Introduction

Though he probably entertained doubts about Adams’s choice of Elbridge Gerry, a former antifederalist, as one of the three envoys, Hamilton could only applaud the president’s decision in the spring of 1797 to seek satisfaction for French seizures of U.S. ships and to make a final effort to settle Franco-American differences. Gerry, together with the astute, stalwart John Marshall and the dull, dignified Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, formed the three-man commission Hamilton had favored all along. The mission, he knew, was a diplomatic long shot. The French decree of March 2, 1797, had authorized a kind of licensed piracy. All British goods found on U.S. ships were subject to confiscation; U.S. citizens found serving on British ships would be treated as pirates, even if they had been impressed into service; U.S. ships lacking a French-model crew and passenger list, or role d’équipage, would be legitimate prizes. The destination of the U.S. commissioners (they arrived in Paris in early October 1797) has been described as a “catacomb of traffickers, warlords, and bravoes.” Prominent among the traffickers was the mission’s presumed negotiating partner, Talleyrand, who had returned from four years of exile in England and America in 1796. Upon becoming foreign minister in July of 1797, through the influence of a former lover, he laid out his program: “I have to make an immense fortune out of it, a really immense fortune.” When it came to such serious matters, Talleyrand was a man of his word.