Congress received long-awaited dispatches from its commissioners in Europe in December 1782. On 16 December Robert R. Livingston submitted to Congress Jay’s brief note of 28 September, which clarified a reference to Oswald’s second commission in Franklin’s dispatch of two days earlier.1 Livingston included in his letter of transmittal a quotation from Jay’s private correspondence of 4 September hinting that difficulties had arisen in the Spanish-American negotiations.2

Because the frigate Danaé, bearing October dispatches from France, went aground in Chesapeake Bay, no further news reached Philadelphia until 22 December. On 23 and 24 December, Congress considered Jay’s letters of 18 September and 13 October, both of which suggested a lack of confidence in French good will, as well as Franklin’s letter of 14 October, which mentioned the “Want of due Form” in Oswald’s commission and expressed doubt that Britain would accept the first draft of preliminary articles without modification. Franklin also reported, without expressing concern, Rayneval’s discussions with Shelburne.3 This led Madison to remark that “although on a supposed intimacy and joined in the same commission, they the Ministers, wrote separately, and breathed opposite sentiments as to the views of France.”4

Jay’s letter of 18 September enclosed a translation of an intercepted dispatch of Barbé-Marbois, the French consul general, who boasted that Congress’s instructions to its commissioners left the king of France in effective control of America’s peace negotiations, and sharply criticized the fisheries claims being advanced by the United States. Jay had asked that this text be kept “a profound secret” and cautioned that he did not see how that could be “done if communicated to the Congress at large, among whom there always have been, and always will be, some unguarded members.” Nevertheless, on 24 December, Livingston laid the documents before Congress, where they provoked indignation at Barbé-Marbois and questions about the authenticity of the dispatch and about the accuracy of the translation.5 On that day, and again on 30 December, the issue of the French alliance and the instructions to the peace commissioners were the subjects of sharp debate. Abraham Clark of New Jersey, seconded by John Rutledge of South Carolina, moved to “revise the instructions relative to negotiations for peace, with a view to exempt the American Plenipotentiaries from the obligation to conform to the advice of France.” Clark’s motion was postponed without a vote, with no record of it remaining in the official Journals.6 These discussions, however, set the stage for controversy over the manner in which the preliminary articles had been negotiated, and especially Jay’s role in the negotiations.

Madison rallied the supporters of the French alliance in Congress, leaving Livingston to placate La Luzerne. In conferences on 30 and 31 December the French minister communicated to Livingston excerpts from Vergennes’s letter to him of 12 August 1782 summarizing the lack of progress in peace negotiations, which he attributed to Shelburne’s retraction of the previously issued pledge to grant American independence in the first instance, and suggesting that Britain would only “negotiate seriously and in good faith when it has decidedly lost hope of dividing the allies.”7

Livingston promised to remind the American commissioners of their instructions in “a precise and clear manner but with delicacy,” and drew on the documents supplied by La Luzerne to rebuke Jay in the laboriously drafted letter of 4 January 1783, below, that he had begun writing five days earlier. Jefferson was its intended bearer, but his departure for France was delayed and finally cancelled on 1 April 1783. This and other dispatches were subsequently given to John Vaughan (12 April) and to Matthias Ogden (30 April).8 Jay did not receive Livingston’s rebuke until the end of May, six months after he and his colleagues had concluded the preliminaries with the British. His reply was curt: “My letter by Captain Barney affords an answer to the greater part of your inquiries.”9