‘That Moral League of Nations Against the United States’ — The Declaration of Paris and the Marcy Amendment

Abstract

As Chapter 3 shows, the intention behind the Declaration of Paris was to create new universal rules of international law that would first isolate the Americans and then force them to accept the abolition of privateering. This chapter will examine the success of that attempt, and the counterproposal that the USA made to thwart the Anglo-French ambition to ban privateering. While scholarly research on the Declaration of Paris is limited, it is almost non-existent on the USA’s response, although the proposal made by Secretary of State William Marcy in July 1856 remained official US policy until the Second Hague Peace Conference. Based on a wide selection of previously neglected US and non-US sources, this chapter will examine the USA’s attempts to prevent the declaration’s success as well as the origins and global impact of the Marcy Amendment.