Colonial-Era Foundations

Diplomatic practices of England’s Atlantic seaboard colonies and Native American tribes in the century and a half before US statehood are foundational to America’s diplomacy. This chapter examines the understudied cross-cultural interweaving of European diplomatic methods and the performative diplomacy of Native peoples. It explores drivers of frontier diplomacy—war, trade, and a desire to seize and protect land—and the unsystematic but intentional communities of practitioners in frontier diplomacy. Publics were participants in and objects of their diplomacy. Case studies of astute “go-betweens” illuminate norms and patterns of practice: Roger Williams, America’s first public diplomat, and the Algonquian sachems Massasoit and Canonicus in New England, William Johnson and the Mohawk leader known as Chief Hendrick on the New York frontier, and George Washington and the formidable Creek leader Alexander McGillivray. Their diplomacy during the century and a half before US statehood initiated an American way of diplomacy: a preference for hard power over soft power, episodic commitment to public diplomacy correlated with war and ambition, an information dominant communication style, and American exceptionalism.