Most historians of the formative generations of the United States have focused (and still do) on a story of nation building that is centered on the creation of domestic institutions, identity, and westward expansion. Events outside the United States – usually the Barbary Wars and, later, the Mexican War, are relegated to diplomatic historians, a group that, for the last fifty years has been seen as a fusty relic of the age of political history and American exceptionalism.
But not all Americans lived within the boundaries of the United States, and non-Americans were more likely to meet citizens and representatives of the new nation where they lived – in Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia. Three Consuls examines these encounters and the experiences and impact of Americans living in what Fernand Braudel termed the Mediterranean littoral.
Why choose the Mediterranean? After the American Revolution, the new nation was no longer part of the British Empire, which meant it could no longer count on the favorable trading terms that the King and Parliament provided. In fact, angry members of Parliament were now trying to stymie trade from the upstart competitor. The wartime alliance with France, the relative absence of British control in the Mediterranean region, and the promise of good markets in American fish and West Indian products all pointed American shipping into that region.
But, both then and now, commerce does not just happen magically. Merchants need an infrastructure of treaties and welcoming ports, naval protection, willing and trustworthy trading partners, able seamen, insurers, and, crucially, national representatives who can smooth over any problems that arise. That’s where consuls come in. In the absence of other diplomats in the region (the only high level American diplomat in the region was in Madrid roughly 200 miles away from the Mediterranean shore) they used their local connections to smooth over all concerns of American shipping ranging from runaway sailors to the outbreak of wars.
After ratifying the Constitution, the United States went on a spree of appointing consuls. The bulk went to Mediterranean ports, where commerce looked most promising. Initially, most were not what we would today consider American citizens, largely because there just weren’t that many Americans living in the region. This quickly raised a question of identity: who could be considered American? Those living abroad, and many living in the United States, adopted a broad notion of Americanness which made sense in a period when no adult Americans had been born in the United States (they would have been born in the British empire) and the idea of the nation-state itself was inchoate.
These new, mostly foreign-born consuls formed a nucleus around which a larger community began to form. By the early nineteenth century hundreds of Americans – consuls, merchants, captains, naval officers, seamen and others — lived permanently or part-time in the region. They were the outward face of the United States. The more that arrived, the more their connections to the new nation strengthened, and the more they began to sketch a new American identity based on economic and social networks rather than territorial citizenship.
The main motivation for becoming a consul was that it provided access to American shipping networks. As a result, most consuls were merchants who felt that their interests were the interests of the United States at large, much as General Motors would supposedly claim in the twentieth century. They became instrumental in expanding American trading networks, which, in turn, helped to define American identity and community within the Mediterranean. Similarly, their consular work, which involved meeting and assisting Americans, further cemented a sense of American identity among the consuls and the others whom they assisted as well as bringing the United States and its interests to the attention of local officials in the Mediterranean.
One of the three consuls, Robert Montgomery, is a good example of all of these developments. Born in Newry, Ireland around 1754, he spent only a few years living in Philadelphia. They were formative years, though, as he trained to be a merchant with influential relatives and began to work in the Montgomery family shipping business. He discovered Alicante in the early 1770s and began making big profits there because rival British merchants had been expelled due to Spain’s role in the American Revolution. He decided to set up shop and stay, in part because of poor health, and he never returned to the United States again.
Robert Montgomery, Jr., son of the longtime Alicante consul eventually moved to Colombia in newly-independent Latin America (picture in author’s possession).
Still, he considered himself American and went so far as to go up to Paris to have Benjamin Franklin give him a certificate to that effect during the war – in part so that Spanish officials could not expel him as a British merchant. Over the years his consular work, which involved numerous contacts with other American officials, merchants, and mariners, tied him tightly to the American network and reinforced his American identity (though rivals would occasionally question it). He became the face of the United States through most of eastern Spain and even appointed a network of American vice consuls who responded directly to him.
Over the years Montgomery became very rich. Initially, when the British were expelled from Spain, he was one of the only merchants with access to North American fish and western European goods that were needed in Spain, leading to massive profits. Later, when he became American consul, like many of his colleagues he profited from his job which gave him first access to American ships, many of which were looking for local merchants with contacts to sell their goods, a role that Montgomery and others also found very profitable. While the neutral commerce of the Napoleonic Wars continued, there was plenty of profit to go around and conflicts of interest between public and private roles were minimized.
Finally, like other consuls, Montgomery spent most of his life outside of the United States. He married, raised a family, and worried about the future of his adult children in Spain. He and other Americans were a double minority in Spain – American and non-Catholic (in Islamic North Africa their otherness was even more apparent). As a minority he was often not particularly welcome, found it difficult to find a marital partner, educate his children, and find them spouses. For him and other Americans, the small community in Mediterranean Spain became crucial for fulfilling all of these needs.
Like most Americans in the region, Montgomery and his family continued to thrive until the final chapter of the Napoleonic Wars wrecked eastern Spain and then left England and France in control of what little remained of the Mediterranean trade. His sons, Robert Jr. and Frederick, departed for developing markets in newly-independent Latin America, as did many others in the American Mediterranean community. There, frustrated with the weakness and disorganization of the American navy and State Department, they distanced themselves from the United States and joined the British community and the local Catholic elite.
Carrer de Montgomit is probably the only physical remnant of the Montgomery family’s time in Alicante and the likely site of their home and vineyards.
As a result, the trading community in the Mediterranean no longer represented the cutting edge of American interests. Instead, American energy now focused on new lands conquered west of the Mississippi and, later still toward influencing the area south of the Rio Grande. This created new forms of capitalism and imperialism quite different from what had existed in the Mediterranean community. The trading community represented by the three consuls was militarily weak, dependent on diplomacy, focused on overseas trade, and composed of those who identified with the Untied States and its interests by choice. The new continental imperialism, by contrast, would be militarily aggressive, skeptical of diplomacy, tied to domestic markets, and composed solely of formal citizens of the United States.
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