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CHAPTER VI

LOUISIANA, THE CONQUEST OF A PACIFIST

NOR many years before he became president Thomas Jefferson had been an influential defender of French interests in America. It was generally expected that his administration would prove friendly to France. Jefferson himself anticipated that this would be the case. He even objected in the spring of 1801 to the names of certain ministers from France on the ground that they were persons to whom it would be difficult for him to confide his inmost thoughts. The golden age now ushering in required candor in its diplomats, and Jefferson anticipated in his relations with France at any rate a series of open covenants openly arrived at.

The President was doomed to speedy disillusionment. For he reckoned without knowledge of two of the craftiest men of the age, whom his own candor might baffle from its very unexpectedness, but whose own intentions defied all penetration. To match wits with Napoleon and Talleyrand, the American president would need his utmost guile. It was fortunate in such a contest that the tangle of European affairs worked to American advantage.

On November 9, 1799, Napoleon had overthrown the discredited Directory and as First Consul had become the autocrat and arbiter of his country's destinies. On July 31, 1801, he signed the Treaty of Morfontaine by which the previous difficulties with America were set at rest. On the same date he signed another treaty which was as complete an undoing of the first as if expressly designed as such. In the American treaty, as we have seen, Napoleon agreed to discontinue all seizures of American property, and to recognize that all obligations imposed upon America by the Treaty of 1778 were at an end. The Americans in return were

to cancel their claims against France for spoliations committed prior to 1800. Seemingly a most amicable arrangement. But could friendship by any chance exist between the United States and a strong power in control of the mouth of the Mississippi? Talleyrand thought not, and few will challenge his contention. Yet this was precisely the situation created by the second of the two agreements, the Treaty of San Ildefonso, wherein Spain conceded to the First Consul what she had previously refused to Talleyrand and the Directory, namely the long coveted province of Louisiana with enough of the Floridas to restore the boundaries of 1763.

The diplomacy of Napoleon's early years of power aimed at the restoration of the French colonial empire. Of such an empire Louisiana would be the brightest jewel. Vergennes had negotiated for it under Louis XVI, and Spain had agreed to part with it for cash. France was, however, too nearly bankrupt to pay the price. The offer made by Talleyrand under the Directory was an Italian kingdom for the young duke of Parma, son-in-law of the Spanish King, Charles IV. But that monarch's scruples forbade acceptance of the spoils of the Church, and as these were to be the chief ingredients of the new kingdom, negotiations were suspended. The First Consul improved the offer. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany should be transferred from its owner to the duke of Parma who should combine the two territories into a Kingdom of Etruria, its boundaries to include not less than 1,000,000 people, and its sovereignty to be insured by French bayonets. Charles was enchanted, and he summoned post haste the one man in his kingdom who had most opposed the scheme.

The Prince of the Peace, for it was he, failed to offer the expected congratulations. Godoy had shown in his American treaty of 1795 such disregard of the traditional policies of Spain that his shrewd and patriotic opposition to the schemes of France appears a bit surprising. But he sensed in the possession by France of Louisiana and the Floridas an overpowering menace to the heart of Spanish empire in America. As long as Godoy held the seals of office, Talley

rand accomplished nothing. French pressure compelled Godoy's retirement in 1798. Out of office, his views remained unchanged. If it was King Charles's will that an empire must be sacrificed to purchase but a few square miles in Italy, at least a Spanish patriot would hold on to the security until the payment was effected.

Godoy emerged soon from retirement and was set to match his wits with Napoleon's ambassador at Madrid, his brother Lucien. Wits, or perhaps it was gold, prevailed over Lucien, to the intense indignation of the First Consul. Louisiana was not handed over to the French and even the existence of the treaty was only suspected. Its terms were not divulged. One of its terms was soon destined to embarrass the French. Talleyrand had stipulated solemnly that once Louisiana returned to French hands, there it should remain. At the time he said this, we may suppose that even Talleyrand was sincere. For it was assuredly no part of the First Consul's plan to consolidate an empire only to scatter it. But Napoleon had yet to learn the potencies of negro genius and the yellow fever. The negroes of Haiti, oddly enough, were to influence the Louisiana purchase. The story is a strange one.1

NAPOLEON AND SANTO DOMINGO

Under the old régime, the island of Santo Domingo was the most profitable of French possessions. Five hundred thousand black men slaved for a tenth as many creoles and an equal number of mulattoes. The French Revolution of 1789 unleashed all the furies of servile insurrection in the island. Almost the entire white population disappeared in the massacres of 1791. Black men ruled the island. Out of the chaos that ensued, there emerged in 1795 a strange and ruthless conqueror, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the African counterpart of Napoleon himself, whose resemblance indeed to the conqueror of Italy was to give rise to the

1 It is told by Henry Adams in "Napoleon I et Saint-Domingue" in Revue Historique, XXIV, 92-130, also in his History of the United States (New York, 1921), I, 377-398.

strangest of all rivalries, that of Napoleon with a black man, and to defeat the former's colonial schemes.

Just as Toussaint L'Ouverture was consolidating his authority in the island, the troubles between the United States and the Directory led to the exclusion or withdrawal of American vessels and goods from the French West Indies. The United States hoped that the economic pressure thus exerted would compel the islands to renounce their political connection with France and declare their own independence. Santo Domingo practically did so. American trade was renewed, and to it Toussaint rightly attributed the salvation of his experiment.

While Toussaint was maturing his plans in Santo Domingo, Napoleon was mastering France. As First Consul he conceived that restoration of French authority in the West Indies was the key to the enlarged colonial empire of his dreams. Lulling the negro chieftain into a false security, he made ready against him an expedition which he entrusted to his brother-in-law, Leclerc, husband of Pauline Bonaparte. An important feature of his preparations was the disarming of England by the Peace of Amiens. The mistress of the seas being temporarily at peace, Napoleon dispatched a fleet intended first for Santo Domingo, and then for New Orleans, for having subdued the island, Leclerc was instructed to garrison New Orleans with 10,000 men and hold Louisiana for France.

Here was menace indeed. All the Western interests of the United States were endangered. Western loyalty depended on the free navigation of the Mississippi. If France closed the river's mouth Jefferson was ready, as he expressed it in 1802, "to marry the United States to the British fleet and nation." 2 America, he admitted, was not strong enough to make French occupation an immediate casus belli, but the next war in Europe would see us aligned with England against France. The issue was critical. A decree of the retiring Spanish governor of Louisiana closed on his own initiative the navigation of the Mississippi. Trouble

2 The Works of Thomas Jefferson, IX (Federal Edition), 365.

was certain to result when the province was transferred to a power able to enforce this ordinance.

Jefferson possessed no adequate means to meet the emergency, until an epidemic of yellow fever in Santo Domingo served to solve his problem. After some initial successes, Leclerc sent L'Ouverture in chains to France, a dungeon, and a speedy death. Afterward one French army, then a second succumbed to yellow fever. The General, exhausted and embittered, followed his men to the grave, and buried with himself his brother's dreams of empire overseas. Just as the menace of Leclerc's expedition roused Jefferson to the necessity of the Louisiana Purchase, so its failure determined Napoleon on the Louisiana sacrifice. Death had cleared a pathway to negotiation, and Monroe was sent upon his way.

The Monroe mission was a thoroughly characteristic expression of Jefferson's peace-loving diplomacy. The growing threat in Santo Domingo, the rising tide of anxiety in the West could not be matter of indifference to so astute a politician, to a statesman whose sympathies for Westerners were always keen. Yet when Congress assembled in December, 1802, wars and rumors of war were conspicuously absent from the presidential message. A squadron of ships, admitted Jefferson, unhappily must still patrol the Mediterranean, but the fleet itself he thought had better go into a huge dry dock. As for the militia, perhaps some modification in its regulation might be wisely made. The presence of a French army at New Orleans, it was mildly hinted, might produce some changes in our foreign relations. But of war itself, which Jefferson really conceived as a possible outgrowth of trouble on the Mississippi, the message conveyed no hint.3

Peace was the President's chief object. War must be postponed until the West was peopled and the debts were paid. The peaceful possibilities of diplomacy must certainly be tested to the utmost. It is tribute to the personal authority of Jefferson and his powers of persuasion that Kentucky and Tennessee restrained their military ardor

3 The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, IX, 406-415.