A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  Having described the historic roots of Louisiana’s economic decadence, Navarro turned next to the colony’s “present state.” Martin Navarro was not Adam Smith, but for a Spanish royal official his arguments were unexpectedly close. Like Smith, Navarro saw the virtue of “self interest and a bettering of one’s fortune.” He openly admired the energy and industry of English and French smugglers “excited by self interest.” Navarro advocated

  a general, free, and common trade with any nation whatsoever … by permitting the entrance into this river of [ships of] any flag, without distinction—the sole and only mode of causing this province to flourish, populate, and advance.

  In this section of his treatise, Navarro referred to “the deity to whom all the most illustrious nations with just reason present their adoration,” but he was not talking about God. The deity was “commerce”—as he had seen it practiced by English-speaking interlopers in New Orleans in the 1770s.

  New Orleans had been desperate, and “the English were not backward.” Smugglers operated with impunity from Natchez and Baton Rouge on the Mississippi, and from the marshy village at Pass Manchac, where the Amite River and Lake Maurepas drain into the western end of Lake Pontchartrain. Between 1770 and 1779 they “established a trade which was annually worth many millions,” and “their audacity c[a]me to such an extreme that,” without permission from Spanish authorities at New Orleans, “they built a dock on the land in order to facilitate the passage of the floating warehouses of their vessels”—in short, a place of deposit where cargoes could be transferred from canoes, bateaux, and flatboats to oceangoing vessels.

  On one occasion, Navarro recalled, Bernardo de Gálvez attempted to enforce Spanish regulations by confiscating thirteen English vessels in the Mississippi.

  But what happened? From that very moment, the importation of negroes ceased. The colonists ceased to experience that abundance which is produced by the coming of traders, and which alone makes for the happiness and progress of empires.

  Navarro admired Bernardo de Gálvez, one of the best governors in the Spanish empire, but in these circumstances even Gálvez “vacillated between extremes, without daring to take other measures than that of conformity—a sad recourse.”

  Spanish officials had no alternative but to tolerate the contraband trade until Gálvez captured Natchez, Baton Rouge, Manchac, Mobile, and Pensacola in his brilliant campaign of 1779–1780. They stood by, Navarro recalled, “with the pain of not being able to remedy it, although on the other hand, we had the consolation of seeing the inhabitant and the hunter profiting from the fruit of their labors.” They knew that Louisiana owed its economic survival “to the illicit trade of the English.” Without it, Navarro asked,

  Who was there to furnish these subjects with slaves and tools for the cultivation of their lands? Who would have supplied the things of prime necessity to them? How many ships have come from Spain that would have done it?

  “What pain for a watchful governor like Don Bernardo de Gálvez,” Navarro wrote. “Although an eyewitness to this forbidden trade,” he could not take decisive action without betraying either “the sovereign authority or the happiness of the province.” Experiences such as these convinced Navarro of the virtues of free trade, which he advocated in writing and put into personal practice as soon as he could.

  In January 1782, Carlos Ill’s ministers wrote new provisional regulations for Louisiana, influenced less by Navarro’s study than by a medley of exemptions advanced through the influence of the Gálvez family. On Friday, April 5, 1782, the royal decree was read aloud from the balcony of the casa capitular. Artillery units fired a salvo from the Place d’Armes below, answered by a triple salute from decorated ships anchored in the river. The city greeted the new regulations “with such acclamations of joy that there was scarcely time to conclude the meeting with proper formality before attending the High Mass and Te Deum which the King had decreed in gratitude for the success of the Royal Arms over the English.” People placed candles in their windows that evening, “indicating how willingly the citizens would have given more appropriate expression to their joy did their circumstances and conditions permit.” And finally, French translations were distributed to the citizenry “so that they might know the great benefits His Majesty had bestowed upon them.”21

  The experiment fell short of Navarro’s program, but for ten years it opened trade between Louisiana and specified ports in France, opened trade with the French West Indies in case of “urgent necessity,” and permitted duty-free importation of slaves. These three provisions took effect in 1783 (with the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution) and, together with a special-interest exemption for the export of barrel staves to the sugar islands, they governed Louisiana trade until 1794.

  From his long experience enforcing trade regulations, and from the questions asked by puzzled New Orleans merchants, Navarro found many ambiguities in the new rules—who, for example, decided when the colony’s necessity was “urgent” enough to permit trade with the French islands? The decree showed signs of haste and the rules lacked the coherence of Navarro’s recommendations (so much so that extensive clarifications had to be issued in 1784); nevertheless, they unlocked the door. And in private dealings, the advocate of free trade was not slow to push where the new regulations may have opened doors wider than intended.

  Navarro had lived modestly for decades on a salary of 4,000 pesos. Although he never married, he acknowledged his daughter, Adelaide de Blanco Navarro Demarest, born in 1768, and gave her a dowry of 6,000 pesos for her wedding in 1785. As late as 1781 Navarro had complained that none of his business ventures had ever prospered, but the new regulations included an obscure provision to encourage trade by giving New Orleans merchants two years to buy sailing vessels without paying any duty. Navarro entered a series of partnerships, and between 1782 and 1788 the slave trade, real estate, and money-lending made him one of the richest men in the city22

  “A man of talent, active, disinterested, and popular,” wrote Governor Miró when he recommended Navarro for appointment as Spanish ambassador to the United States, the intendant was “apt for whatever position [and] possessing ability in the English language.” Among the transactions for which records survive, Navarro sold fifteen slaves for 6,400 pesos in 1785, and the next year pocketed 24,455 pesos as his share of the profit on a cargo of slaves imported with Daniel Clark. He invested in rental property in Spain—ten houses, three farms, and two wine shops in partnership with his brother in La Coruña—as well as land and plantations upriver from New Orleans, and rental property on St. Peter Street. He made business loans to a druggist, an indigo planter, and people buying houses or slaves. His largest loan was 14,000 pesos to help a colleague reestablish himself after the fire of 1788. Living elegantly on Royal Street, his own household included his secretary, a housekeeper, apprentices and servants, and a slave trained as a barber and tailor. As he contemplated retiring from the intendancy at fifty, Martín Navarro was worth 3.7 million pesos—living proof that, as he had advised the crown in 1780, “self interest and a bettering of one’s fortune overrides all inconveniences.”23

  For all his enthusiasm about free trade, however, Navarro had never lost sight of the strategic importance that Carlos III attached to Louisiana. And despite his lucrative slave-trading partnership with Daniel Clark, an Irish-born, Eton-educated Pennsylvanian who was amassing great wealth as a shipping agent in New Orleans, Navarro regarded Americans as the emerging threat to the Spanish colony. The presence of Americans on the tributaries of the Mississippi, he had warned in 1780,

  gives us motive to reflect very seriously…. Although the English posts no longer exist, we must count on new enemies who are regarding our situation and happiness with too great jealousy. The intensity with which [the Americans] are working to form a city and establish posts, and their immediate proximity to our post of the Illinois may be harmful to us some day, unless we shelter ourselves in time by promoting a numerous populatio
n in this province in order to observe and even to restrain their intentions. … As soon as the population will have reached a respectable number, a barrier to the kingdom of Nueva España [or Mexico] will be fortified and assured. This will be able to oppose any attempt of the Americans already settled on the upper part of the river, and finally may … yield a profit in men, reinforcements, and royal duties.24

  Navarro saw the hard truth that every American who crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle along the Ohio River and its tributaries weakened the buffer between the Spanish territories and the energetic republican neighbor.

  — CHAPTER THREE —

  Poor Colonel Monroe!

  Poor Col. Monroe!… His perfections of person or mind … were sum[m]ed up to me this day and amounted to eight which includes every perfection that a female can wish or a man envy. He is a member of Congress, rich, young, sensible, well read, lively, and handsome. I forget the other accomplishment, and will not subscribe to the last unless you prove the dimple on his chin to be what constitutes beauty, and I have a doubt about the sixth unless it is agreed that affording [a] subject for gaiety and liveliness to the company you are in, is the same thing as being gay and lively yourself…. At present he is more the object of my diver[s]ion than admiration.

  —Sarah Vaughan, October 10, 17841

  THE TWENTY-three-year-old Philadelphia belle Sarah Vaughan only remembered seven of the eight “perfections” that her circle of stylish young women attributed to the tall, shy young Virginian they met aboard a sloop bound for Albany in 1784. Miss Vaughan, whose merchant father helped found the American Philosophical Society, had done her homework. The gossip she was sharing with thirty-three-year-old Kitty Livingston, daughter of the governor of New Jersey, was more accurate than not.2 James Monroe was a freshman member of Congress, a rising young attorney representing his native Virginia after several years in the state legislature, and on the governor’s advisory council. He was not rich, then or later, but at twenty-six he was young and single and had bright prospects.

  At seventeen Monroe had abandoned his studies at the College of William and Mary and volunteered for service in the American Revolution. The faculty’s dull lectures bore no comparison to the revolutionary ideals voiced in debate near the other end of Duke of Gloucester Street at the Capitol and at Raleigh Tavern. Heading north from Williamsburg as a subaltern in the Third Virginia Regiment, Monroe tasted the joy of victory in a skirmish on Manhattan Island in 1775 and again in the surprise attack at Trenton for which Washington’s army crossed the Delaware River late on Christmas Day 1776. Wounded in a brave assault against a Hessian artillery position, Monroe nearly bled to death from a severed artery in his shoulder. Promoted to captain and returned to duty after months of convalescence, he soon achieved the rank of major on the staff of Washington’s brigade commander William Alexander, known as Lord Stirling in honor of his claim to a Scottish earldom—a title recognized as legitimate by the English law courts but denied to the American-born “Lord” by the House of Lords.

  Basking Ridge, Lord Stirling’s country house near Elizabeth, New Jersey, offered a gathering place where his aides mingled with fellow officers and polite society. Stirling’s wife, Sarah, was a Livingston and her brother William was the governor of New Jersey. The Stirlings and the Livingstons, and their friends and guests, added social distinction to the wartime experiences that widened Monroe’s vision of the new nation while shaping his impressions of other American states and their rising leaders. Major Monroe was close at hand when Major James Wilkinson brought news of the victory at Saratoga and then schemed with the Conway Cabal to supplant Washington as commander in chief. Monroe enjoyed the counsel of Mrs. Theodosia Prevost, the future wife of Aaron Burr, as he extricated himself from a sentimental affaire de coeur with a young lady he met at the Hermitage, the Prevost mansion in Paramus, New Jersey. As one of the few American staff officers who spoke a little French, Major Monroe became well acquainted with the marquis de Lafayette, who spoke a little English.

  When the war moved into the Carolinas, Monroe followed eagerly, bearing a letter of recommendation from Washington “as a brave, active, and sensible officer.” Washington’s aide Alexander Hamilton offered more exuberant praise: “Monroe is just setting out from Head Quarters,” Hamilton advised Henry Laurens, of South Carolina,

  and proposes to go in quest of adventures to the Southward. He seems to be as much of a knight errant as your worship, but as he is an honest fellow, I shall be glad he may find some employment, that will enable him to be knocked in the head in an honorable way…. You know him to be a man of honor a sensible man and a soldier. This makes it unnecessary [for] me to say anything to interest your friendship for him. You love your country too and he has the zeal and capacity to serve it.

  Appointed minister to France in 1794 by President George Washington, James Monroe (opposite page) purchased an elegant house on the rue de Clichy, near Montmartre. There in 1796 he and Elizabeth Kortright Monroe (above) sat for watercolor-on-ivory portraits by the Swiss-born miniaturist Louis Sené. Devotees of French fashion, as were many American republicans, the Monroes resided twice in Europe—in Paris from 1794 to 1797 and in Paris and London from 1803 to 1807—and they brought their taste for elegant French furniture, fashion, and cuisine to the decor of the White House in 1817. (James Monroe courtesy James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Elizabeth Kortright Monroe courtesy Ash Lawn-Highland, Charlottesville, Virginia.)

  Sarah Vaughan, Kitty Livingston, and their circle sensed that Monroe was well-read. Perhaps they knew that he had read law with Thomas Jefferson after the war and opened a law office in Fredericksburg, at the falls of the Rappahannock River, before entering politics. Miss Vaughan had doubts about Monroe’s “gaiety and liveliness” and was undecided about whether he was handsome. Her friend Kitty Livingston could decide whether the tall young Virginians deeply dimpled chin “constitutes beauty.” Clearly, whatever his other merits, James Monroe was sensible. Sarah Vaughan and Alexander Hamilton were in agreement on that—as was George Washington, the American paragon of good sense.3

  Sensible and serious, James Monroe rose quickly in Virginia politics. He started in 1782 with a seat in the state legislature vacated when his uncle and patron, Joseph Jones, went to Congress. He was soon appointed to the executive council along with the future chief justice John Marshall and Jefferson’s diplomatic protégé William Short. In an age skeptical of executive power, this council advised the governor and served the commonwealth as a political training ground where promising young men on the way up rubbed elbows with seasoned politicians on their way to retirement. The next summer, Monroe’s diligence gained him election to Congress.

  As a congressman during the 1780s, Monroe and his colleagues were as much diplomats as legislators, for the Confederation Congress resembled the General Assembly of the United Nations more than its modern congressional namesake. A prominent Massachusetts congressman called his delegation “our Embassy” and hoped its conduct would “merit the Approbation of our Country”—by which he meant his state. Another “mere freshman” from Connecticut described Congress as “a maze, a labyrinth of which I have not yet got hold of the clue. Some business is done in Congress, some in committee and boards. I am labouring to explore these different powers and provinces, but make very slow progress.”4

  Constitutional restrictions, chronic poverty, and habitual absenteeism put the national government in a tight harness. The state legislatures generally chose the members of Congress, and kept them reined in with detailed instructions—all to ensure that political power stayed in the states and localities. Not surprisingly, after independence had been won, many states sent the second string to Congress while their best men stayed at home. “The members of Congress are no longer, generally speaking, men of worth or of distinction,” one congressman told a Dutch visitor, “for Congress is not, as formerly, held in respect… [and] the governments] of the States and the foreign mis
sions absorb the men of first rank in the Union.” As the largest and most populous state in the Confederation, Virginia generally sent a delegation to Congress that was a cut above the others. Like the state’s executive council, the Virginia congressional delegation always included a few seasoned leaders, a couple of promising youngsters sent to test their wings, and some second-stringers to hold down the bench while the others were on the floor or in committee. The fact that Virginia paid its delegates on a per diem basis probably helped, too. Congressmen from some states had fewer incentives for diligence, and they often had difficulty getting paid at all.5

  Unlike John Francis Mercer, whose outrageous opinions and “great swelling words” prompted a wintry puritan from New Hampshire to give thanks when the “Prince of the South” retired from Congress, Monroe stood out among Virginia’s young men (as would James Madison when his turn came).6 The leaders of his delegation included Monroe’s wise old cousin William Grayson, whose intellect and wit enlivened many a debate, the proud aristocratic Richard Henry Lee, and, before Jefferson left for his diplomatic mission to France, the author of the Declaration of Independence. Among the middling talents were Edward Carrington from Cumberland, Samuel Hardy from Isle of Wight, and Richard Henry Lee’s irascible younger brother Arthur. The Lee brothers sometimes stood aloof from the rest, but on the whole the Virginians acted together and exercised influence well beyond their numbers.