Key figures: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Benjamin Harrison, Robert Morris
Summary
The Model Treaty, also called the Plan of 1776, was a template for the commercial treaties that the newly independent United States intended to negotiate with foreign powers during the Revolutionary War. On June 11, 1776 — the same day it created the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence — the Second Continental Congress resolved to appoint a committee “to prepare a plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign powers.” The following day, June 12, it named five members: John Adams, John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Harrison, and Robert Morris.
John Adams was the plan’s principal author, having sketched preliminary ideas in his diary as early as February and March 1776 while weighing the commercial advantages of an alliance with France. Adams presented the committee’s draft to Congress on July 18, 1776, and after debate Congress formally adopted the Model Treaty on September 17, 1776. Instructions to the American commissioners followed on September 24, and the commissioners — Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee — were appointed the next day; Franklin carried the plan to Paris as the basis for negotiations with the French court.
The document was deliberately commercial rather than military in character. Adams sought reciprocal trade terms and freedom of commerce while avoiding any binding political or military entanglement with a European power. Its provisions reflected the free-trade and neutral-rights principles of the age: open ports and unrestricted movement of goods, the right of neutral nations to trade in ordinary (non-contraband) merchandise, and clearly limited definitions of contraband. This emphasis on “no political connection” and commerce-only ties expressed a strand of American thinking that hoped independence could be secured through trade rather than through alliance.
Significance
The Model Treaty was the first foreign-policy blueprint of the United States and the foundation of its early commercial diplomacy. Its idealistic vision of trade without political alliance did not survive the practical needs of the war: to secure French recognition and military support, the American commissioners ultimately concluded two agreements in 1778 — the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which drew directly on the Model Treaty’s commercial provisions, and a separate Treaty of Alliance carrying the military commitments the Plan of 1776 had deliberately excluded. The plan’s free-ship-free-goods and neutral-rights principles nonetheless shaped later American treaties and the country’s long advocacy of neutral maritime commerce. As the earliest systematic statement of United States foreign and trade policy, drafted in the same weeks as the Declaration of Independence, the Model Treaty stands alongside those founding documents as a defining act of the year 1776.