Murray was also the U.S. Minister (ambassador) to the Netherlands from 1797 until 1801, and supported the U.S. mission to France in peace negotiations.
In 1784, as a law student in London, Murray wrote in defense of state government in America. This eventually ran to a series of six essays, which were published in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention there. Murray rejected the notion, advanced by Montesquieu among others, that virtue was the root of democracy. The essays were addressed to John Adams, who was in London serving as the United States ambassador, and of whose Murray was a "political disciple."[1]
Notes
^ Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.
