By the terms of the navy act, the United States had to stop building vessels for its own protection. Of those which had been authorized, the frigates _Constitution, United States_, and _Constellation_ were under way and were eventually completed. The timber, with material that had been collected for the other vessels, was sold, except what was needed for the frigate which was to be presented to the Algerines, and which was to be built at Portsmouth, N.H. The whole affair was a melancholy business that must have occasioned Washington deep chagrin. In his address to Congress, December 7, 1796, announcing the success of the negotiations for effecting the release of the captives, he observed that "to secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force, organized and ready to vindicate it from insult or aggression."
A few months before France declared war upon England, February 1, 1793, Edmond Genet was appointed French Minister to the United States. He landed at Charleston, April 8, and at once began activities so authoritative as to amount to an erection of French sovereignty in the United States. The subsequent failure of his efforts and the abrupt ending of his diplomatic career have so reacted upon his reputation that associations of boastful arrogance and reckless incompetency cling to his name. This estimate holds him too lightly and underrates the peril to which the United States was then exposed. Genet was no casual rhetorician raised to important office by caprice of events, but a trained diplomatist of hereditary aptitude and of long experience. His father was chief of the bureau of correspondence in the Department of Foreign Affairs for the French monarchy, and it was as an interpreter attached to that bureau that the son began his career in 1775. While still a youth, he gained literary distinction by his translations of historical works from Swedish into French. Genet was successively attached to the French Embassies at Berlin and Vienna, and in 1781 he succeeded his father in the Department of Foreign Affairs. In 1788, he was Secretary of the French Embassy at St. Petersburg, where his zeal for French Revolutionary principles so irritated the Empress Catherine that she characterized him as "a furious demagogue," and in 1792 he was forced to leave Russia. In the same year he was named Ambassador to Holland, and thence was soon transferred to the United States.