
George Hammond (1763-1853) was Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States from 1791 to 1795, preceding Robert Liston.
Biography[]
George Hammond was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England in 1763, and he served as a secretary to David Hartley the Younger during the British-American peace talks in Paris in 1783. He served as charge d'affaires in Vienna from 1788 to 1790, in Copenhagen in 1790, in Madrid in 1791, and as Ambassador to the United States from 1791 to 1795. Hammond came to belief that most of America's leading families were Tories at heart, and Alexander Hamilton privately met with Hammond at the same time as French ambassador Edmond-Charles Genet's arrival in Philadelphia, promising to prevent George Washington's administration from undertaking any anti-British measures in exchange for Hammond persuading his government not to create any provocation which could lead to pro-French radicals having their way with American foreign policy. After his return to London, he became an undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and he became joint-editor of George Canning's Anti-Jacobin newspaper in 1797. He died in 1853.