Thomas Barclay (diplomat)

Thomas Barclay (diplomat)

Thomas Barclay (1728 – January 19, 1793) was a Philadelphia merchant, America’s first consul in France (1781–1787) and the American diplomat who negotiated America’s first treaty with the sultan of Morocco in 1786. He was the first American diplomat to die in a foreign country in the service of the United States.

Barclay was born in Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, son of Robert Barclay (d. 1779), prosperous linen merchant and ship owner. His mother’s name is unknown, but may have been Carsan. After learning the merchant trade in his father’s business in Strabane, he arrived in Philadelphia around 1764 in his mid-thirties. There he was active in the large Irish community, where he was a founding member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick (1771), and he became a successful merchant and ship-owner. His firm played a big role in the Irish trade – especially in the export of flax seed and the import of linen and other dry goods. As time passed, the firm’s ships were increasingly seen in the ports of England, southern Europe, the Caribbean, and occasionally the Mediterranean.

In 1770 Thomas Barclay married Mary Hoops in Philadelphia. Born in 1750 in western Pennsylvania, Mary had moved to Philadelphia with her family at the age of eleven. She was one of eight children of Adam Hoops (1708–1771) and Elizabeth Finney Hoops (1720–1782).

Thomas Barclay’s first decade in Philadelphia was a time of growing friction with England that began with the Stamp Act in 1765 and he was an early member of the resistance. A signer of non-importation agreements in 1765 and 1769, he was on the committee that organized the Philadelphia Tea Party in 1773, which used persuasion rather than violence to refuse the British East India Company's tea. He was one of only four men elected a member of the five successive Philadelphia correspondence committees during the resistance years of 1774-1776. He was also elected to the Philadelphia Corporation in 1774, named a deputy delegate to the Provincial conventions in 1774 and 1775, and appointed to the Pennsylvania Navy Board in 1777. Following the outbreak of war with England and the Declaration of Independence he remained politically active. In 1781, when it became clear that William Palfrey, who had been named consul to France, was lost at sea, the Continental Congress named Barclay to the post.