A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  In 1791, when a slave conspiracy was discovered in Pointe Coupée Parish, in the rich bottomland between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers about a hundred miles upriver from New Orleans, none other than Pedro Bailly had been hauled into court for talking about “striking a blow like at the Cap”—a geographical reference to Cap Français (now Cap-Haïtien) on the north coast of St. Domingue and a rhetorical allusion to the limited goals of the mulatto party, who sought only equality with whites as citizens and not the abolition of slavery. With Governor Miró presiding, the court had acquitted Bailly in 1791, in part because the evidence against him was all hearsay, in part because he may have done nothing but talk, and in part because the mood of the colony was still calm, for in 1791 the news from St. Domingue was only of discord between elite whites and mulattoes.47

  With a full-fledged slave revolt raging in St. Domingue, however, the mood in Louisiana was more apprehensive in 1795, when a second and more serious slave conspiracy was discovered at Pointe Coupée. “If our information is correct,” a Pointe Coupée planter wrote to authorities in New Orleans, “the Saint-Domingue insurrection did not have a more violent beginning.” Although not as severely outnumbered by their slaves as the planters of the sugar islands, Pointe Coupée’s two thousand white residents did live on large isolated plantations stretching for twenty miles along the west bank of the Mississippi River and were outnumbered by their seven thousand slaves. While the Code Noir forbade possession of weapons by slaves, enforcement in Pointe Coupée was lax and many of the area’s slaves had guns. Finally, while there had been no credible evidence of outside agitation in 1791, this time Jacobin provocateurs probably were at work up and down the Mississippi, circulating radical literature, denouncing slavery, and distributing and proclaiming the French National Convention’s declaration of February 4, 1794, “that all men, without distinction of color living in the colonies are French citizens enjoying all rights assured by the Constitution.”48

  With France and Spain at war, a French victory could bring a general emancipation, thought Joseph Bouyavel, a French-born teacher who lived on the Goudeau estate at Pointe Coupée. Bouyavel was accustomed to reading revolutionary literature to the slaves, including antislavery passages from the Declaration of the Rights of Man from his copy of Théorie de l’Impôt. Bouyavel counseled the slaves “to be patient because slavery would not last very long,” but other whites, including a German-born tailor from Philadelphia and an agitator from the Republic of Raguse, a revolutionary state established in Yugoslavia at the height of the French Revolution, spread a more insidious rumor, fraught with implications of double-dealing on the part of slaveholders.49

  Jean Baptiste, one of the principal leaders of the conspiracy, heard the story from a slave from Curaçao, near Venezuela, who recounted that “they are awaiting at the Capital an Order of the King which declares all the slaves free.” Soon thereafter Antoine Sarrasin, the other chief leader of the Pointe Coupée plot, told Jean Baptiste that although “this order of freedom” had been sent to the commandant of a neighboring parish, an overseer at the Poydras estate (where both leaders were slaves) had convinced the commandant not to publish it. Instead, this overseer, named Duffief, had drawn up “a petition for the slaves to sign,” renouncing their freedom, “without telling them what the petition said.” As another slave heard the rumor, “the King had given us our freedom, but the masters made a petition to prevent it” and were forcing their slaves to sign a petition “renouncing their freedom and saying that they wanted to end their days with their masters.” A foolhardy planter’s wife gave further credence to the rumor when she taunted her slaves for their refusal to plant corn with a threat to send for the petition that Duffief had tricked them into signing so that “when all the nègres will be free, you will never be free here.” “If all this was true,” Jean Baptiste reasoned, the slaves of Pointe Coupée “must oppose it and kill the whites.”50

  “We are free,” a planter overheard one of his slaves say, “but the settlers do not want to give us our freedom. We must wipe them all out. We have enough axes and sticks to kill them. We missed once, but I do not think this coup will miss.” At a secret meeting of conspirators in Antoine Sarrasin’s cabin on the Poydras plantation at Pointe Coupée, the German tailor and the Yugoslav firebrand asked the obvious question: If the rumor was true, “would [it] not be better for you to do like the nègres du Cap”? If the planters of Louisiana were the only obstacle to their freedom, the slaves of Pointe Coupée “could do the same here as at Le Cap.” The logic was lethally indisputable. “I would go to bed [armed to the teeth] with the most sinister thoughts creeping into my mind,” a militia officer wrote, “taking heed of the dreadful calamities of Saint-Domingue, and of the germ of revolt only too widespread among our own slaves. I often thought, on my going to bed, of the means I would use to save [my wife] and my son.”51

  Perhaps inevitably, since the conspirators’ main lines of communication extended at least a hundred miles along the banks of the Mississippi River and perhaps as far north as Natchez, the uprising planned for the night of April 12–13 was discovered or betrayed on April 9. The local Spanish commander, Captain Guillermo Duparc, quickly arrested the suspected ringleaders. Subsequent arrests culminated on April 30, when Governor Carondelet ordered a simultaneous raid of Negro quarters on plantations throughout Louisiana at 5:00 a.m. to round up any remaining weapons or strangers. Eleven days of formal hearings and trials began at Pointe Coupée on May 8, and more than fifty slaves and three whites were found guilty of conspiracy. Five days of sentencing and executions began on May 29. By June 2 three white conspirators were bound for prison in Havana, thirty-one slaves were flogged and sent to hard labor at Spanish presidios in Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, and between twenty-three and twenty-six slaves were hanged. Their severed heads were nailed to posts along the levee road from Pointe Coupée past Baton Rouge to New Orleans—grisly evidence that in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, a banner of blood had been carried from the Bastille into the Caribbean and up the Mississippi River.52

  — CHAPTER NINE —

  A New Era in World History

  I am arming the Canadians to throw off the yoke of England. I am arming the Kentuckians, and I am preparing an expedition by sea to support their descent on New Orleans.

  —Citizen Edmond Charles Genet, June 19, 17931

  Why should not I have the luck of that fanatic priest… who preached in France and the other States of Europe for the Conquest of the Holy Land. Louisiana and its wretched inhabitants are assuredly more interesting than that barren Country: The Spaniards who defend the Mississippi are more worthy of Contempt than The Ottoman; and the French … burn with the Divine fire and sacred enthusiasm which Liberty inspires. Subscriptions will be opened and immediately filled up, and Thousands of brave patriots will present themselves for that superb and truly Holy Expedition.

  —Citizen August Lachaise, May 9, 17942

  WHILE THE National Convention was preparing to abolish the French monarchy and begin “Year I of the Republic,” in September 1792 the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was traveling with a regiment commanded by his literary patron, Duke Karl-August of Weimar, as they advanced through Alsace and Lorraine toward Paris. The imprisonment of Louis XVI had shocked the crowned heads of Europe, momentarily joining Bourbons, Hanoverians, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs in sympathy with their beleaguered cousin. Emperor Leopold II of Austria, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, led the reaction, dispatching an Austrian force and some Prussian troops to save the king of France from the wrath of his subjects and force the genie of revolution back into its bottle.

  Goethe was working on theories of optics and color at the time and had gone along for the ride, curious to observe what he called the color of war. “A kind of brown-red tint,” he decided while watching French artillery halt the Prussian advance at Valmy on September 20, 1792, “which makes the situation as well as the surrounding objects more
impressive.” The color of war, as any soldier from any war could have told him, was the color of mud and blood.

  Late that evening, in the rainy forest of the Argonne, a hundred twenty miles east of Paris, the author of Faust huddled near a campfire with a group of despondent Prussian soldiers. Throughout the campaign Goethe “had been in the habit of enlivening and amusing the troops with short sayings,” but when asked for his impressions of the day’s events, he stared into the fire and spoke a few words as chilling as the night: “From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history,” Goethe replied, “and you can all say you were present at its birth.”3

  Emboldened by the success of its army, the French National Convention embraced and confirmed Goethe’s prophecy. No longer satisfied with defending its borders and its revolution against invasion by coalitions of kings and despots, on November 19, 1792, the convention offered its assistance to “all those wishing to recover their liberty,” and embarked on an aggressive policy of foreign liberation. “We cannot rest,” Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville proclaimed to the convention, “until all Europe is ablaze.” The dynastic and imperial wars of Europe were “puny projects,” Brissot declared, “compared with the worldwide risings, the gigantic revolutions, that we are called upon to achieve.” On that same day in November, the convention confirmed the appointment of a new minister to the United States, twenty-nine-year-old Edmond Charles Genet.4

  Born at Versailles in 1763, Edmond Genet was something of a child prodigy, having learned English, Swedish, Italian, and Latin by the age of twelve and having accepted at fourteen a gold medal from the king of Sweden for his translation of Olof Celsius’s History of Eric XIV of Sweden, published in 1776. Through his father, a gifted linguist and career civil servant specializing in Franco-American relations, young Genet met Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Paul Jones, and other American patriots as they visited his father’s office. His father arranged for Genet to experience the capitals of Europe in a series of temporary postings at Frankfort, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow—a virtual diplomatic grand tour. After his father’s death in 1781, Genet was named chief of the Bureau of Interpretation at nineteen, and then secretary of the French legation in St. Petersburg, and, at twenty-six, charge d’affaires at the court of Catherine the Great. Polished in manners, witty in conversation, adept at the harpsichord and in song, Genet was attractive and energetic but also, perhaps owing to his youth and his “very ardent mind,” prone to superficial and impulsive decisions.5

  An enthusiastic convert to the revolution, Genet busied himself writing grandiloquent reports about Russian commerce and gossipy letters about the schemes of royalist émigrés at the Romanov court. Catherine the Great was more interested in annexing Poland than in rescuing Louis XVI—but until the moment that she seized Poland, openly denounced the revolution, and sent the French “demagogue enrage” packing in July 1792, Genet believed that his own efforts helped dissuade the empress of Russia from intervening in French affairs. Arriving back in Paris in September, just as the French turned back the Austrians and Prussians at Valmy and declared themselves a republic, Genet found himself immediately welcomed by Brissot de Warville and the Girondin leadership. They shared his admiration for America and its republican institutions, and they regarded Genet’s ouster as the venom of a Russian tyrant directed against the only person in the entire French diplomatic corps “who had dared act like a free man.”6

  After he completed two brief diplomatic missions to The Hague and to Switzerland, the National Convention appointed Genet minister to the United States on November 19. By mid-December the instructions for his mission were complete. Genet was to propose a pact by which the two republics “would amalgamate their commercial and political interests … promote the extension of the Empire of liberty, guarantee the sovereignty of all peoples, and punish the powers still retaining colonial systems”—particularly Spain and Great Britain—“by refusing to admit their ships to the harbors of the two contracting nations.” In addition to commercial ties, the proposed alliance was aimed at the “liberation of Spanish America” by “open[ing] the Mississippi to the inhabitants of Kentucky, delivering] our brothers in Louisiana from the tyrannical yoke of Spain, and perhaps add[ing] the glorious star of Canada to the American constellation.”7

  In addition to the republic’s grand objectives, Genet had three specific assignments, two of which stemmed from the 1778 Franco-American treaty of alliance during the American Revolution. First, Genet was instructed to negotiate advance payments on America’s debt and use the money to purchase grain and supplies for France and its Caribbean possessions. Second, he was to insist upon strict enforcement of Articles 17, 2i, and 22 of the treaty, by which France and the United States allowed each other to outfit privateers in one another’s ports while excluding the ships of their enemies. Third, Genet was authorized to recruit and commission officers for military expeditions against Louisiana, Florida, and Canada and to commission French privateers based in American ports.8

  Departing from Paris on January 21, 1793—the very day that Louis XVI’s head dropped into the basket below the guillotine—Genet and his entourage (two secretaries of legation, a private secretary, and two personal servants) were delayed at Rochefort by foul weather in the Bay of Biscay. Genet’s baggage included his carriage, a bidet, and two hundred fifty blank military commissions—an indication of the magnitude of the expeditions he hoped to send against Louisiana, Florida, and Canada. At last on February 20 the forty-gun warship Embuscade cleared the harbor and set sail for Charleston, South Carolina. By then Genet knew that France and Great Britain were formally at war, that within weeks the republic would soon declare war on Spain, and probably that George Rogers Clark had offered to mount an expedition against New Orleans.9

  After a long and difficult voyage, the Embuscade moored in Charleston on April 8, 1793, and Citizen Genet stepped ashore amid the cheers of a large and enthusiastic crowd. Sending the legation secretaries and their baggage by sea to Philadelphia, Genet unloaded his carriage, bought four strong horses from General Thomas Pinckney, and on April 18 commenced a leisurely journey overland to Philadelphia. Buoyed by friendly receptions at towns and cities along the way, the young minister charmed his way north. Genet “appears to be a man possessed of much information, added to the most engaging and agreeable manners that I ever saw,” James Monroe’s law partner informed James Madison when the minister reached Fredericksburg, Virginia. “He is very easy, communicative and dignified and will precisely suit the taste of our countrymen—all who have seen him are delighted.”10

  In Philadelphia, a somewhat cooler reception was being prepared. Upon learning of the outbreak of war between France and Great Britain, President George Washington had interrupted his vacation at Mount Vernon, summoned his cabinet, and hurried back to Philadelphia. Regardless of personal sympathies, neutrality came easily to Americans so long as the news was only of French, Austrian, and Prussian armies clashing on distant battlefields. A century of experience, however, had taught Americans that when England and France went to war the fighting inevitably went to sea and found its way to American shores and American shipping. Within Washington’s cabinet, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton favored the British and their substantial trade with America, while Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson admired republican France.

  The two secretaries had already faced off on domestic issues, especially Hamilton’s programs to fund the national debt and encourage manufacturing and trade. Now they clashed on foreign policy as well, and their adherents were beginning to throw partisan epithets at one another. Hamilton and the conservatives (who would eventually organize the Federalist party) regarded the “democratic element” as mobs and Jacobins, while Jefferson’s “republican interest” (as they were beginning to identify themselves) saw their rivals as aristocrats, monarchists, Tories, monocrats, and Anglocrats. “Parties seem to have taken a very well defined form in this quarter,” Jefferson advised Congressman J
ames Monroe in the spring of 1793. “The old tories, joined by our merchants who trade on British capital… and the idle rich of the great commercial towns are with the kings. All other descriptions [are] with the French. The war has kindled and brought forward the two parties with an ardour which our [domestic] interests … could never excite.”11

  Despite the growing animosity between his chief lieutenants, Washington and his cabinet were united in their determination to maintain American neutrality and keep the nation out of war. Washington issued a formal proclamation of American neutrality on April 22, and as Citizen Genet rambled toward Philadelphia the president instructed his secretary of state to receive the French minister but “not with too much warmth or cordiality.” When at last he met with President Washington on May 18, Genet was “affectionate” and “magnanimous.”12

  On the difficult issue of whether to allow French and British privateers to operate from American ports, however, Jefferson and Hamilton were closer to basic agreement about American neutrality than they were inclined to admit. By Article 22 of the Franco-American treaty of 1778, Jefferson reported to the cabinet, “we cannot permit enemies of France to fit out privateers in our ports.” Since the treaty prohibited British privateering from American ports, Jefferson continued, “we ought not therefore to permit France to do it, the treaty leaving us free to refuse, and the refusal being necessary to preserve a fair and secure neutrality.” Jefferson feared, however, that by accommodating Great Britain “under pretence of avoiding war on the one side,” Hamilton and other Anglophiles in Washington’s cabinet had “no great antipathy to run foul of [war] on the other” by offending France and joining “the confederacy of princes against human liberty”13