George Ellisen

George Ellisen was a Russian diplomatic official of German background, recorded in the Erik Amburger database as Georg Friedrich Ellisen and in Russian as Egor Egorovich. He attended the Petrischule from 1792. Russian official calendars place him at the mission in Philadelphia in 1815, 1822, and 1823; by January 1823 he was acting as chargé d’affaires. ^{1, 2}

On 10 January 1823 Ellisen joined John Quincy Adams and the British minister Stratford Canning to exchange ratifications of a convention negotiated under Russian mediation. It implemented an award concerning British compensation for property, including enslaved people, removed from territories covered by the Treaty of Ghent. When disagreements over the certificates threatened to prolong the formalities, Ellisen proposed a French protocol that retained the substance of Adams’s draft. The parties accepted it and completed the exchange after several hours. His colleague Baron Maltitz helped compare the ratified texts. ^{2, 3}

Ellisen also reported on Mexico’s diplomatic arrival and American proposals to occupy the Columbia River. The Amburger database places him in Russia’s Foreign Ministry in 1832. ^{4, 1}