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  • A Quaker Goes to Spain: The Diplomatic Mission of Anthony Morris, 1813–1816 by H. L. Dufour Woolfley
  • Richard K. MacMaster
H. L. Dufour Woolfley. A Quaker Goes to Spain: The Diplomatic Mission of Anthony Morris, 1813–1816 (Lehigh University Press, 2013). Pp. 197. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, $70.

H. L. Dufour Woolfley visited Wyck House in Germantown while researching a biography of William Lloyd and noted possibly relevant archival materials there. Reading a collection of letters Anthony Morris sent from Spain to his daughters in Philadelphia, Woolfley knew that his next project would be to learn more about the man and the diplomatic mission that took him to Spain in 1813. A Quaker Goes to Spain is the result of his quest.

Anthony Morris belonged to an elite of well-to-do Quaker mercantile families. Born in 1766 to Samuel and Rebecca (Wistar) Morris, he [End Page 207] married Israel Pemberton’s granddaughter in 1790. Morris was a successful Philadelphia attorney and a former Pennsylvania state senator when he found himself in straitened circumstances in 1812. Public service was an acceptable way to mend broken fortunes and Anthony Morris aimed at a lucrative consular post in some busy port overseas. Morris had access to the White House through his long friendship with Dolley Payne and her first husband, John Todd. After her second husband became president in 1809, Dolley Madison invited Morris’s eldest daughter Phoebe for extended visits with the first family and launched her in Washington society.

James Madison had no diplomatic post to offer Morris, but early in 1813 he was able to propose his friend be stationed in Bermuda to coordinate prisoner-of-war exchanges with his British counterpart. It was not to be. The British admiral would not countenance an enemy agent at his headquarters. James and Dolley Madison were still determined to help their friend and the president found a place for him. Morris would go to Spain as his personal envoy to persuade the Spanish government to cede Florida to the United States.

Madison made no secret of his intention to acquire both East and West Florida by any means. His instructions to General George Mathews in 1811 were sufficiently vague to offer plausible deniability when the Patriot invasion of East Florida went awry a year later and a bill authorizing seizure of the Floridas failed in Congress when northern Republicans voted against it. Faced with the unpopularity of “Mr. Madison’s War” and opposition to the expansionists of 1812 as a result, he could not risk confrontation with Spain.

With the Spanish government in Cadiz wholly dependent on British arms for its survival, there was reasonable fear that Spain might transfer the Floridas to Great Britain as staging ground for an invasion of the United States. Anthony Morris was authorized to ascertain the truth of this rumor and, if possible, to obtain agreement for a temporary occupation by the United States to restore order. His mission was hampered from the first by American refusal to accept Luis Onis y Gonzalez-Vara as Spain’s ambassador or officially recognize the exiled government in Cadiz. Morris had no authority to heal this breach.

A wartime crossing required a neutral ship sailing from New Haven to Lisbon. As Morris and his secretary, James Murray, left Lisbon on their way to Cadiz in October 1813, Wellington’s army pushed the last French troops out of Spain. When Morris was invited to meet with Jose Luyando, the First Secretary of State, in December, the Cortes and the Regency Council were already packing up to move back to Madrid. His meetings with [End Page 208] Luyando were cordial, but he soon realized that nothing could be decided about Florida before an official recognition and exchange of ambassadors. In February 1814, nevertheless, Morris made a formal proposal for “a temporary and provisional occupation of those territories by the United States to be held by them in trust for Spain.” He was not surprised when no response was forthcoming, as he explained to US Secretary of State James Monroe in April. On the basis of his conversations with Luyando, Morris assured Monroe that both Floridas “might...

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