The Historian's Perspective
Detail of a portrait of John Jay. (Courtesy of
the Library of Congress)
Inventing American Diplomacy
by R.B. Bernstein
In 1783, the expatriate artist Benjamin West began what became his
most memorable painting, “The Peacemakers.” West intended
to produce a group portrait of the diplomats whose negotiations resulted
in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, but the British diplomats refused to
sit for the portrait, and West had to leave it unfinished. The Americans
who sat for the portrait seem to embody the virtues of diplomacy, in
particular a calm collegiality uniting the new nation’s diplomats.
John Jay stands to the left, grim and resolute. Beside him sit John
Adams, looking weary but tranquil; Benjamin Franklin, the only one looking
out at the viewer, with a faint smile on his face suggesting his pleasure
with the negotiations’ results; and his grandson, William Temple
Franklin, the American delegation’s secretary, leaning with head
on hand looking pensive and attentive. Behind the two Franklins stands
Henry Laurens, looking anxious and worn, as befitted a man who had spent
nearly two years as an imprisoned guest of George III in the Tower of
London.
“The Peacemakers” shows no sign of the discord that raged
among these diplomats and their colleagues, nor between the Americans
and their adversaries the British and their allies the French. It gives
no clue to the slapdash, turbulent, and conflicted history for which
the treaty was the culmination. Nor does it suggest that the treaty
spawned a turbulent history that led to the Constitution of the United
States.
It is important to remember that independence from Britain was more
than just a severing of ties between the United States and its former
mother country. It created the chance for the United States to establish
its presence in the community of nations. Thus the American Revolution
not only created the United States; it was the catalyst for the invention
of American diplomacy.
Even before the war began, the thought of independence led Americans
to explore securing support from Britain’s European rivals. In
late 1775, the Second Continental Congress created a Committee of Secret
Correspondence to make covert feelers toward foreign powers. That committee
authorized the Connecticut merchant Silas Deane to undertake a confidential
mission to France, Once independence was declared, Congress decided
to bolster its diplomatic presence in France. It named Benjamin Franklin
of Pennsylvania, perhaps the most famous and eminent American in the
world, and Arthur Lee of Virginia, to join Deane as a team of diplomats
seeking recognition from France. Franklin led this series of negotiations,
meeting with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. At
the same time, he also conducted a shrewd and well-crafted campaign
of public relations to make the American cause the toast of Paris and
the central issue of the time. Clad in modest dress topped by a fur-trimmed
hat, taking on the role of an ingenuous American farmer-philosopher
from the banks of the Delaware, Franklin proved a master of political
theater. Even with all these efforts, which he maintained throughout
his diplomatic service, Franklin needed to prove to the skeptical Vergennes
and his colleagues that the Americans could make effective use of the
aid they sought. Not until news of the American victory at the Battle
of Saratoga in October 1777 reached Paris could Franklin induce the
French to enter into a formal treaty of alliance between France and
the United States.
Unfortunately for Franklin, his colleagues bickered with each other
and with him – a characteristic that dominated the earliest years
of American diplomacy. Of the various representatives that Congress
sent to Europe, only Franklin had extensive previous experience in the
Old World, and only Franklin possessed the talents and abilities essential
to the mission’s success. Deane was out of his depths and defensive;
Lee was wary of everyone but himself, suspecting Deane of corruption
and Franklin of being susceptible to French influence and flattery.
He tended to voice these suspicions not only in arguments with his colleagues
but in letters to his political allies in Congress.
More than personal animosity underlay these divisions and disputes.
Most Americans had been steeped in distrust and fear of Catholic France
since the days of the colonial wars, and many Americans' felt that their
own country was innocent and virtuous while Europe, in particular France,
was decadent and corrupt. This feeling sparked American wariness that
decadence and corruption might gain too much influence over America
in general and its diplomats in particular.
Franklin found having to deal with Deane and Lee bad enough –
but in some ways things were about to get worse. In 1777, Congress sent
one of its leading members, John Adams of Massachusetts, to Paris to
help secure an alliance with France. Unfortunately Adams arrived in
early 1778, after the establishment of the alliance. Feeling all but
useless and frustrated by his uselessness, Adams also became aghast
at what he considered Franklin's sloppiness in keeping records and Franklin's
preference for convivial dinners and banquets over the hard work of
diplomacy.
Adams did not understand Franklin's mastery of indirect diplomacy conducted
under the guise of social engagements. But at the same time Franklin
did not understand Adams's lawyerly conception of diplomacy. For Adams,
a diplomat was a lawyer for his country, committed to argue for its
interests. Adams concluded that the Comte de Vergennes was insufficiently
committed to the American cause – and, in some measure, Adams
was correct, for Vergennes put France’s interests first, and saw
the American cause as a means for France to humble and injure its old
enemy Great Britain. Determined to defend American interests from French
indifference, Adams lobbied, pressured, argued with, and even berated
Vergennes. In return, Vergennes pressed Congress to recall the troublesome
Adams.
In June of 1779, overcome by frustration, Adams welcomed the news from
home that he could leave France for America. He soon returned to the
fray, however, sailing back to Paris at the end of 1779, named as the
American commissioner to negotiate a treaty of peace with Britain. French
objections to Adams as the sole appointment for such an important diplomatic
task eventually led Congress to name four other diplomats to join Adams
as a commission of diplomats -- Benjamin Franklin; John Jay, a polished
and suave New Yorker who had spent two years seeking without avail to
establish a treaty of alliance with Spain; Thomas Jefferson, a diplomatic
and genial Virginian who was friendly with both Adams and Franklin;
and Henry Laurens, a powerful figure in South Carolina. Jefferson, however,
was unable to set sail for Europe before the commission concluded its
work, and Laurens was captured by a British ship, arrested for treason,
and jailed in the Tower of London, where he languished until he was
exchanged for General Cornwallis in 1781 Thus, Franklin, Adams, and
Jay comprised the team entrusted with the fate of the United States.
John Jay held Adams and Franklin in a careful, tenuous, ever-shifting
balance. More suspicious of France than Franklin (as a descendant of
French Huguenot Protestants, Jay still remembered with bitterness the
persecution of his family by French Catholics in the late sixteenth
century), but more diplomatic in style and manner than the blustery
Adams, Jay tipped the scales decisively among the American commissioners.
Congress had directed the American diplomats always to coordinate and
work in close contact with their French counterparts in any negotiations
with Britain. But Adams distrusted the French and John Jay, a descendant
of French Huguenot Protestants who had been persecuted by the Catholic
majority in the late 16th century, was also more suspicious of France
than Franklin. Thus Adams and Jay persuaded Franklin that their best
course of action was to open direct talks with the British and seek
a separate peace. According to legend, the three men were smoking in
front of a fireplace at Franklin's rented house at Passy, just outside
Paris, when Franklin asked Jay, "Would you break our instructions?"
Jay supposedly threw his pipe into the fireplace, where it shattered,
and answered, "I would break our instructions as soon as I would
break that pipe."
Thus in late 1782, the American diplomats and their British counterparts
began the subtle, difficult, and complex negotiations that ended in
late 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. The situation of the negotiations
was complex. France was bound to Spain by secret agreements to recover
Gibraltar from the British and some British factions did not want to
concede American independence despite Cornwallis’s surrender British
diplomats were prepared to insist that the United States make good on
the losses suffered by Loyalists, whose property was confiscated and
British merchants, to whom Americans owed considerable debts. Americans,
on the other hand, were determined to secure access to the fisheries
of the Gulf of Mexico and the Canadian Atlantic coast.
Americans faced several additional problems. It was difficult to keep
Congress informed of the negotiations, for messages carried across the
Atlantic could take as long as two months to reach their intended destination.
Congress itself was wracked by internal political divisions, and this
led to sometimes conflicting instructions and advice and demands reaching
the American diplomats in Paris. Suspicions that agents of rival European
powers were seeking to influence Congress further complicated the diplomats’
task. And there was always the need to be on guard against espionage
agents, hoping to discover American intentions and willing to sow disinformation
to all parties involved in the negotiations.
For the most part Franklin, Adams and Jay managed to bury their differences
so that they could effectively deal with the British diplomats. Adams
managed to secure American access to the fisheries of the Canadian coast,
and Franklin parried British claims for reparations for Loyalists by
arguing that those claims had to be set off against American claims
against Britain for property destroyed in the war.
The preliminary articles of peace between Britain and the United States
which served as the basis for the final treaty, (1) recognized American
independence, (2) ceded to the United States all territory held by Great
Britain between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River, (3)
recognized American rights of access to the Newfoundland fisheries in
Canada, (4) required the American states to make good on any valid legal
claims of Loyalist refugees or British subjects against American debtors,
and (5) gave up any attempt to seek compensation for by Loyalists and
British subjects for lost property.
Although the Treaty of Paris brought a triumphant end to the war with
Great Britain, and was one of the greatest achievements of the American
government operating under the Articles of Confederation, it also left
a legacy of political and constitutional uncertainty. The United States
had great difficulty inducing the individual states to see that legitimate
debts were paid to Loyalist and British creditors. In retaliation, the
British refused to withdraw their forces from forts in the Old Northwest).
Further, Britain refused to give Americans “most favored nation”
status in commercial relations, injuring American trade. The treaty’s
most important consequence, perhaps, was that it highlighted the Confederation’s
inability to defend American interests abroad or enforce the terms of
the treaty. This contributed to a movement to revise—or replace—the
Articles of Confederation. The Treaty of Paris was thus a step-parent
of the Constitution of the United States.
R. B. Bernstein is Distinguished Adjunct
Professor of Law at New York Law School and author of The Founding
Fathers Reconsidered and Thomas Jefferson.
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