A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  “The Western settlers,” Washington said, speaking “from [his] own observation,” stood “as it were upon a pivot—the touch of a feather, would turn them any way.” During the Revolution they

  look’d down the Mississippi, until the Spaniards … threw difficulties in their way; and they looked that way for no other reason, than because they could glide gently down the stream; without considering perhaps, the fatigues of the voyage back again … and because they have no other means of coming to us but by a long Land transportation and unimproved roads…. But smooth the road once, and make easy the way for them, and then see what an influx of articles will be poured in upon us—how amazingly our exports will be encreased by them, and how amply we shall be compensated for any trouble and expence we may encounter.26

  Other Potomac planters shared Washington’s indifference to the Mississippi. From George Mason’s silence “upon this subject,” James Monroe concluded that Washington’s neighbor, the influential master of Gunston Hall and principal author of the Virginia constitution and Declaration of Rights, was “not with us.”27 Monroe also suspected that Congressman Richard Henry Lee and his cousin Light-Horse Harry Lee, while voting dutifully with the Virginia delegation to uphold the stipulation about the Mississippi in Jay’s instructions, privately “held the opposite sentiment.”28

  An active patriot since the Stamp Act and a Virginian who had often allied with the radicalism of Samuel Adams in national affairs, the aging and gout-ridden Richard Henry Lee, now fifty-four, was more concerned with European than with western affairs. Opening the Mississippi, he suggested in a letter to George Washington, was “an Object unattainable for many years, and probably Never without War not only with Spain, but most likely with the Bourbon Alliance.” European hostility seemed a greater danger than “an Alliance of Kentuckians with the British,” for “after all, if this navigation could be opened and the benefits be such as are chimerically supposed, it must in its consequences depopulate and rain the Old States.”29

  More interesting than his cousin’s intermittent correspondence with the influential squire of Mount Vernon, however, was the full-court press that Light-Horse Harry Lee mounted on the subject of the Mississippi between April and October 1786. In no fewer than six letters to Washington, Lee urged a temporary closing of the river in exchange for the commercial treaty. Lee’s arguments were familiar. “Rather than defer longer the benefits of a free liberal system of trade with Spain,” he asked during the secret congressional debates in July, “why not agree to the occlusion of the Mississippi”? If America accepted Gardoqui’s terms, Lee reiterated a week prior to Charles Pinckney’s speech, “we give in fact nothing, for the moment our western country become populous and capable, they will seize by force what may have be[en] yielded by treaty.”

  Sweetening his pitch in September, Lee alluded to current talk of improving Washington’s favorite river. “If the Potomac navigation proceeds in the manner these gentlemen mention,” Lee said, “it… will be a strong argument among the politicians, [in] favor of the Spanish treaty and the occlusion of the Mississippi.” The final and most lengthy letter in the series, early in October, summarized Jay’s arguments on behalf of the treaty and “confess [ed]” Lee’s “hope that the state of Virginia will consider a treaty with Spain on the principles of the project”—that is, with restrictions on navigation of the Mississippi—“essentially necessary to her political happiness, and to her commercial aggrandizement.”

  Light-Horse Harry Lee’s persistent appeals to Washington are interesting less for what he said than for his motive for pressing the matter. Through Gardoqui’s good offices, Washington had already accepted the gift of a fine Spanish jackass from Carlos III, and along with one of Lee’s letters came a “small box given to me by Mr. Gardoqui for you.” The contents of that small box are unknown, and no one (least of all Gardoqui) would imagine that General Washington could be bribed. So, with Congress deadlocked seven to five, Gardoqui recruited Henry Lee to cultivate Washington’s support for the proposed commercial treaty on the long-shot chance that he might induce Virginia to reverse its position on the navigation of the Mississippi. Gardoqui’s expense accounts and confidential reports, however, prove that Light-Horse Harry Lee—a man remembered mainly as the father of Robert E. Lee and the eulogist who proclaimed George Washington to be “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”—was a hired mule. For his services in smuggling pro-Spanish arguments to Washington, Gardoqui secretly gave Lee a total of $5,000 in loans, which Lee never repaid.30

  About the time of Light-Horse Harry Lee’s last letter to Washington in October, his “heterodoxy” on the issue of the Mississippi aroused deep suspicions back in Virginia, where the legislature was “full of consternation and complaint” about Jay’s “project for bartering the Mississippi to Spain.” Lee was eligible for reelection and had always voted in accord with his instructions (regardless of his private opinion) but on November 7, 1786, the legislature summarily “dropt” him when it reelected the other eligible members of the Virginia congressional delegation. Lee regarded his “disgrace” as “cruel and ungrateful,” and his friends were pained by “the mortification in which it must involve a man of sensibility.” It was an embarrassing snub to any man of honor. “I feel as you do for our acquaintance Colo[nel] Lee,” Washington wrote with greater empathy than grammatical precision: “Better never have delegated, than left him out.” Happily for Lee’s political reputation, he was reelected to a vacancy in the Virginia congressional delegation a few weeks later—and the Spanish bribe remained a secret until discovered in the archive of Gardoqui’s confidential reports and expense accounts by diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis in the twentieth century.31

  Even Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to the Mississippi was a recent development. Trade with the west, Thomas Jefferson had written to Washington in October 1784, was “under a competition between the Hudson, the Patomac and the Mississippi.” The Mississippi had the advantage for heavy commodities, but with navigation in the Gulf of Mexico “so dangerous, and that up the Mississippi so difficult and tedious,” it was unlikely “that European merchandize will return through that channel.” The Mississippi and its tributaries invited “flour, lumber and other heavy articles … floated on rafts which will be themselves an article of sale … the navigators returning by land or [upstream] in light batteaux.”

  For imported goods, Jefferson foresaw “a rivalship between the Hudson and Patowmac.” Poring over his maps, Jefferson calculated that the navigable tributaries of the Ohio were closer to Alexandria, Virginia, than to New York “by 730 miles, and … interrupted by one portage only.” Nature, Jefferson solemnly decreed, “has declared in favour of the Patowmac.”

  Like Fortune, however, Nature is profligate with her charms. “Unfortunately,” Jefferson lamented, “the Hudson is already open and known in practice,” while “ours is still to be opened.” Washington, he hoped, would inspire Virginia to open the Potomac River and seize “the moment in which the trade of the West will begin to get into motion and to take its direction.” Avowing that he personally did not own “nor ever hav[e] a prospect of owning one inch of land on any water either of the Patowmac or Ohio,” Jefferson regarded his own “zeal in this business [a]s public and pure”—civic virtues presumably transferable to any gentleman who helped enforce Nature’s verdict, even if he happened to own land along the chosen river.32

  Washington’s enthusiasm for the Potomac and Jefferson’s verdict in its favor as Nature’s preferred artery to the west occasionally blinded both men to the inconvenient fact that water runs downhill. Not so the intrepid Pennsylvania democrat William Maclay. “During all the time of the high price of wheat, flour, etc. in the Atlantic states,” Maclay asked, has “a single boat been loaded with these articles at Fort Pitt, and ascended the Monongohela or any other stream, so that these same articles reached the mouth of the Potowmack? The answer must be, no.”33 Would not the farmers of
the west rather “take their chance of the Mississippi market at 2000 miles distance? the answer must be yes.” To clear a profit, Maclay knew, boats laden with country produce

  must be heavily loaded, [and] such cannot ascend streams with ease if the water is high. … If shallow, they cannot proceed for want of water … and even then the labor of the boatmen is extreme. Hence country produce will always descend the full stream, be the prospect of the market ever so distant.

  “Thus it is plain,” Maclay concluded, “that the Atlantic rivers never can supply any town on their banks with provisions or any heavy articles, but those which are produced on their own lands.”34 Despite William Maclay’s affection for the Susquehanna, his critique of the Potomac applied equally to the Pennsylvania river. For impatient western families and clear-eyed southerners, it was the Mississippi that ultimately mattered. Until their countrymen got over their regional infatuations with lesser streams on the Atlantic Coast, however, American sentiment remained divided—and that division gave Spain room for diplomatic manuevering and frontier intrigue.

  — CHAPTER SIX —

  Bourbons on the Rocks

  Carlos, Carlos, ¡qué tonto tú eres! [How foolish you are!]

  —Carlos III to the future Carlos IV, ca. 17881

  This Federal Republic is born, so to speak, small; and before it could establish its independence it had to have the support of nations as powerful as France and Spain. The day, however, will come when it will be gigantic, and a formidable colossus in these regions; then it will forget the benefits which it has received from both Powers, and will think of nothing but its own aggrandizement.

  —Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda, 17832

  A SIDE FROM THE OLD Ursuline Convent and a few other structures that survived the disastrous fire of 1788, the oldest buildings in New Orleans stand near Bayou St. John. Along Moss Street the West Indian rooflines and pencil-post columns of plantation-style houses built in the second half of the eighteenth century compete for the soul of the neighborhood with nineteenth-century shotgun doubles and spacious 1930s bungalows. Formerly navigable to Lake Pontchartrain, Bayou St. John was the preferred gateway to Spanish New Orleans. By entering Lake Pontchartrain through Lake Borgne and the straits of the Rigolets, thirty miles east of the city, Spanish sailing vessels avoided the shoals near the crow’s-foot delta of the Mississippi and the slow drudgery of tacking and jibing against the current through ninety miles of winding river. Bayou St. John is now severed from the lake by the modern city’s protective levees, but a small bronze plaque outside the West Indian plantation-style house at 1300 Moss Street, built about 1784, marks Grand Route St. John. Then a simple dirt road, despite its magnificent name, Grand Route St. John followed an old Indian path along a slight ridge between the river and the bayou that connected Spanish New Orleans with its international port of entry. It was here that the royal packet boat from Havana moored late on Friday afternoon, April 3, 1789.

  That morning at their regular weekly meeting Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró and members of the Cabildo had honored their retiring colleague, Intendant Martín Navarro, who was returning to Spain. Now the Havana packet boat was discharging an unwelcome messenger. As the afternoon sun cast shadows of moss-laden oaks across tile roofs and stucco walls, a royal courier rushed along Grand Route St. John toward the city with sealed proclamations announcing “the death of our King and Lord Don Carlos III (may he have Heavenly Glory)” and the accession of his eldest son, the former Prince of Asturias, now Carlos IV.3

  As soon as the information reached him, Governor Miró sent messengers to summon the members of the Cabildo to meet in “extraordinary session” early Saturday morning. Gathering at nine o’clock in the “chambers of the Capitol” (the provincial government house that served as Miró’s residence and office near the river on St. Louis Street), they learned of “the grievous occurrence … of the death of our King and Lord Don Carlos III… at 15 minutes to one on the 14th of December.” Miró outlined the funeral rites that would be conducted “in accordance with the Royal orders of His Majesty the actual King” and “with the greatest possible solemnity and propriety in the small church of the Hospital, which was not destroyed by the flames of the late disastrous fire.”4

  On Monday, two members of the Cabildo, “wearing mourning, and preceded by the two mace-bearers of the City with their maces, also in mourning,” would announce the king’s death to the populace of the city. At nine o’clock on Tuesday, April 22, the mace-bearers, once again “dressed in strict mourning, and accompanied by the officers of the Military Corps,” would lead Governor Miró, the members of the Cabildo, and other dignitaries in a solemn procession “from the government buildings (which serve for the meetings of the Cabildo, due to the burning of the casa capitular in the fire of the 21st of March last year) to the Church at Charity Hospital” on Rampart between Toulouse and St. Peter Streets “(instead of the parochial church which was likewise destroyed in the said fire).”5

  In the center of the church stood a “majestic sepulchral bier.” At the top were the ceremonial funeral urn covered with a royal mantle in bright red velvet and “a scepter and gilt crown with bright beautiful enamel, which resembled precious stones” resting on a red velvet pillow decorated with gold braid—all of it sheltered beneath “a beautiful canopy which … descended in four arched festoons” bearing insignias of the king and medallions of the royal orders. Sixty royal coats of arms graced the altar, the pulpit, and the walls of the chapel, “all illuminated by a large number of torches and candles … giving splendor to the mournful display.” As the city gathered in “a spectacle equally respectful and demonstrative” of their veneration for the late Carlos III, the Reverend Father Antonio de Sedella, a Capuchin friar known also as Père Antoine, offered an eloquent eulogy. Tears and prayers for absolution were punctuated by a volley of artillery fired in salute to the passing of one of Spain’s greatest monarchs. Finally, about midday, the governor and members of the Cabildo “returned in the same order … to the Government Buildings where courteous leave-taking took place among those present, and all retired to their respective homes.”6

  A great monarch was dead and his able intendant, Martín Navarro, was leaving New Orleans. For twenty-five years, Carlos III had been willing to subsidize Louisiana as a borderland barrier protecting the silver mines of Mexico from foreigners. More recently, his intendant had advocated free trade and population growth as a better means to the same end. Without these two men guiding Spanish policy in Madrid and New Orleans, however, their successors wavered in the face of American westward expansion. The death of Carlos III and the ineptitude of his Bourbon cousins in France and of his son Carlos IV set in motion a sequence of world events that enabled the United States to pluck territories from Spain more aggressively (and in much larger pieces) than Thomas Jefferson had anticipated while Carlos III was still alive.

  Conflict between governors and intendants, each of whom answered independently to a different set of imperial officials, was commonplace throughout the Spanish empire. When Esteban Rodríguez Miró and Martín Navarro responded so promptly and cooperatively to the great fire of 1788, that moment may well have marked the pinnacle of executive efficiency for the Spanish regime in Louisiana. The able partnership of able men was rooted in their shared perception of the colony’s needs, and in their shared commitment to the benefits of free trade and increased immigration. Devastating as it had been, Louisiana had survived the fire of 1788. New Orleans would rebuild (as it would rebuild yet again after another major fire in 1794), but the province would never recover from the death of Carlos III or the retirement of Martín Navarro. Their departures made the year 1788 an unmarked turning point for the future of North America.

  For all his enthusiasm about free trade and his emulation of Anglo-American entrepreneurial values, Martín Navarro had never lost sight of the strategic importance that Carlos III attached to Louisiana. The king and his intendant agreed that colony was, first
and foremost, a buffer zone to keep foreigners away from the silver mines of New Spain. Englishmen had once been the main threat, but the situation had changed after the American Revolution. The English still held Canada, but in his Political Reflections on the Present Conditions of the Province of Louisiana, Navarro had warned that American settlements in the Ohio and Illinois Country now gave Spanish statesmen “motive to reflect very seriously.” He minced no words. American frontiersmen were “new enemies who are regarding our situation and happiness with too great jealousy.” With this formidable threat in mind, Navarro had recommended that Carlos III ease restrictions on Louisiana trade to encourage “a numerous population in this province … [as] a barrier for the kingdom of Nueva España” capable of “opposing] any attempt of the Americans already settled on the upper part of the river.”7

  As Navarro and his partners demonstrated before the intendant retired with a fortune of 3.7 million pesos, expanding the trade of New Orleans was easy. The great river channeled commodities and money past Spanish officials who controlled the port of New Orleans. Regulating immigration and defending a border that stretched sixteen hundred miles from St. Augustine west to Natchez and north along the Mississippi past modern Rock Island, Illinois, was far more complicated. Navarro had warned that the American presence in the upper reaches of the Mississippi Valley was cause for Spanish statesmen “to reflect very seriously.” With the accession of forty-year-old Carlos IV, however, the crowned head of the Spanish empire was no longer capable of thoughtful reflections upon policy—indeed the new king was incapable of distinguishing between a serious statesman and a sycophant who was sleeping with his queen.