US Embassy

This is a list of diplomatic missions of the United States of America. The United States has the most diplomatic missions out of any country in the world.

It is said that Morocco, in December 1777, became the first nation to seek diplomatic relations with the United States and together they maintain the United States' longest unbroken treaty. However the claim also goes to the Netherlands, as they were the first to recognize the United States as an independent government.

Benjamin Franklin established the first overseas mission of the United States in Paris in 1779. On April 19, 1782, John Adams was received by the States-General and the Dutch Republic as they were the first country, together with Morocco and France, to recognize the United States as an independent government. John Adams then became the first U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and the house that he had purchased at Fluwelen Burgwal 18 in The Hague, became the first American embassy anywhere in the world.

In the period following the American Revolution, George Washington sent a number of close advisers to the courts of European potentates in order to garner recognition of U.S. independence with mixed results, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Francis Dana, and John Jay. Much of the first fifty years of the Department of State concerned negotiating with imperial European powers over the territorial integrity of the borders of the United States as known today.

The first overseas consulate of the fledgling United States was founded in 1790 at Liverpool, England, by James Maury Jr., who was appointed by Washington. Maury held the post from 1790 to 1829. Liverpool was at the time Britain's leading port for transatlantic commerce and therefore of great economic importance to the United States. President George Washington, on November 19, 1792, nominated Benjamin Joy of Newbury Port as the first American Consul to Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Joy was not recognized as Consul by the British East India Company but was permitted to “reside here as a Commercial Agent subject to the Civil and Criminal Jurisdiction of this Country…”. The first overseas property owned, and the longest continuously owned, by the United States is the American Legation in Tangier, which was a gift of the Sultan of Morocco in 1821. In general during the nineteenth century, the United States' diplomatic activities were done on a minimal budget. The U.S. owned no property abroad and provided no official residences for its foreign envoys, paid them a minimal salary, and gave them the rank of ministers rather than ambassadors who represented the great powers—a position which the U.S. only achieved towards the end of the nineteenth century.

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