Mystery Clues Update

The French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was assigned to receive the three man American delegation. Gerry, Madison and Pinckney.
However as things played out, several indirect suggestions of loans and bribes to France were made to the commissioners through a certain Mme de Villette, a friend of Talleyrand. Informal negotiations were carried on through her with Jean Conrad Hottinguer and Lucien Hauteval, both Swiss, and a Mr. Bellamy, an American banker in Hamburg; the three were designated X, Y, and Z in the mission’s dispatches to the United States.
 Note the only Frenchman who stood to gain was Talleyrand. The Actual agents were Swiss and American. One has to wonder what an American banker and two Swiss businessmen were doing trying to bilk America out of a fortune while her merchant navy was being stolen by France? Were the Swiss financing the piracy? We may never know.
 The proposal that the Americans pay Talleyrand $250,000 before the French government would deal with them, was kept secret by president Adams for some time. His political opponent Alexander Hamilton eventually forced President Adam's to release the French documents with an ensuing uproar against France. This in 1799 was welcomed by Hamilton and his pro-British party. 


Keep in mind Hamilton's actions may have spurred the English attacks of 1812. Having given the impression that America was weak and divided in it's loyalty's.  So an undeclared naval war ensued between France and the United States. Both Talleyrand and President Adams wished to avoid a declaration of war. In 1799 Adams, to the intense disgust of  Alexander Hamilton, appointed William Vans Murray the U.S. minister to France and assigned Oliver Ellsworth and William Richardson Davie to accompany him. The result was the Treaty of Mortefontaine (Sept. 30, 1800), known as the Convention of 1800, a commercial agreement that improved relations between the two nations. 


As a side note.
 Each time we pass through Saint Michael's , MD we read the sign that states " Welcome to St Michael's, MD  The town that fooled the British"  During the British Naval attacks of the War of 1812 the people of St Michael's hung lanterns in the trees a few miles out of town near the water. British Man O Wars bombarded the forest thinking they had destroyed the town. Imagine the crew of a war vessel firing on the center of a small village knowing that there were civilians there? I makes me wonder what someone as famous as Alexander Hamilton would have said about the Imperial British three years later?