Thomas Barclay (diplomat) - Consul in France

Consul in France

October 5, 1781, Thomas and Mary Barclay and their three young children embarked on the ship St. James, Captain Thomas Truxtun, and began a battle- and storm-filled voyage to France. There, working with minister Benjamin Franklin during the last years of the war, most of Barclay’s time was spent in Dutch and French ports arranging the shipment of blankets, clothing and other supplies for General George Washington’s troops. A year after his arrival, the Continental Congress also appointed him commissioner to settle America’s public accounts in Europe since 1776. At about the same time he agreed to be the agent in Europe for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

In August 1784 Thomas Barclay welcomed to Paris John Adams, with whom he had worked in Holland, and Thomas Jefferson. They had been sent to negotiate treaties of friendship and commerce with the maritime states of Europe and the Barbary powers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Libya in North Africa. Jefferson succeeded Franklin as minister to France in late spring of 1785, and from that time on Barclay worked closely with him on trade and other matters.

In the fall of 1785 Jefferson proposed sending Thomas Barclay to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce with the sultan of Morocco, Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdullah, also known as Muhammad III (reigned 1757-1790). John Adams, who was by then serving as minister in London, agreed: "If Mr. Barclay will undertake the voyage, I am for looking no farther. We cannot find a steadier, or more prudent man." Jefferson and Adams were faced with difficult decisions by threats to American shipping from the Barbary corsairs. In October 1784 an American merchantman had been seized in the south Atlantic by a Moroccan corsair; this, the Moroccan sultan had quickly explained, was to get America to send an envoy to negotiate a treaty with him. He had sought this through diplomatic channels for a number of years with no success.