Reviews

Abstract

To the Editors: We are extremely honored that the AHR reviewed our book Thomas Barclay (1728–1793): Consul in France, Diplomat in Barbary (AHR, February 2010, 222–223). And we thank Lawrence A. Peskin for his judicious and thoughtful review. However, one of his statements perplexes us. Referring to Barclay, Professor Peskin writes that “Samuel Flagg Bemis suggested that he may have been a British secret agent during the American Revolution, a charge that Roberts and Roberts find unconvincing.” Nowhere in our study of Barclay's life and career do we write, nor in our research did we find, anything to suggest that Bemis or anyone else ever thought Barclay “may have been a British secret agent.” The works by Bemis that we consulted—“British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” AHR 29, no. 3 (April 1924): 474–495; “Secret Intelligence, 1777: Two Documents,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (May 1961): 233–249; Pinckney's Treaty: America's Advantage from Europe's Distress, 1783–1800 (1960); and The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1957)—have no mention of Barclay. In The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (1963), Bemis does give “our” Thomas Barclay a few lines, but in the Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States, 1775–1921 (1963), he confuses American consul and diplomat Barclay (1728–1793) with the New York–born Loyalist of the same name (1753–1830) who served as British consul-general for over twenty years, a Bemis confusion we mention in our introduction (pp. 18–19). Perhaps Professor Peskin was misled by that or by our discussion (p. 336 n. 16) of Bemis's suggestion that William Carmichael may have been a British secret agent.