A Wilderness So Immense
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Carlos III by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, about 1787. Painted within two years of the monarch’s death in 1788, Goya’s portrait of Carlos III depicts the avid hunter whose dynastic empire extended from Italy to the Philippines. A reformer, patron of the arts and sciences, statesman, and devout Catholic, Carlos III presided over the final glory of the Spanish empire—which began its fatal decline during the reign of his indolent son Carlos IV and his queen, Maria Luisa of Parma. (Prado Museum, Madrid)
The hunter with his gun and his dog also was a monarch who had learned to wear, and uphold, his authority both firmly and gracefully. In 1786, as Goya began his portrait of Carlos III in hunting garb, that authority reached the far corners of the western world. Spain’s empire had never been larger, even in the heyday of Philip II—across the Atlantic to California and on to the Philippines, north beyond the Missouri River, and south to the tip of Chile.
For the three decades that he ruled Spain, Carlos’s annual calendar was as predictable as his daily schedule. The yearlong pilgrimage through the circuit of royal residences began each January when Carlos III and his court left the Royal Palace in Madrid and traveled six miles north of the city to El Pardo (the residence of his descendants even today) and its hunting park. For Easter, Carlos went twenty-five miles south of Madrid to enjoy the mild spring weather of Aranjuez, now a museum and park, into July. He spent his summers in the mountains at San Ildefonso, forty miles northwest of Madrid and four thousand feet above sea level. October brought Carlos back to the monumental Escorial, twenty miles west of Madrid—Philip II’s equivalent of the pyramids, an imposing palace mausoleum, severely built of granite, slate, and sheet lead, with spartan rooms for living royalty and majestic tombs for the dead. Each December, Carlos and his court returned to the Royal Palace in Madrid, where the circuit began anew. For courtiers and ambassadors—not to mention the king’s thirteen children and their various spouses and offspring—the schedule was as regular as the seasons.
Still vigorous at seventy-one in Goya’s painting, completed in 1787, Carlos III was unusually conscientious about his final imperial responsibility of providing an able successor to rule an empire that nearly encircled the globe. Like Philip II a century earlier, Carlos III quietly lamented that while God had given him many kingdoms, he had denied him a son fully capable of ruling them. Of his thirteen children with Maria Amalia of Saxony, three were long dead. On the eve of his own accession to the throne of Spain in 1759, he had been compelled by “the notorious imbecility” of their eldest child, Felipe, to exclude him from the succession and place their third son, Ferdinand, on the throne of Naples.
The future Carlos IV, their second child, was now the Prince of Asturias, the customary title of the heir apparent (like the Prince of Wales in the house of Windsor). Carlos knew well, however, that their most talented son was not the Prince of Asturias but Gabriel, his fourth and favorite child, whose marriage to Maria Ana of Portugal was a sign of amity between the two kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula—one traditionally allied with France and the other with England.
As Carlos pondered the situation of his empire and his dynasty, the rules of succession laid down by his father were never quite as immutable as they seemed to those who lived outside their sway. Courtiers and ambassadors who knew both couples—thirty-nine-year-old Carlos, Prince of Asturias, and his lascivious Maria Luisa of Parma, on the one hand, and thirty-five-year-old Gabriel Antonio and his attractive Maria Ana of Portugal, on the other—had no difficulty supposing that, for the good of all, Carlos III might seriously contemplate altering the succession in favor of his fourth and favorite son.
He never got the chance. In the autumn of 1787—while Americans began pondering the merits of a new constitution to govern five million people along the Atlantic Coast of North America, and while James Wilkinson was returning from his first sojourn among the eight thousand residents of New Orleans—smallpox decided which Bourbon prince would rule the ten and a half million people of Spain and thirteen and a half million residents of an empire that stretched three quarters of the way around the globe.6
It was mid-November and the court was at El Escorial when Maria Ana of Portugal and her newborn infant died, followed days later by Gabriel Antonio himself. Carlos III was despondent. “With Gabriel gone,” he lamented, “I hardly care to live.”7 A monarch’s crown is often said to descend from father to son. With Gabriel Antonio dead, the crown of Spain would soon plummet from one of the country’s greatest monarchs, Carlos III, to his bumbling heir and namesake. Nevertheless, it was time for the court to move again to the Royal Palace that Carlos III had rebuilt over the ruins of the Alcázar, his birthplace in Madrid.
For thirty years the annual pilgrimage of the royal court had never varied. It seemed part of the natural order of things. And as always, regardless of the weather, Carlos III found solace by hunting most every afternoon. “Rain breaks no bones,” he had often said, but now perhaps the sorrow in his heart let the chill and damp take hold.8
For the first time since his coronation, Carlos III was sick in bed when his chief minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, reminded him that December was near and it was time to go to Madrid. Carlos suggested he might stay longer at El Escorial. Floridablanca objected. “Have no fear, Moñino,” Carlos replied, “isn’t it obvious that in a few days I’ll be taken on a much longer journey from these four walls?”9
On December 9, after the ailing king and his court had returned to the city of his birth, a cold omen came when death summoned his confessor and longtime confidant, Father Joaquín Eleta, as though sending him ahead to open the gates at the next royal residence. Carlos remained lucid and composed in his bed—a great monarch to the last. When advisors and family gathered to witness the reading of his will, grief was visible on Floridablanca’s face. “Did you think I was going to live forever?” Carlos asked him gently. Priests brought the reliquary of San Isidore to the palace, administered the last rites of the Church, and read a papal blessing. A bishop asked whether he had pardoned his enemies. “Why should I wait for this pass before forgiving them?” Carlos asked. “They were all forgiven the moment after the offense.” Finally, five weeks short of his seventy-third birthday, Carlos III died shortly after midnight in the dark morning hours of Sunday, December 14, 1788.10
The body of Carlos III lay in state in Madrid through the day. Sunday evening, royal Spanish and Walloon guards, with arms reversed in mourning, marched by torchlight at either side of his coffin some twenty miles to El Escorial, where the bodies of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony and his favorite son, Gabriel, lay with his Habsburg and Bourbon predecessors. Chanting the Miserere, the monks of San Lorenzo greeted the cortege and carried the body to a temporary tomb. While the great penitential psalm echoed through the monastery—“Have mercy on us, O God, in your goodness”—soldiers fired three salvos in salute and bells rang in mourning at the passing of one of Spain’s greatest monarchs. Finally, the captain of the guard approached the vault and called out, “Señor, Señor, Señor.” Hearing only silence, the officer broke his baton in accordance with custom, and departed.11
Soon after the body of Carlos III had been taken to El Escorial, officials in Madrid began sending edicts to all the provinces of the Spanish empire. On Wednesday, December 24, they signed and sealed the dispatches to Louisiana announcing “the death of our King and Lord Carlos III (may he have Heavenly Glory)” and proclaiming the accession “of our August Monarch Carlos IV (whom God may guard).”12 These proclamations would cross the Atlantic to Havana, the administrative headquarters for the provinces of Cuba, Louisiana, and the Floridas, and then go by royal packet boat to New Orleans.
• • •
New Orleans had been built by military engineers at the southwest end of the French fur-trading empire that had stretched in a great imperial arc along the waterways of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The walled cities of Quebec and New Orleans—separated by
a canoe trip of thirty-two hundred miles—had been the citadels of New France.
Quebec, the northern fortress, derived its name from an Algonquian word meaning “where the river narrows.” Samuel de Champlain had founded the city as a fur-trading post on the site of an abandoned Iroquois village at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in 1608—just a year after Captain John Smith and a hundred other Englishmen had erected their wooden palisades at Jamestown and a dozen years before any European had set foot on Plymouth Rock.
From Quebec, New France had expanded ever westward in pursuit of beaver, whose fur was in high demand as the fiber of choice for the manufacture of felt, especially for hats. By midcentury, French Jesuits and coureurs de bois (literally “runners of the woods”) and their Native American allies had pursued beaver, souls, and glory west through the Great Lakes to the country of Wisconsin and Illinois.
In the spring of 1673, the explorer Louis Jolliet and the missionary Jacques Marquette, S.J., had paddled up the Fox River from Lake Michigan to the site of a village known long since as Portage, Wisconsin. They had lifted their canoes out of the waters of the Fox River, which drain to the Atlantic, and carried them a mile and a half over a gentle rise of land to the Wisconsin River, whose waters ultimately flow past New Orleans to the Gulf. By summer Marquette and Jolliet had descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River, twenty-nine hundred miles from Quebec, where they turned back rather than risk “losing the results of this voyage … if we procedded to fling ourselves into the hands of the Spaniards who, without doubt, would at least have detained us as captives.”13
Finally an expedition led by Robert Cavelier de La Salle pushed south—through “the most beautiful country in the world, prairies, open woods of mulberry trees, vines, and fruits that we are not acquainted with”—to the Gulf of Mexico. On April 7, 1682, they reached the Head of Passes, where the Mississippi splits into three “very fine, wide, and deep” channels—the Southwest Pass, Pas a l’Outre, and South Pass—comprising the bird’s-foot delta and the mouths of the Mississippi River. On the mudflats at the edge of North America’s immense green wilderness, La Salle and his men raised a wooden column and a cross painted with the heraldry of Bourbon France. They sang the Te Deum—“We praise you, O God, and acknowledge you as the Lord. The whole earth worships You, the eternal Father”—and on April 9, 1682, La Salle claimed the interior of the continent for Louis XIV and named it in his honor. By this little ceremony, in the words of historian Francis Parkman, “the vast basin of the Mississippi… passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles … all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.”14
New Orleans commanded the single most strategic point between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains of North America: the isthmus between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain known in the eighteenth century as the Isle of Orleans. As always, the Europeans had taken their clue from the Native Americans. Here, on the east bank of the river at a tight bend ninety miles above the bird’s-foot delta and the Gulf of Mexico, the isthmus was about four to six miles wide. More significant than the distance, however, was the Indian path on the high ground of the Esplanade Ridge that linked the river with the navigable waters of Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain, a shallow brackish lake half the size of Rhode Island.
Two dozen miles to the east, Lake Pontchartrain drains through the straits of the Rigolets into Lake Borgne and the Gulf of Mexico—a trade route protected by barrier islands and favored by French and Spanish mariners in the age of sail. The French built and the Spanish maintained smaller forts near the mouth of the river and along the Gulf Coast, but New Orleans occupied the uniquely strategic place where two navigable waterways from the Gulf to the Upper Mississippi converged. Adjacent to the Esplanade Ridge, the flat alluvial clay sloped gently back from the natural levee at the river. It lacked anything like the heights of Quebec, but the site yielded gracefully to the symmetrical genius of the eighteenth century. When he founded the city in 1718, the lifelong bachelor Jean Baptiste Lemoyne sieur de Bienville and his engineers laid out New Orleans in a rectangular grid: eleven blocks wide at the river, six blocks deep, giving pride of location to the church and Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square). The name Vieux Carré, as applied to the French Quarter, literally means “the old square.”
Far to the north, the seemingly impregnable fortress of Quebec stood on rocky heights high above the St. Lawrence River—a stubborn landscape that dictated the pattern of its cobblestone streets, stone houses, and granite bastions. French engineers found no similar advantages or constraints at the site of New Orleans. Louisiana had no natural stone or gravel, but its alluvial soil offered them cypress, oak, cottonwood, and hickory in abundance. The French built Quebec of stone. They built New Orleans of earth and wood—and after the fortress city of Quebec fell to British major general James Wolfe in 1759, France quickly transferred ownership of Louisiana and its more vulnerable stick-and-mud capital to Spain.
Great Britain and her Prussian allies had been fighting France for five years in the Americas and three in Europe by 1759, when the death of his brother brought Carlos III home to Spain from the kingdom of Naples. If the balance of power in Europe was to hold, France needed Spain’s support. Although the war had not gone well for his cousin Louis XV, the turning point of the Great War for Empire and harbinger of French defeat—Wolfe’s capture of Quebec—lay six weeks in the future when Carlos III ascended the Spanish throne on August 10, 1759.
Drawn toward France by his Bourbon ancestry and his Roman Catholic faith, Carlos III still resented his humiliation by a British commander who had threatened to shell his palace in Naples in 1744. Now blood, religion, and revenge added their weight, and in August 1761 Carlos III signed the third Family Compact, secretly allying himself with Louis XV just in time for the fortunes of war to turn against the Bourbon partners. Great Britain not only held on to Gibraltar—a thorn under the Spanish saddle since 1704—but trounced the French in both hemispheres. Quebec fell in September 1759, and Britain soon controlled Canada, the French islands of the Caribbean, and all the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. And for good measure, before the fighting ended, the British navy seized the Spanish garrisons at Havana and Manila as well.
Against these grim realities, Carlos III accepted Louisiana from France in 1762. A year later, at the bargaining table in Paris, Spain was able to regain Cuba and the Philippines. Nevertheless, proud New Orleanians have long regarded the transfer of their city from France to Spain as though possession of New Orleans was suitable compensation for the Spanish loss of East and West Florida. Louisiana had been expensive for Louis XV and would cost Carlos III no less, but since he was losing the Spanish fortress at St. Augustine as well as control of the Florida coasts from Savannah to the Pearl River (now the coastal boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi), possession of the western half of the Mississippi watershed was now an important strategic burden. Carlos III demanded Louisiana from Louis XV not because he wanted New Orleans or even the Mississippi River, and certainly not with any dream of making the indigent colony populous or profitable, but simply because it was in his dynastic and national interest to keep Great Britain’s aggressive colonists far away from the silver mines of Mexico. After losing Canada to Britain, France had scant reason to spend money on Louisiana, but whether the colony prospered or not, now more than ever its location as a buffer was strategically important to Spain.
In the eighteenth century, the bulk of the world’s silver production had shifted from Peru to Mexico. Silver production at Zacatecas in the province of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City, had doubled under the Spanish Bourbons, and since the American Revolution it had risen steadily from 21.5 million pesos in 1777 to a high of 27 million pesos in 1804. Mexican bullion comprised half of the entire export trade of the entire Spanish empire. One fifth of all this wealth, the quinta real, went immediately to the crown. This income was not only essential to t
he Spanish economy and government; Mexican silver fueled European trade with Asia as well.15 Carlos III was well aware of these bottom-line realities. Divorced from Canada, Louisiana had lost its critical importance to France. The colony was no prize to compensate for Spanish losses in the Great War for Empire, but in the aftermath of the destruction of New France, the sparsely populated western watershed of the Mississippi River might still serve as a barrier to keep greedy Americans away from the bullion of Mexico—but only if Carlos accepted the nuisance of owning and defending New Orleans and the unexplored wilderness of Louisiana.
By 1788 there were 5,338 people living within the wooden defenses of New Orleans—earthworks surmounted by a palisade of vertical logs with four raised bastions for cannon at the corners, and a fifth battlement in the middle of the north rampart that faced toward Lake Pontchartrain. Within these walls stood a thousand houses and buildings, most of brick-between-post construction and sheathed in wood or stucco. A few boasted roof tiles or slates but most made do with wooden shingles.
According to the eyewitness whose firsthand account of the great fire of March 21, 1788, appeared in a London newspaper, Vicente José Nunez, the twenty-seven-year-old paymaster of the army, was “a zealous Catholic, who, not satisfied with worshipping God in his usual way, had a chapel or altar, erected in his house.” At midday he lit “50 or 60 wax tapers” for Good Friday, “as if his prayers could not ascend to heaven without them.” By about one-thirty his votive candles, “being left neglected at the hour of dinner, set fire to the ceiling, from thence proceeded the destruction of the most regular, well-governed, small city in the western world.”16