eed to pay an
annual tribute of 12,000 sequins,--about $27,500.

By the terms of the navy act, the United States had to stop building
vessels for its own protection. Of those which had been authorized, the
frigates _Constitution, United States_, and _Constellation_ were under way
and were eventually completed. The timber, with material that had been
collected for the other vessels, was sold, except what was needed for the
frigate which was to be presented to the Algerines, and which was to be
built at Portsmouth, N.H. The whole affair was a melancholy business that
must have occasioned Washington deep chagrin. In his address to Congress,
December 7, 1796, announcing the success of the negotiations for effecting
the release of the captives, he observed that "to secure respect to a
neutral flag requires a naval force, organized and ready to vindicate it
from insult or aggression."

CHAPTER VI

FRENCH DESIGNS ON AMERICA

A few months before France declared war upon England, February 1, 1793,
Edmond Genet was appointed French Minister to the United States. He landed
at Charleston, April 8, and at once began activities so authoritative as
to amount to an erection of French sovereignty in the United States. The
subsequent failure of his efforts and the abrupt ending of his diplomatic
career have so reacted upon his reputation that associations of boastful
arrogance and reckless incompetency cling to his name. This estimate holds
him too lightly and underrates the peril to which the United States was
then exposed. Genet was no casual rhetorician raised to important office
by caprice of events, but a trained diplomatist of hereditary aptitude and
of long experience. His father was chief of the bureau of correspondence
in the Department of Foreign Affairs for the French monarchy, and it was
as an interpreter attached to that bureau that the son began his career in
1775. While still a youth, he gained literary distinction by his
translations of historical works from Swedish into French. Genet was
successively attached to the French Embassies at Berlin and Vienna, and in
1781 he succeeded his father in the Department of Foreign Affairs. In
1788, he was Secretary of the French Embassy at St. Petersburg, where his
zeal for French Revolutionary principles so irritated the Empress
Catherine that she characterized him as "a furious demagogue," and in 1792
he was forced to leave Russia. In the same year he was named Ambassador