Washington Winter Show 2015

43 This page is sponsored by Mrs. H. Bartholomew Cox and Mrs. Michael Miller coastal regions and protection of our growing trade throughout the world. The competition for supreme maritime power pitted the United States, France, England, and Spain against each other. For America this international contest resulted in combative hostility known as the Quasi-War with France (1798–1801). Dr. James Brown Scott, renowned authority on international law and diplomacy, remarked that the Quasi-War was an action to protect rights: [A] display of force by the United States… [which resulted] that the government had made Figure 3: Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jr ., by James Alexander Simpson (a er Gilbert Stuart) c. 1840 (White House Historical Association). Simpson depicts Decatur in his United States Navy uniform. He wears his Society of Cincinnati Eagle insignia. Decatur was made an honorary member of the New York State Society of the Cincinnati in 1813 in recognition of his heroic naval service. Several other heroes of the War of 1812 were also elected as honorary members: William Bainbridge, Isaac Hull and Thomas Macdonough. The category of honorary member was created in the Society’s original institution to recognize “men in the respective States eminent for their abilities and patriotism, whose views may be directed to the same laudable objects with those of the Cincinnati.” The New York Society’s honorary members of the early 19th century period received membership certificates (diplomas) that bore the signatures of George Washington and Henry Knox because the New York Society had a supply of signed blank certificates le over from the original generation of members. up its mind to conduct itself as an independent state and to insist upon and maintain its rights, even at the expense of a resort to force against the country with which it had been allied [France]… the United States demonstrated to the world that they were independent not merely in theory but in very fact. 2 After the Revolution the United States abolished the American Navy, but it was not long before foreign powers began to harass and seize American merchant ships. Even before