American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service 1776a24. Revised Second Edition

Stuart Kennedy Charles

Description

This book traces the significant history of the U.S. Consular Service, Americas principal representation abroad through most its history. This new edition adds the period 1914 to 1924, after which the Consular Service was integrated with the Diplomatic Service to form the present-day Foreign Service of the United States. This volume thus adds the work of the Consular Service through the end of World War I, the Greek disaster in Turkey, and Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic.Consuls have played an important role in relations between countries from ancient times to the present. Consuls look after the citizens of their respective countries temporarily living elsewhere, and they act as quasi-diplomatic representatives wherever they are located. In this book the author briefly traces the history of consuls from their creation in the Egypt of the Pharaohs to their spread across the sailing routes of the Mediterranean to the rest of the world. The book focuses mainly on the development of the Consular Service of the United States. As a British colony Americans relied on the far-flung British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants, but after the Revolution they had to scramble to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined by protocol to the major capitals of the world, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide adequate help to distressed Americans, mainly seamen. As consular appointments were often used as a reward for authors and other talented people, the American Consular Service could boast of such noteworthy members as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and the cartoonist Thomas Nast. Winston Churchills grandfather was an American consul, as was Fiorello LaGuardia, later mayor of New York. American consuls played significant roles in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I and its aftermath.

Sujets

• Diplomacy
• Diplomatie (homonymie)

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 02 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780986435355
• Langue: English

Extrait

The American Consul

 

Since 1776, extraordinary men and women have represented the United States abroad under widely varying circumstances. What they did and how and why they did it remain little known to their compatriots. In 1995, the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) and DACOR, an organization of foreign affairs professionals, created the Diplomats and Diplomacy book series to increase public knowledge and appreciation of the professionalism of American diplomats and their involvement in world history. The second edition of Charles Stuart Kennedy's history of the U.S. consular service , the definitive work on the subject, is the fifty-fifth volume in the series.
 
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
 
Jonathan Addleton , Mongolia and the United States: A Diplomatic History
ADST , A Brief History of U.S. Diplomacy
Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution
Charles T. Cross , Born a Foreigner: A Memoir of the American Presence in Asia
Peter D. Eicher, ed., “Emperor Dead" and Other Historic American Diplomatic Dispatches
Hermann F. Eilts, Early American Diplomacy in the Near and Far East: The Diplomatic and Personal History of Edmund Q. Roberts (1784–1836)
Stephen H. Grant, Peter Strickland: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal
Michael P. E. Hoyt , Captive in the Congo: A Consul's Return to the Heart of Darkness
Dennis C. Jett , American Ambassadors: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Diplomats
David D. Newsom , Witness to a Changing World
Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History
Nicholas Platt , China Boys: How U.S. Relations with the PRC Began and Grew
James W. Spain, In Those Days: A Diplomat Remembers
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, ed. , China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945–1996
 
For a complete list of series titles, visit < adst.org/publications >

 
 
The American
Consul
 
 
A History of the United States
Consular Service, 1776–1924
 
Revised 2nd Edition
 
 
Charles Stuart Kennedy
 
 
An ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Book
 
 

 
Washington, DC

 
 
 
Copyright © 2015 by Charles Stuart Kennedy
 
New Academia Publishing 2015
First edition, The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776–1914 (Greenwood, 1990)
 
The views and opinions in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, DACOR, Inc., or the Government of the United States.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
 
Published in ebook format by New Academia Publishing
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9864-3535-5 (electronic)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930109
ISBN 978-0-9906939-7-0 paperback (alk. paper)
 
 


Praise
“This book is both a historical record and an introduction to the world of American consuls. The description of the early years of the Republic, with its raffish, sometimes corrupt consular personalities and its first glimmerings of the political spoils system, grows in significance when one considers the modern scandal of political-appointee ambassadors.”
—Diego C. Asencio, former Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs
 
“Charles Stuart Kennedy has produced a well-researched, comprehensively documented and highly readable history of U.S. consuls and the consular service. The scholar, the practitioner or even the young American bent on public service will find The American Consul to be a riveting read.”
—Maura Ann Harty, former Assistant Secretary of State for ConsularAffairs
Preface to the Second Edition
In the intervening years following the publication of this book’s first edition, The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776–1914 (Greenwood, 1990), I hoped that historians would pick up on the important role of American consuls in the development of U.S. relations with the rest of the world. But that did not happen. As the first edition is no longer in print and had been published with a virtually prohibitive price by a firm that caters to the academic library market, I decided to bring out a new edition in paperback.
This new edition adds the period 1914 to 1924, when the Consular Service was integrated with the Diplomatic Service to form the present-day Foreign Service of the United States. This volume thus adds the work of the Consular Service through the end of World War I, the Greek disaster in Turkey, and Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic.
On a personal note, I discovered with some chagrin that I had left out a family member in this tribute to the American Consular Service. A few years ago, well after I had published the book, I was playing with the Internet and noted that an entry regarding my grandfather, a Civil War veteran, referred to his father-in-law––my great grandfather Edmund Jüssen––as a fellow veteran. Checking further I found that Great Granddad had been consul general in Vienna between 1885 and 1889. So this obscure title runs in the family: I was consul general four times.
I want to thank the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Kenneth Brown, Margery Thompson, and Marilyn Bentley for their support in encouraging me to bring out this new edition. The Association generously assigned the following interns to help with the editing of the book, and I thank them all: Jennifer Ricketts, Caroline Lemp, Brad Walvert, Biola Ijadare, Mary Larson, and especially Whitney Kipps, who gave particular attention to polishing the work.
1. Consular Antecedents
The origin of consuls predates that of permanent ambassadors by almost two millennia. The first ambassadors set up residence in foreign countries during the late Middle Ages. An establishment closely approximating a consular service had been created in Egypt in the sixth century B.C. during the reign of the pharaoh Amasis, who, wishing to encourage trade with the Greeks, set aside Naucratis, a city in the Nile Delta, where they could live under their own governors. 1 Those governors had many of the characteristics of modern consuls in that their principal functions were to encourage trade, act as magistrates for their citizens living in Egypt, serve as intermediaries with the Egyptian authorities, and report back to their city-states on political and economic conditions in Egypt. Naucratis was not a Greek colony but existed at the sufferance of the Egyptian Pharaoh, who delegated certain powers to the Greek governors in the manner that countries today will allow foreign consuls to perform certain legal functions for their own citizens.
Having foreign officials in a sovereign country exercising certain authority over their own citizens has a logic that was evident centuries before the exchange of resident ambassadors. The Pharaoh gave the Greeks a place where they were both isolated and protected. Removing them from too much contact with Egyptians also spared the Pharaoh’s officials from having to deal with disputatious foreign traders and kept the foreigners from corrupting his subjects.
The Greek city-state system, and later that of the Romans, had their versions of consuls. But, with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Dark Ages, it was not until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the trading states of Europe began to reassemble their systems of laws, codes, and commercial practices. Gradually merchants in northern Europe (especially members of the Hanseatic League) and the Mediterranean were enabled to enjoy a certain security in knowing that their goods and agents were not completely at the mercy of capricious local magistrates. With the codification of mercantile practices, consuls began to reappear to help merchants of their cities or states on foreign shores. By the thirteenth century Venice had more than thirty consuls placed abroad in Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, and Damascus, as well as in all of the major European ports. 2
As commerce grew, countries and city-states began to send their ambassadors to reside at courts of foreign rulers, rather than to perform a specific mission and then return. These resident ambassadors took away some work consuls had performed, especially in dealing with major problems affecting large numbers of their subjects, but few ambassadors had the interest, experience, or authority to deal with commercial matters, or intercede for merchants or sailors in trouble. Courts and ports were two different worlds, and it took different types of men to deal with each. Even today, although there are attempts to meld professional diplomats with consuls, individual differences in personality and outlook sharply affect preferences for one or the other field of work.
By the eighteenth century the consular network of the major trading nations was well established; consuls in the ports and commercial cities of Europe were gaining respect for their abilities in seeing that the wheels of commerce turning at a proper rate. Some countries appointed their own merchants as consuls, permitting them to continue in private trade while looking after their countries’ interests and collecting fees for their services. Others appointed foreigners as consuls; attracting men who found it worthwhile to represent a foreign power, either because of the honor or because occupying a quasi-legal position gave them certain trade advantages. A few countries, notably France, the dominant European power, had established a professional consular service.
While consuls in European cities enjoyed prestige and often monetary advantages, their colleagues along the north coast of Africa were in a perpetually preca