A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  Antagonism bred by the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations festered in Congress for two full years. The Spanish treaty was dead in the water, but both sides were on their guard just in case. An air of suspicion permeated national politics. Distrust made routine business more difficult, aborted a promising congressional reform movement to strengthen the union, and inflamed regional friction both in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and in the state conventions that ratified the new federal Constitution. Eventually, on September 16, 1788, three weeks before adjourning for the last time, the Confederation Congress resolved “that no further progress be made in the negotiations with Spain … but that the subject to which they related be referred to the federal government which is to assemble in March next.”3 The underlying issues of national and regional self-interest were not about to disappear. The Jay-Gardoqui negotiations revealed attitudes toward the Mississippi River and the west that shaped the events of the next decade and the subsequent history of North America—jealous hostility from New England, competitive neglect from the middle states, expansive hopes from the south, and impatient frustration in Kentucky and the Ohio Country.4

  The empire founded by the Castilian sponsors of Christopher Columbus had never been larger than it was in 1786. The New World dominions of His Most Catholic Majesty Carlos III embraced all of Mexico, Central America, and South America except the Guianas and Brazil. Of the major Caribbean islands, he held Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Trinidad. Of the territory that now comprises the United States, he ruled Florida, coastal Alabama and Mississippi, the east bank of the Mississippi River from Natchez to the Gulf of Mexico, and virtually everything west of the river and south of Canada.

  The vast Spanish empire looked formidable on a world map, but more precarious in ledgers of the royal treasury. Silver production at Zacatecas in the province of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City, had doubled under the Spanish Bourbons. By 1786 Mexican bullion comprised 49.5 percent of the annual export trade of the entire Spanish empire. Carlos III and his chief minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, were keenly aware that this wealth comprised about a third of the royal income, and that it was essential to the survival of the Spanish economy and government.5

  With half the wealth of its world empire at stake, Spain’s imperial objective was to maintain the watershed of the Mississippi River as a protective barrier against its nearest and most aggressive rival. For this reason—after opening the river during the American Revolution as a covert slap at Great Britain—Floridablanca had slammed the door on American traders in 1784. That official policy did not drastically change until Carlos III joined his beloved queen, Maria Amalia of Saxony in the royal crypts of El Escorial. Diego de Gardoqui reflected this sentiment in a private conversation with James Madison, when he “betrayed strongly the anxiety of Spain to retard the population of the Western Country; observing that when ever a sufficient [American] force should arise therein, it w[oul]d be impossible for it to be controuled.”6

  During the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786 and the ongoing debate into 1788, two distinct groups of Americans—New Englanders and middle state advocates of rival streams—favored closing the Mississippi River to American trade for twenty or thirty years. “Every Citizen of the Atlantic States, who emigrates to the westward of the Allegany is a total Loss to our confederacy,” Rufus King and his friends believed. “Nature has severed the two countries by a vast and extensive chain of mountains” and “interest will keep them separate,” King wrote.

  The feeble policy of our disjointed Government will not be able to unite them. For these reasons I have ever been opposed to encouragements of western immigrants—the States situated on the Atlantic are not sufficiently populous, and loosing our men, is loosing our greatest Source of Wealth.

  Boston merchant Nathaniel Gorham, president of Congress, was blunt: “Mr. Ghorum avowed his opinion that… shutting the Mississippi would be advantageous to the Atlantic States, and wished to see it shut.” In a private fit of exasperation, John Jay was even more blunt. “Would that the world had no Mississippi!” he exclaimed during a frustrating moment of his negotiations with Diego de Gardoqui.7

  The “rage for emigrating to our western country” astounded Jay. “Thousands have already fixed their habitations in that wilderness,” he wrote a friend, “and the seeds of a great people are daily planting beyond the mountains.” Would they be friend or foe? “That western country will one day give us trouble,” Jay feared. “To govern them will not be easy, and whether after two or three generations they will be fit to govern themselves is a question that merits consideration.”8

  When John Jay worried that the United States was already too big for a single republic, his opinion was bolstered by the best of eighteenth-century political science. On this point, Americans looked to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, a book of applied political theory published in 1748, widely translated and reprinted, and highly regarded by statesmen of the revolutionary generation. Montesquieu’s book was ideally suited to men of a practical American temperament: its short chapters and numbered paragraphs were filled with pithy maxims about monarchies, aristocracies, and republics—an eighteenth-century Cliffs Notes on Classical Government. Educated men read Montesquieu firsthand (skimming lightly over familiar citations to Aristotle and Plato, Plutarch and Livy, Cicero and the rest), and they repeated his basic ideas in newspaper essays, pamphlets, and political oratory. Montesquieu’s writings readily explained the fall of the Roman republic, the inequities of the Stamp Act, and the recent decline of the Confederation Congress.9

  With nods to “the great Montesquieu” and “the experience of all ages,” James Monroe’s neighbor and law partner, John Dawson, proclaimed “that no government, formed on the principles of freedom, can pervade all North America.” The very idea of a single republic “one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws,” wrote the former librarian of Harvard College, James Winthrop, in the Massachusetts Gazette, “is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.”10

  For several months in 1786, as we have seen, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and their friends in New England had drawn a parallel lesson from Montesquieu as they flirted with separatism. Having reconsidered the merits of “their connection with the Southern States” and convinced themselves that “even the appearance of a union cannot … long be preserved,” men like Rufus King and Theodore Sedgwick had conspired to “contract… the limits of the confederacy to such as are natural and reasonable.” In the smaller northern republic of their dreams, the needs of merchants and fishermen and the value of a commercial treaty with Spain would be obvious, understood, and beyond the reach of savage frontiersmen and slaveholding “Southern Nabobs [who] behave as though they viewed themselves a Superior order of animals when Compared with those of the other end of the Confederacy”11

  Chilling news from the western counties of Massachusetts rapidly cooled the impulse toward New England separatism in the autumn of 1786. Squeezed by postwar recession, overextended credit, and outrageously high taxes payable only in hard currency, the farmers of western Massachusetts rose up against the courts, lawyers, creditors, and tax collectors who threatened to foreclose on their farms and imprison them for debt. In August and September 1786, armed groups of farmers forced the closing of courts in five Massachusetts counties.

  By Christmas the movement found its nominal leader in Captain Daniel Shays, an impoverished Revolutionary War veteran from the Connecticut River Valley town of Pelham, Massachusetts, thirty miles north of the government arsenal at Springfield. Late in January, eleven hundred angry men and boys attacked the arsenal and were repulsed by a single volley of cannon fire. By spring Shays’s Rebellion was over. Four men had died in skirmishes (three rebels and a militiamen), four were wounded, two rebel leaders were hanged, and the rest fined, wh
ipped, or briefly imprisoned. Daniel Shays himself faded into obscurity, drink, and poverty, dying in 1825 at the age of eighty-four.12

  When the first news of frontier unrest reached New York City late in August 1786, the Massachusetts delegation was, simultaneously, working to win Congress more authority for the proper regulation of American trade while also flirting with ideas of separation or a commercial sub-confederation. Despite the apparent contradiction, either path might move New England toward prosperity, and what other options did they have? The status quo was hopeless. Congress needed a transfusion of energy and money for the union to survive, but the plan of a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation seemed dangerous—a cure worse than the disease, and all the more suspicious because it was so popular among the wealthy planters of Virginia and Maryland. Massachusetts chose not to be represented at the Annapolis convention, a meeting that Theodore Sedgwick believed masked “an intention of defeating the enlargement of the powers of Congress.”13 How could slaveholding planters and southern nabobs sympathize with the real problems of commerce? “The proposition for the Annapolis convention, which originated in the Assembly of Virginia,” warned Rufus King, “did not come from the persons favorable to a commercial System common to all the states.” The Chesapeake grandees pushing for a convention seemed just hapless tools of Philadelphia financier Robert Morris and his ilk. Surely their intended convention would summon “thro out the Union an Exertion of the Friends of an Aristocracy” and degenerate into “a plan of foederal Government essentially different from the republican Form now administered.”14

  Coupled with the rejection of measures to strengthen the Confederation Congress, the grim news from the frontier counties of Massachusetts undermined all the political calculations of Rufus King, Nathaniel Gorham, Theodore Sedgwick, and their friends. Compared to Daniel Shays and the angry plowboys of Massachusetts, those superior animals, the southern nabobs, and their proposed convention looked better than it had. Agrarian unrest at home made a stronger alliance with men of property increasingly attractive, even if their property included slaves.

  “The affair of the Mississippi hangs at present in suspence,” William Grayson reported with relief in November 1786 to James Monroe, who was heading home after three years in Congress, and to his successor, James Madison. “The Massachusetts] Bay delegation have been more on the conciliatory plan, since the late insurrections in that State,” Grayson added. “They of course depend greatly on the foederal aid,” Grayson reminded Madison, and were now wishing “not only for a continuance of the confederation, but that it may be made more adequate to the purposes of government.” For the past year Grayson and Monroe had seen the New Englanders in their more provincial and selfish moments—but Shays had changed their mood. “The Massachusetts delegation have been much more friendly … since the late insurrection in their State,” Grayson smiled to Monroe, and now “they look upon the foederal assistance as a matter of the greatest importance [and] of course they wish for a continuance of the Confederation.”15 Of course.

  The Massachusetts delegation of 1786 couldn’t have cared less about America’s future claim to the Mississippi River, but many politicians and merchants from the middle Atlantic states (and several prominent Virginians) quietly agreed with John Jay about a temporary closing of navigation on the river. These were men who assumed (along with other southerners and westerners) “that all North America must at length be annexed to us,” but who were committed to other rivers as trade routes into Kentucky and the west.16 If fate kept the Mississippi closed for a few years, they were not averse to developing a variety of dreams and schemes for waterways and canals connecting their favored streams to the lands beyond the Appalachians.

  Gazing across the lawns of Mount Vernon toward the Potomac River, George Washington wrote that “our clearest interest is to open a wide door, and make a smooth way for the produce of that Country to pass to our Markets before the trade may get into another channel.”17 In subsequent decades, how many thousands of American enthusiasts for our canal and our turnpike, our railroad and our interstate highway, our airport and our information technology corridor have echoed Washington’s sentiment?

  In Richmond, men dreamt of connecting the James River (which pierces the Blue Ridge Mountains) with the Kanawha, a tributary of the Ohio. They began work in 1784 but fell behind their rivals in New York. Eventually their canal system was interrupted and damaged by the Civil War, and later its surviving towpaths supported the railroad line named for the connection they dreamt of: the Norfolk and Western.18

  George Washington supported the James River project, but he and his neighbors were more enthusiastic about linking the Potomac River with any of the tributaries of the Ohio that converge near Pittsburgh. Toward this end, at the great falls of the Potomac, Washington started a canal that opened in 1800, only to be superseded by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1825, which in turn blazed the trail for Peter Cooper’s steam-powered Tom Thumb and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.19

  Washington’s favorite river had more northern rivals, as well. From the headwaters of Chesapeake Bay, Pennsylvanians dreamt of reaching inland to Pittsburgh via the Susquehanna River, with a portage of eleven miles to the Allegheny (a major tributary of the Ohio) and another portage of only seven miles to Lake Erie. It was plain, Pennsylvania’s William Maclay bragged in the New York Daily Advertiser, that the Susquehanna had better connections to the west than the Potomac, “and is besides intimately connected with the northern waters, and great lakes; advantages which the Potowmac cannot pretend to.”20

  Regardless of Washington’s and Maclay’s grand claims for the Potomac and the Susquehanna, their mid-Atlantic rivalry for the western trade was mild compared to the ancient contest between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence Rivers. Pioneered by the coureurs de bois of New France, the great commercial empire of the St. Lawrence followed the beaver along waterways stretching westward from Quebec and Montreal through the Great Lakes into the Canadian Rockies. Canada dominated the North American fur trade through most of the eighteenth century, despite the fact that the St. Lawrence freezes over every winter. The Canadians lost their advantage in the Great Lakes when America won its independence. In the new century they would finish second to their New York rivals in the race to build canals to carry inland produce from the Great Lakes to the sea.21

  In this commercial competition between the major rivers of the Atlantic Coast, first place went eventually to the ice-free port at the mouth of the Hudson. Forty years after John Jay’s protective measures to close the Mississippi and stifle western expansion had failed, a more visionary generation of New Yorkers led by De Witt Clinton started a 363-mile canal between Albany and Buffalo. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal would reduce the cost of shipping freight from Lake Erie to Manhattan from $100 a ton to $6 a ton and crown New York City as the great storehouse and emporium of the East Coast.22

  George Washington began his love affair with the west at sixteen, riding along the Shenandoah River “through the most beautiful Groves of Sugar Trees” on a bright Saturday in March 1748—the same year that Montesquieu warned that extended republics cannot long subsist. The young Virginian had crossed the Blue Ridge with a surveying party “and Spent the best part of the Day in admiring the Trees and Richness of the Land.” By twenty he owned two thousand fertile acres on the Virginia frontier, by 1767 he had acquired land west of the Alleghenies, and by his death in 1799 the squire of Mount Vernon owned forty-five thousand choice acres of western land scattered through the Shenandoah Valley and the modern states of Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

  In the west, Washington believed, “an enterprizing Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate … for himself and posterity.” After all, “the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made … by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” As a surveyor,
planter, and speculator, Washington had felt the lure of western lands as intensely as any colonial Virginian. As a statesman and strategist whose military career began with the first shots of the French and Indian War near Fort Duquesne, however, Washington had learned in the American forest what Harvard librarians found in Montesquieu, that distance and self-interest could disrupt empires and republics.23

  At the end of the Revolution, Washington warned that Americans would move across the mountains “faster than any other ever did, or any one would imagine.” And he knew that their political allegiance would tend toward the nation that provided them access to markets. Opening the Potomac River was “of great political importance,” Washington wrote in 1784, “to prevent the trade of the Western territory from settling in the hands either of the Spanish or British.” If “the trade of that Country should flow through the Mississippi or St Lawrence … they would in a few years be as unconnected with us [as] we are with South America.”

  For Virginia’s well-being, he believed that extending the “inland navigation of the rivers Potomac and James” was essential. If America’s western settlers “cannot, by an easy communication be drawn this way,” Washington warned, “they will become a distinct people from us—have different views—different interests, and instead of adding strength to the Union, may in case of a rupture with either [Spain or Britain] be a formidable and dangerous neighbour.”24

  Aside from his obvious attachment to the river that washed Mount Vernon, Washington was indifferent to the Mississippi River chiefly because it belonged to Spain and emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. “The more communications are opened” between east and west, he advised a friend in Maryland, “the closer we bind that rising world (for indeed it may be so called) to our interests; and the greater strength we acquire by it… not only as it respects our commerce, but our political interest, and the well being and strength of the Union also.”25