Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, With the Annual Message of the President, Transmitted to Congress, December 4, 1893

Mr. Gresham to Senhor Mendonça.

Department of State,
Washington , September 15, 1893 .

My dear Mr. Mendonça: I duly received your personal letter of the 9th instant in relation to the motives which have led your Government to interdict all telegraphic correspondence between your country and foreign parts, whether in cipher code or in ordinary commercial language.

My response to the New York merchants who addressed me on the subject had reference to the announcement that all such communications were prohibited without regard to the channel of transmission; and Mr. Thompson was directed to represent the serious impediment thus set in the way of legitimate trade at a season when arrangements are on foot at the commercial centers for purchasing and transporting the great staple productions of Brazil, of which, as you are aware, the importers of this country take a notable share.

It has not been represented that the prohibition in question lies only against messages transmitted by the American-owned cables to the countries adjoining Brazil and to be forwarded thence by the Brazilian land lines. I have understood that the European channel was also barred to our merchants equally with the merchants of Europe. If I am in error in this, and it should prove that a discrimination has been made against American interests, that will be a matter for independent consideration. At present I am glad to believe that no such differential treatment exists or is to be apprehended. At the same time I should observe that, being unable to effect telegraphic communication with the American Minister at Rio by the Buenos Ayres route, my instruction was transmitted by the European cables, and, as I have since learned, was delivered to Mr. Thompson without delay. I am as yet uninformed why the American channel should have been closed to official intercourse with our diplomatic agent in Rio.

Trusting that all these points may be satisfactorily explained, and that this abrupt and injurious interference with an important trade, in which Brazilian interests can hardly be less concerned than those of this country, may speedily terminate with the disappearance of the occasion therefor,

I am, etc.,

W. Q. Gresham.