When fifty-six delegates to the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they were not simply communicating with their former sovereign and parliament in Great Britain. They were also sending a message to the entire world, represented both in their appeal to universally applicable natural law in the introduction and preamble and in their assertion that as “Free and Independent States,” they had the right to “levy war” and “contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” By doing so, they established an immediate need to conduct diplomacy.
Yet as the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Samuel Flagg Bemis relates in his classic 1935 study The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, the Americans were entering into a dangerous world of intrigue and trickery. Eighteenth-century European diplomacy, notes Bemis, was defined by “Machiavellian” greater powers in a “cynical and brutal” world that was indifferent to the concerns or interest of the people groups whose territories suffered the regular incursions and violence of modern armies: “No ruler trusted another, not even a blood relative and treaty ally. No government could rely on the fulfilment of a treaty, unless by calculating it to be to the interest of the obligated party.”
Yet when fighting between colonists and British regulars first began in 1775, the Americans didn’t have a single experienced diplomat. From the perspective of the great powers of Europe, the colonists were a backwater colony of country rubes, easily exploited by seasoned government ministries on the continent.
A handful of Americans would prove them wrong. Alongside the Declaration of Independence, the founders simultaneously appointed a committee to draft a series of treaties to be discussed with foreign countries, especially with France, whom the Americans believed was their most natural ally against Britain. The committee included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Benjamin Harrison, and Robert Morris. They soon produced a report that featured several proposed articles for treaties of “commerce and amity” with foreign powers, which they dubbed the “Plan of 1776.”
Congress then drew up instructions for American diplomats sent to the continent, urging them to solicit the Court of France for arms and ammunition. Congress also told the commissioners that if Spain was reluctant to support the American cause because of “Apprehension of Danger to his Dominions in South America,” they were given the authority to offer assurances to the Spanish crown that it would “receive no Molestation from the United States.”