by Jon Kukla
Anyway, a diplomat’s instructions could change with changes in circumstances. As the American minister to Spain from 1780 to 1782—at a time when America’s desperate need for money to fight the war overshadowed any hopes of future navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers—Congress (with Virginia’s explicit blessing) had reluctantly authorized Jay to surrender all American claims to the use of the Mississippi in exchange for Spanish support in the war against Great Britain. As Carlos Ill’s rising expert on all things North American, Diego de Gardoqui had been party to Jay’s negotiations in Madrid. He knew how Jay and many East Coast Americans felt, and with that knowledge he played them like a violin throughout the spring and summer of 1786. In Gardoqui’s own figure of speech, he squeezed them like an orange.
“For nearly a month,” Gardoqui reported in the encoded confidential dispatch of August 6, 1786, to José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, “the Congress has worked with vigor concerning our affairs. Never has it had greater nor more acrimonious debates because those of the North argue in accord with us and those of the South oppose bitterly.” The northern congressmen, he told Carlos Ill’s chief minister, “have gone as far as to threaten secession and that they will make a treaty with His Majesty.” The result was that John Jay would be called before Congress to report on the Spanish negotiations. Jay “resisted giving his verbal opinion,” Gardoqui knew, “and he gave it in writing. I believe it is not bad.”12
Gardoqui knew that Jay was seeking permission to surrender navigation of the Mississippi for a period of twenty-five or thirty years in exchange for the attractive commercial treaty Spain was offering. The Spanish negotiator may not have known exactly how Jay hoped to evade the constraints of his instructions. He did know that within a few days, on August 10, “Congress must meet in a great assembly.” He expected “very bitter debates,” but he was uncertain of their outcome. “I don’t have full confidence” of success, he admitted, but in the hope that Jay and the northern congressmen might pull it off, “I do not cease working day and night. A deep secrecy is kept and it seems strange to everyone.”
The Spanish envoy was too worldly to indulge in paranoia, but his closing remarks reveal just how tense things were—with the future of the American union at stake. Even though his letter was written entirely in secret code, Gardoqui was circumspect. He “had much to say but there is no safe conduit and as a contingency I write this via Boston. They ought to decide soon; I will take care to inform your excellency.”
Having dictated his report to the clerk who would translate it into code—probably his able secretary, predecessor, and hunting companion Francisco Rendón—Gardoqui continued to work day and night toward his goal, and apparently with success. Before dispatching his report to Madrid, Gardoqui was able to add a momentous postscript, also in code:
I have just finished putting together a secret meeting with those of the North for tomorrow.
While Congress was busy trying to remedy its chronic poverty and lack of authority, James Monroe had been closely monitoring the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations. In letters to influential Virginians such as George Washington, James Madison, and Governor Patrick Henry, Monroe consistently reported that he had caught wind of the northern stratagem “upon my first arrival here in the winter, and [had] been acquainted with all the previous arrangements, those in favor of it found necessary to make, to prepare for its reception.” Their “plan,” as Monroe saw it, was “to enter into engagements” with Gardoqui that would close the river “at least for a certain term … and further to enter into a reciprocal guarantee [between Spain and the United States] of their respective possessions in America.” In exchange for surrendering the use of the Mississippi for twenty-five or thirty years, Jay and his northern supporters expected a commercial treaty with Spain in which “we are to be admitted reciprocally, they into our ports here and we into theirs in Europe, upon an equal footing.”
The northern scheme had begun to unfold (and unravel) on May 29, 1786, when Secretary Jay informed Congress of the difficulties in his negotiation with Gardoqui and asked Congress for a special committee with full power to direct his negotiations. “It was immediately perciev’d,” Monroe told Madison, “that the object was to relieve him from the instruction respecting the Mississippi and to get a committee to cover the measure.” The plan, in short, was to sidestep a straightforward debate in Congress about giving up the use of the Mississippi—which Jay and the New Englanders knew they could not openly win. By asking Congress to establish a special committee “to instruct and direct him on every point and subject relative to the proposed treaty with Spain,” Jay, King, and their collaborators sought to evade the congressional stipulation insisting upon “the free Navigation of the Mississippi, from the source to the Ocean, as established in their Treaties with Great Britain.”13
When Jay’s letter reached the floor of Congress on May 31, Monroe continued, Rufus King (“who is associated in this business”) rose to distract the delegates’ attention from their hidden agenda with “a long speech in which he took a view of the insidious designs of France” in its recent negotiations about the Newfoundland fisheries. King’s real objective, Monroe believed, was to make “a tryal of the pulse of the house on the subject” of lifting the Mississippi restriction in Jay’s instructions. Congress failed to take the bait. Instead it referred Jay’s request to a committee composed of Charles Pettit, the former assistant quartermaster general from Pennsylvania; Rufus King, who was in on the scheme; and James Monroe, who was on to him. They immediately arranged to meet with Jay the next day, June 1, 1786.
King was enthusiastic and Pettit was perhaps willing to evade the Mississippi restriction, but Monroe’s presence kept them from acting. Their impasse, Monroe knew, was more important than it seemed. The separatists’ “plan failed,” he wrote Jefferson, “in not carrying a committee in the first instance for the purpose” of evading Jay’s instructions.14 After enduring their hopeless deadlock for two months, on Tuesday evening, August 1, the three congressmen agreed to refer the matter back to the full Congress. Their recommendation was accepted, their committee disbanded on Wednesday, and Congress called Jay to report on the state of his negotiations on Thursday, August 3, 1786.15
“From the best investigation that I have been able to give the subject,” Monroe reminded Madison, “I am of opinion that it will be for the benefit of the U. S. that the river sho[ul]d be opend.” Monroe recognized that America might be too weak to mount a military challenge if Spain unilaterally closed the river—“nor even think of it for the present”—but he reasoned that “if we enter’d into engagements to the contrary, we [would] seperate those people I mean all those westward of the mountains from the federal government and perhaps throw them into the hands eventually of a foreign power.”
None was willing openly to admit it—except in private conversations and occasional correspondence—but Rufus King, Nathan Dane, Nathaniel Gorham, Timothy Pickering, and Theodore Sedgwick had reached exactly the same conclusion. By forcing the west and the south out of the union, they were, as Sedgwick put it, merely “contracting the limits of the confederacy to such as are natural and reasonable.”16
The letter that Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress, wrote to John Jay, secretary for foreign affairs, on August 1, 1786, was politely succinct. Known to some at the beginning of the Revolution as the “Sam Adams of Philadelphia” and the “Life of the Cause of Liberty,” Charles Thomson had been named secretary twelve years earlier at the first meeting of Congress. He was fair, and everyone knew it. “With respect to the taking the Minutes,” Thomson later recalled, “what congress adopted, I committed to writing; with what they rejected, I had nothing farther to do; and even this method led to some squabbles with the members, who were desirious of having their speeches and resolutions, however put to rest by the majority, still preserved upon the Minutes.” After a dozen years, Thomson surely had forgotten that upon his nomination as secretary of Congress back in August 1774,
“Mr. Duane and Mr. Jay discovered [i.e., revealed] at first an Inclination to seek further.”17 Thomson was a neutral in the debate over the Mississippi, but the tone of his letter to a man known for his personal vanity was as polite and succinct as an arrest warrant:
Sir
I have the honor to inform you that the United States in Congress assembled require your attendance in Congress on Thursday next at 12 oClock on the subject of your letter of the 29th of May.
With great Respect, I am, Sr, Your obedt humble Servt,
Cha Thomson18
“The position of Mr. Jay becomes very embarrassing,” wrote the French charge d’affaires Louis-Guillaume Otto, who was monitoring congressional deliberations and Gardoqui’s negotiations as closely as he could. “He cannot conclude his treaty without encountering bitter reproaches from the five southern states, who loudly accuse him of… all sorts of intrigues,” while, “on the other hand, this minister cannot refuse to execute the orders of a party of which he is himself the most zealous partisan”—the northern congressmen—“without losing his popularity and influence. Whatever Mr. Jay’s conduct may be,” Otto concluded, “it is to be feared that this discussion … may be the germ of a future separation of the southern states.”19
Shielded from public scrutiny by the confidentiality of congressional debates, Jay testified in favor of relinquishing navigation of the Mississippi for twenty-five or thirty years. He regarded that concession as a small price to pay for the commercial advantages with which Gardoqui had been dazzling the northern commercial and maritime states.
At last the contentious issue had reached the floor of Congress for open debate, although the debate itself indicated that Jay and the northern separatist congressmen had already failed. Their best shot at success had been to cloak the intended surrender of the Mississippi in the appointment of Jay’s special advisory committee—thereby forcing the south and west either to accept a fait accompli or leave the union. Stymied by the failure of their covert strategy, the schemers lacked the nine-state majority they needed for an overt success. Then, as news of the first rumblings of what became Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts shook their confidence in their ability to control New England itself, the secret separatists tried to bury the whole episode. With Congress about to embark upon the most divisive debate since its arguments over independence, however, the damage had already been done. Congress was deadlocked—and sectional distrust would quickly spread to the south and west.
The southern delegates chose thirty-four-year-old Charles Pinckney as their champion to answer Jay point for point. Born in Charleston into a preeminent planter family, Pinckney was one of South Carolina’s most eligible bachelors, with seven low-country plantations and a fine town-house on lower Meeting Street. He had read law at home when the Revolution disrupted his enrollment at the Middle Temple in London, entered the state legislature at twenty-two, served as an officer in the state militia, and spent time in a British prison ship and a year on parole for his part in defending the city during the siege of Charleston. Pinckney was destined to leadership in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, four terms as governor, a seat in the United States Senate, and marriage to his social equal, Mary Eleanor Laurens, daughter of the patriot, planter, and former president of Congress Henry Laurens. Given a week to prepare his speech, Pinckney came to the floor of Congress on Thursday, August 10, with a written text that disputed Jay’s testimony, disparaged the value of Spain’s offers, and vindicated America’s claim to the Mississippi.20
Jay’s testimony on August 3 and Pinckney’s reply a week later framed the most divisive debate in the nation’s short history—a debate about the future that was too vital to remain entirely secret forever. The South Carolinian’s speech was so important that in response to requests from “many of the southern members to furnish them with copies, I had a few printed.” For this Pinckney turned to Francis Childs, who published both the New York Daily Advertiser, the city’s oldest daily paper, and the weekly New-York Price-Current. Childs’s office at Water and King Streets was discreetly convenient, but Pinckney’s choice of his printer in New York probably had more to do with his kinship to Nathan Childs, publisher of the South-Carolina Weekly Gazette and the Charleston Morning Post, than to convenience.21
Mr. Charles Pinckney’s Speech, in Answer to Mr. Jay is an odd-looking thing: four long columns of small type on two sides of a fourteen-by-sixteen-inch foolscap sheet of paper. The press run was small, perhaps only a few dozen copies. Neither Pinckney nor his compositor, perhaps one of the shop’s apprentices, wasted time on fancy presswork or careful proofreading. Typographical errors abound, even for an age in which spelling was still a creative art. The substitution of a six for a zero in the date of the speech has bred confusion (and footnotes) for generations of historians.
In essence, Francis Childs’s print shop struck off copies of Mr. Charles Pinckney’s Speech, in Answer to Mr. Jay that were little more than galley proofs, corrected hastily if at all, and rushed them to Pinckney, who had most of them “confidentially delivered to some of my friends.” Three years later Pinckney sent President Washington “one of the few copies I have left,” and fifteen years apparently passed before James Madison got his own copy—even though he visited Monroe in New York that August and replaced Monroe in Congress that November. The copy of Mr. Charles Pinckney’s Speech, in Answer to Mr. Jay preserved in Madison’s papers at the Library of Congress is likely one that Pinckney sent him in July 1801, when Madison was secretary of state and Pinckney was President Jefferson’s nominee for ambassador to Spain. Another extant copy, also at the Library of Congress, may have belonged to Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress.22
One reason so many of his colleagues wanted copies of Pinckney’s speech is that it was long on facts and short on rhetoric (good news for modern readers accustomed to politicians who think in fifteen-second sound bites). Another reason is that although Charles Pinckney disagreed with John Jay at every point, he answered Jay’s arguments without distorting them, thus conveniently summarizing both sides of the debate as it eventually went public. The third reason is that everyone in Congress assigned grave importance to the implications of the debate, and Pinckney’s speech, for the future of the union.23
Congress assembled on Thursday, August 10, 1786, and immediately “resolved” itself into a committee of the whole—a routine procedure that made formal debate easier. The president of Congress, Boston merchant Nathaniel Gorham, whom Gardoqui believed “behaves well and will hold firm,” vacated the chair for South Carolina delegate John Bull, who chaired the committee of the whole during the debate.24 Ten years Pinckney’s senior, John Bull lived near Beaufort and had come to Congress with Pinckney two years earlier. Now he was the presiding officer to whom, in the tradition of English-speaking legislatures everywhere, the younger South Carolinian addressed arguments meant for all. At the end of the afternoon, as was then customary, the minutes of Congress would say only that “after some time” Mr. Gorham “resumed the chair, and Mr. Bull reported, that the committee … having come to no determination, desire leave to sit to-morrow”25
“Mr. President,” Pinckney began dispassionately, “the Secretary for Foreign Affairs has reported, that, in consequence of the commission and instructions he had received from Congress for the purpose of negotiating with Mr. Gardoqui, he has had several conferences with him,” and that he had discussed “an offer from Mr. Gardoqui to enter into a commercial treaty upon certain principles,” provided “that Spain and the United States should fix the boundaries of their respective territories” and that Americans relinquish “their right to navigate the river for twenty-five or thirty years.”26 Pinckney thought the terms were ill-advised, and he set out to explain why.
First, despite her great wealth and vast empire, it seemed clear that Spain was weaker than Jay and his friends were willing to admit. Already wary of the example of American independence, Spain “views with a jealous eye the emancipation of these Sta
tes, and dreads [our proximity] to her rich and extensive, tho’ feeble colonies of South-America.” The “deranged state” of American finance and the weakness of the Confederation, Pinckney admitted to his colleagues, gave Carlos III hope that “your distress will force you into a compliance.” Nevertheless, Pinckney was confident that America’s difficulties were only temporary, while “the Spanish Monarchy carries in its bosom the seeds of its dissolution.” America’s situation, he said, “though unpleasant, is not yet sufficiently desperate to force us into measures derogatory to our national honor. Spain has more to risque, and more to dread … than we can fear.”
Secondly, although Gardoqui claimed to offer “principles of perfect reciprocity,” his promise was a sham. Spanish ports in the West Indies and South America would remain closed to American trade, tobacco would remain “prohibited in her European ports,” and import duties would remain unfair. Americans trading into Spanish ports “will pay four, and in some instances six times as much as their merchants will in our ports.” Spanish products would pay duties of 2 or 2.5 percent as they entered the United States (5 percent only if the states approved a proposed impost, which they did not). Conversely, American grain could enter the port of Cádiz with a 10 percent duty, while the tariff on merchandise entering other ports in Spain was “generally estimated at 25 per cent”—and for South American ports “not less than 25 per cent, ever, and in many cases much higher.”
Next Pinckney reviewed Spain’s interest in specific American commodities. The offer to purchase masts and spars was of “no consequence,” he declared. “If you have masts and spars of equal size and fitness with those imported from the Baltic, you will always find purchasers.” As to grain, every few years dry weather forced Spain to import wheat from Sicily and Poland, so Spain bought “American wheat when it is as good and as cheap.” This fact demonstrated, Pinckney contended, that Spain’s idea of reciprocity was to open their ports when it served their interests, “but in the lucrative and truly important trade of their islands and other dominions, or wherever they are afraid of a rivalship, there you are to be prevented.”