Thomas Barclay (diplomat) - Diplomat in Barbary

Diplomat in Barbary

Thomas Barclay arrived in the Moroccan capital of Marrakech in June 1786, after five months of overland travel and a sea voyage from Cadiz to the Moroccan port of Mogador. After two audiences with the sultan, the draft treaty he had brought from Paris was accepted with only minor changes. When the question of future presents or tribute was informally raised he made it clear that there could be no question of either, or he would have to leave without a treaty. The matter was dropped and Barclay obtained for America a rare treaty with a Barbary power without promise of tribute — large annual payments and/or delivery of military or other goods of value. The treaty was ratified by Congress in July 1787. A United States Department of State official observed in 1967 that, “the basic provisions of the 1787 treaty never been broken, making this the longest unbroken treaty relationship in United States history.”

The treaty meant that American ship captains no longer needed to fear Moroccan corsairs and that the Atlantic shipping lanes to and from Southern Europe were safe for American ships as long as a Portuguese naval squadron at the strait of Gibraltar kept corsairs from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli in the Mediterranean, which it did until long after the United States made peace with Algiers (the principal threat) in 1795 — except for a few disastrous weeks of a truce in 1793 when eleven American ships were seized by Algerine corsairs — at least seven of them in the Atlantic.

In 1791 President George Washington and Secretary of State Jefferson sent Thomas Barclay back to Morocco to reconfirm the US-Morocco treaty with the successor to the late sultan with whom Barclay had negotiated. By the time he reached Gibraltar an internecine battle for the sultanate was underway among the late sultan’s sons. He was told to wait, which he did, reporting to Secretary of State Jefferson often and in detail with news from Morocco and other parts of Barbary.

In December 1792 he received a letter from President Washington asking him to go to Algiers to ransom Americans being held there and to negotiate a treaty with the ruling dey. (Barclay was the backup to John Paul Jones who had died before receiving the instructions.) He immediately went to Lisbon to obtain funds critical to the mission, but on his third day there he took sick. The following day, January 19, 1793, suffering from what the doctors called an inflammation of the lungs, Thomas Barclay died.