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MrRodgers -> American dealings with foreign govts. (3/18/2015 5:50:36 PM)
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A History Lesson for the Republicans Who Wrote to Iran.
A very good read and some perspective. Items:
* In 1786, Congressman James White of North Carolina told the Spanish diplomatic envoy Diego de Gardoqui that if the United States made a treaty with Spain that did not guarantee Americans access to the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans, far western North Carolina might declare independence and swear an oath of allegiance to Spain.
*In the spring of 1788, a group from Tennessee and Kentucky, seeking an alliance with the Creek Indians, also declared themselves willing to break away from the United States and become Spanish subjects.
*In 1793, the French emissary, Edmond-Charles Genet, recruited citizens in South Carolina to raise forces to fight with the French against Britain and Spain.
*In 1797, Senator William Blount of Tennessee plotted to invade Spanish Florida with help from the British.
But these attempted negotiations taught Americans and foreigners alike that a decentralized system of foreign relations did not work.
*When Georgians moved west onto Creek Indian land in the mid-1780s and fighting broke out, the War Department could only lamely ask Georgia to let it mediate. But instead of accepting federal authority, the governor of Georgia called out the state militia. Georgia found itself in the middle of a war it could not win alone.
As long as congressmen, state officials and private individuals presumed they had the right to negotiate with foreigners, no foreign government could trust that anyone claiming to speak for the United States actually did.
*Chickasaw Indian leaders told the president of Congress, Elias Boudinot, in July 1783 that they had heard “that the Americans have 13 councils (colonies) composed of chiefs and warriors” and that he was “the head chief of a grand council which is above these 13 councils.” (president of the senate)
People claiming to represent Georgia, Virginia, Illinois smaller groups of settlers had approached the Chickasaws to negotiate. The Chickasaws asked to know who actually spoke for the United States. It became quickly clear that, as a new nation, America needed one voice in negotiations with both Indian nations and European empires in matters of war, peace and traders had approached the Chickasaws to negotiate.
In the Articles of Confederation in 1789 and despite the insistence in the Articles that “no State, without the Consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance, or treaty, with any King, prince or state,” sovereignty rested primarily in the states.
The new Constitution added a president to the nation’s government, which previously had only a Congress.
Increasingly, Americans began to see alternative negotiating as treason. President George Washington and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, put a stop to the French emissary Genet’s recruiting, and Senator Blount left the Senate under threat of impeachment.
When, in 1805, Aaron Burr, right after serving as Jefferson’s vice president, conspired to seize Spanish lands and possibly establish an independent republic, Jefferson declared Burr a traitor and ordered his arrest. Burr was acquitted, but Americans generally agreed with Jefferson that, if Burr had done what he was accused of, he was a traitor.
Here
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