The American Consul

Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.

This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, 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 help to distressed Americans. Appointments were often given to accomplished authors, with notable members including Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and the cartoonist Thomas Nast. Briefly traces the history of consuls from their creation in Ancient Egypt, this volume sheds light on the significant roles American consuls played throughout history, including in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. This second edition continues the narrative to cover World War I, the Greek disaster in Turkey, and the early years of the Weimar Republic.

This book is a history of the United States Consular Service, an unheralded, but significant element in the promotion of American commerce and influence abroad from the Revolution onward. A group of relatively minor officials, appointed by the vagaries of political patronage and virtually ignored by successive Secretaries of State, American consuls were established in most major foreign ports and trading centers early in the history of the Republic. Consular officers were major players in America's overseas presence because of their special responsibility for seamen and shipping. They were the officials most concerned with the Barbary pirates and worked with the United States Navy to remove them from the Mediterranean. Until 1822 they were the only official representative of the U.S. government in the emerging republics of Latin America. American consuls in Britain helped prevent the Confederates from assembling and supplying a fleet out of European ports. The Spanish-American War was essentially a consular war-fought in colonial territories where consuls supplied intelligence and support for American miliary actions. The American Consul is a long overdue history of the Consular Service. It introduces, through brief histories, anecdotes, and vignettes, some of the men sent abroad by an imperfect system to represent our country. It is an evolving chronicle of their contributions to the expansion of American influence from the start of the Revolutionary War to the eve of the First World War, when American diplomats assumed the predominant role in America's foreign relations. This book is must reading for anyone interested in American diplomatic history.

Previous ed.: published as by Karla Zimmerman, Celeste Brash. 2007.

"This is the first-ever biography of Thomas Barclay, the first American consul to serve the United States abroad and the man who, in 1786, successfully negotiated our first treaty with an Arab, African, or Muslim nation. It is the story of an Ulster-born immigrant building his fortune as a Philadelphia merchant in international trade, then losing it as he gives priority to his adopted country's fight to gain and build on independence. It tells how, after emigrating to Philadelphia in the 1760s, Barclay became a leading member of the Irish community, a successful merchant/ship owner, and political activist. This biography follows his move to France with his wife and three small children when the Continental Congress named him consul in 1781. There, before an American consular service existed, before Congress knew a consul from a consul general, Thomas Barclay did whatever was needed, wherever it was needed. To shipping, naval, and other tasks, Congress added an audit of American public expenditures in Europe since 1776. Then Jefferson and Adams added diplomacy in Barbary, where Barclay negotiated a rare tribute-free treaty of commerce and amity with the Sultan of Morocco. His personal relationships with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson reveal as much about them as about him. On assignment for President Washington in 1793, he became the first American diplomat to die in a foreign country in the service of the United States."--BOOK JACKET.