Diplomats like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams won the war of words.

As we celebrate our semiquincentennial anniversary, we Americans naturally focus our attention on events related to government and war: the grand political document that is our Declaration of Independence; George Washington’s courageous crossing of the Delaware. Yet there is another element to our nation’s founding, one no less necessary to secure the independence of the thirteen colonies: diplomacy. Though it is a story less revered than those of what our forefathers achieved in Philadelphia and Trenton, the unlikely achievements of America’s first diplomats ensured the patriots’ success on the battlefield and the preservation of their fledgling republic.

When fifty-six delegates to the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they were not simply communicating with their former sovereign and parliament in Great Britain. They were also sending a message to the entire world, represented both in their appeal to universally applicable natural law in the introduction and preamble and in their assertion that as “Free and Independent States,” they had the right to “levy war” and “contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” By doing so, they established an immediate need to conduct diplomacy.

Yet as the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Samuel Flagg Bemis relates in his classic 1935 study The Diplomacy of the American Revolution, the Americans were entering into a dangerous world of intrigue and trickery. Eighteenth-century European diplomacy, notes Bemis, was defined by “Machiavellian” greater powers in a “cynical and brutal” world that was indifferent to the concerns or interest of the people groups whose territories suffered the regular incursions and violence of modern armies: “No ruler trusted another, not even a blood relative and treaty ally. No government could rely on the fulfilment of a treaty, unless by calculating it to be to the interest of the obligated party.”

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