The First Country To Recognize The Young United States

Getting recognized is hard

Morocco–United States relations. (2022, October 25). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco%E2%80%93United_States_relations

One of the most difficult things for a new country to do is to obtain recognition from other nations. A country is only such if it is recognized by other legitimate countries. Getting recognized as a brand new country is extremely difficult and poses one of the toughest and earliest challenges for any newly minted nation. Taiwan, for example, is only officially recognized by 13 nations out of a possible 192. Somaliland is not officially recognized by any nation.

The United States faced this problem when it declared independence from the United Kingdom and its British Empire. So too, did the Confederate States of America less than a century later when it declared its independence from the United States.

So which was the first nation to recognize the United States as an independent state free from Great Britain? It was Morocco.

The 1777 Declaration

Long before the United States looked like it would, or even could, win a war against Great Britain, Morocco officially recognized the United States as its own nation. On December 20th, 1777, the Moroccan sultan Sidi Muhammad Ben Abdullah, also known as Muhammad III, declared that all ships sailing under an American flag were welcome in Moroccan ports.

The declaration did a number of things.

1. It recognized the United States as its own nation.
2. It gave the United States the same privileges as other established nations.
3. It recognized that the American flag represented a new nation that was capable of conducting its own independent diplomacy.

The declaration put the United States on equal footing with all other nations that were recognized by Morocco, including states like Russia, Prussia, Naples, and Genoa. This was a big deal and is what every newly created nation dreams of.

But the new relations did not stop there.

Sultan Muhammad III made numerous overtures to the American government in a bid to win early friendship with the new republic. The sultan made a number of declarations in a bid to garner the attention of the nascent American government. The efforts…