Born in 1754 in Newry, Ireland, Robert Montgomery was a commission merchant who would come to represent the United States as consul to Alicante, Spain, for roughly thirty years.  Other than his long service, he typified early American consuls, who frequently were born outside of the U.S.  and were usually merchants.  This paper uses Montgomery to illustrate the nature of American consuls, who were typically the only representatives of the United States within their areas of posting.  It addresses questions such as: How did merchant consuls balance personal business with state business?  How did they balance their identity as cosmopolitan merchants with their role as national representatives?  And, most generally, how did they, as the Americans most frequently in contact with non-Americans, help to determine what it meant to be an American?

Lawrence A. Peskin is an associate professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and a visiting fellow at ANU.  A student of early American political economy and America in international context, his books include Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Johns Hopkins, 2003), Captives and Countrymen: Barbary “slavery” and the American Public Sphere, 1785-1816 (Johns Hopkins, 2009), and America and the World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Johns Hopkins, 2011.  Co-authored with Edmund F. Wehrle).