others were Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin, who acted as unofficial American ministers to the court of Louis XVI. As the first American commercial agent, Deane was instrumental in establishing the machinery that would funnel French aid to the Americans.2 Prior to the entry of France into the war with Great Britain in 1778, the French king’s ministers not only allowed American commercial agents to assist the fledgling Continental Navy but also permitted American privateers to fit out in French ports and use those same ports to sell off the proceeds from the prizes they had taken. Deane and the agents who followed him were a combination of military purchasing agents, naval storekeepers, and consuls. They acted as consular officers when dealing with local authorities and as sharp businessmen in purchasing supplies for the American cause taking a percentage of the procurement costs to put in their own pockets. The system was full of flaws, hastily organized by desperate men with little experience in obtaining and shipping government supplies. Both French and American suppliers and agents undoubtedly took full advantage of the makeshift channel, but the fact remains that Silas Deane and his successors were able to pump vital supplies to the revolutionary armies. Ninety percent of the powder used by the American revolutionaries in the first two and a half years of the war came from Europe, mainly from France.3
One of the first American commercial agents in France was Thomas Morris. His appointment was based on nepotism and arranged by Robert Morris, one of the wealthiest men in the American colonies, a member of Congress who was known as “the financier of the American Revolution” for his astute management of the meager financial resources of the former colonies. Thomas Morris was his illegitimate half-brother and had been reared by him. But young Thomas had acquired both bad companions and dissipated habits.4 A change of scene was felt to be the solution to Thomas’s problems; his brother sent him to the French port of Nantes as the American commercial agent and as agent for the Philadelphia firm of Willing and Morris. This firm had control over vessels taken as prizes and brought to Nantes by the small but effective Continental Navy and American privateers. The firm also purchased and shipped supplies and munitions to the rebellious colonies. Morris was in charge of what amounted to a gold mine since the family firm took a commission, quite legitimately, from transactions dealing with prizes, supplies, and munitions. The Atlantic crossing, however, had not changed Thomas; he kept his profligate habits and acquired a new set of bad companions in the French port.
By the spring of 1778 the two American commissioners then in Paris, Deane and Franklin, concerned about the situation in Nantes, asked Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams, who was visiting his uncle, to go to the port and put matters right. Williams was to take prize-vessel cases out of the hands of Thomas Morris and deal directly with the privateer and naval captains.5 The matter became more confused when William Lee, one of the Lees of Virginia and brother of Arthur Lee, the third commissioner in Paris, arrived in Nantes. Lee, who was to have been the commissioner of Congress to the courts of Vienna and Berlin but had not been accepted by them, stayed on in Nantes to lend a “helping hand.” Instead of assisting Jonathan Williams, William Lee sided with Thomas Morris against Williams.
Silas Deane had left Paris under a cloud and was replaced by John Adams. The three American commissioners, Franklin, Arthur Lee and Adams, backed away from a confrontation over who had authority over commercial agents and left William Lee in charge.6 Lee appointed two agents, Jean-Daniel Schweighauser in Nantes and John Bonfield in Bordeaux.7 Meanwhile Thomas Morris died, perhaps of dissipation. William Lee eventually settled in Paris, leaving his agents to work in the port cities.
The Nantes affair demonstrated major weaknesses that were to plague the American consular service for the next 130 years. These flaws were patronage and profit. Men with political influence, such as Lee, Morris, and Franklin, had no qualms about placing family members in positions of public service where they could make a commission off the government goods and services that had to pass through their hands.
Article XXXI of the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the America and France stated: “The two contracting parties grant, mutually, the liberty of having each in the ports of the other, consuls, vice-consuls, agents and commissioners, whose functions shall be regulated by a particular agreement.” Franklin and his colleagues expected that Congress would soon appoint some consuls to put American affairs in order in the ports. Franklin, Lee, and Adams suggested in a letter to the president of Congress that in selecting consuls “the choice will fall most justly as well as naturally on Americans, who are, in our opinion, better qualified for this business than any others, and the reputation of such an office, together with a moderate commission on the business they must transact, and the advantages to be derived from trade, will be a sufficient inducement to undertake it, and a sufficient reward for discharging the duties of it.”
Enclosed with this joint letter was a short piece labeled “The Functions of Consuls.” Among the functions described was “to have inspection and jurisdiction, civil as well as criminal, over all the subjects of their states who happen to be in their department, and particularly over commerce and merchants.” A consul should be over thirty. When there were questions that affected “the general affairs of the commerce of his nation,” he should call general assemblies of all merchants and ships’ captains in the port, with penalties for nonattendance. The commissioners went on to describe the consul’s judicial authority. A consul was to be able to “oblige any of his nation to depart if they behave scandalously, and captains are obliged to take them, under a penalty.” There were other provisions for dealing with disputes between consuls and merchants. The piece ended on probably the one practical note, at least in the American context: “If war happens, the Consuls retire.”8
If Franklin and the other two commissioners had really wanted consuls soon, this description of the functions of consuls, obviously taken from the highly authoritarian French instructions, was a serious tactical error. The commissioners had been in France too long and apparently had forgotten that Congress was running a revolution against a distant ruler who had sent his appointed officials to lord it over American colonials. The men in Philadelphia would not tolerate little American Caesars strutting around major ports.
Franklin desperately needed someone to take the problems of the ports and the commercial agents off his hands. In 1779 he wrote the Marine Committee of Congress, asking that no more Continental Navy ships be sent to work out of France, as the prizes they seized only caused “Lawsuits and all the Embarrassment and Solicitation and Vexation attending Suits in this Country.” If, however, the navy was “still ordered to cruise in these seas, a Consul or Consuls may be appointed to the several Sea Ports, who will thereby be more at hand to transact maritime Business expeditiously, will understand it better, relieve your Minister at this court from a great deal of Trouble, and leave him at liberty to attend affairs of more general importance.”9 In other words, no consul, no navy. Franklin, however, did not get his consul