As a British colony Americans relied on the far-flung British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they had to scramble to create an American service. While the U.S. diplomatic establishment was confined by protocol to the major capitals of the world, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide adequate help to distressed Americans, mainly seamen.

As consular appointments were often used as a reward for authors and other talented people, the U.S. Consular Service boasted such worthies as Nathanial Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, the cartoonist Thomas Nast, the grandfather of Winston Churchill, and Fiorello LaGuardia, later mayor of New York. Consuls have played an important role in relations between countries since ancient times.

In their country of assignment, consuls look after their own citizens and act as quasi-diplomatic representatives. Kennedy briefly traces the history of consuls from their creation in the Pharaohs’ Egypt to their spread across the sailing routes of the Mediterranean to the rest of the world. American consuls played significant roles in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I and its aftermath. The book ends in 1924 when the Consular Service was joined with the Diplomatic Service to become the Foreign Service of the United States.