After serving as a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, Hoffman succeeded John Hay (the late President Lincoln’s private secretary and future Secretary of State) as Secretary of the Legation in France during the last years of the reign of Napoleon III, when the American envoy was the aging soldier-statesman, General John Dix.  Hoffman later held the same position at London and St. Petersburg, and in the 1880s served as US envoy to Denmark.

“General Walker applied for his pardon when in the United States this Winter – went through the necessary formalities – was promised it but did not get it. Genl. Dix has written to the Prest. at my request to ask for it, and it occurs to me that if you too would write a line it might be of service.
It looks to me as if there was to be war within a year – perhaps sooner. French vanity is deeply wounded, and French vanity wounded insures war.

     Benny Roberts says his arm is to be accepted, and the French General will order 500,000. The difficulty however is there is no one to order them of. Benny has got up a company which exists only on paper.  He can’t fix a price, or a period or anything else.

Have seen your Gatling guns at the Exposition, you mentioned them to me last Summer. Gen. Dix told me that the Emperor had twice stopped to examine them and to make inquiries about them, but there was no one there to give him the information he required.

The Exposition was a great failure at the opening, but is gradually filling up and becoming interesting.  By June it will be a superb affair, the likes of which we shall never see again. The American Dept. is improving and is rather interesting. It has one merit at least. It is utterly unlike any other Dept.  Scarcely anything ornamental in it, all useful and substantial…”

John G. Walker was a former Confederate General who served under Stonewall Jackson and then held a command in Texas, fleeing to French-dominated Mexico after the War; he was then awaiting a pardon for his rebel service (which he later received, becoming US Consul in Bogota, Colombia).  The looming war between France and Germany, which Hoffman correctly predicts, three years in advance was overshadowed by the April 1^st opening of the Paris Exposition Universelle, the grand world’s fair in which 42 nations participated, including the United States, though, as Hoffman writes, displays of Yankee inventiveness were more focused on commerce than art. This included the Colt Company’s Gatling Gun, the Civil War advance in military technology, which proved of value to the Emperors general, who were secretly developing their own version of a rapid-fire machine gun. As a former military officer, Hoffman obviously took an interest in new American weaponry,  such as the breech-loading conversion of a Springfield rifle, patented by General Benjamin Roberts and then hawked in Europe by the “paper” company he established in New York. After being rejected by both the US Army and Navy, Roberts succeeded in selling his gun to the French, though the ultimate production was nothing like the half million guns he had mentioned to Hoffman; the French finally procured several thousand Roberts guns during the Franco-Prussian War (in which, of course, they were roundly defeated).