by Jon Kukla
Jefferson and Knox wanted Shelby to act on his authority as governor of Kentucky. Beyond that all Jefferson could offer was his “hope that the citizens of Kentuckey will not be decoyed into any participation in these illegal enterprizes … by any effect they may expect from them on the navigation of the Mississippi.” Whistling in the dark, Jefferson expressed his confidence that “their good sense will tell them … that their surest dependance is on those regular measures which are pursuing and will be pursued by the general government, and which flow from the United authority of all the states.”
Time and again, Kentuckians had complained of “the feeble attempts which have been made by the executive under the present government, and the total silence of Congress on this important subject.” Now, with Clark’s sabers rattling in the background, Governor Isaac Shelby applied exquisite pressure on the Washington administration.
After conferring with his like-minded attorney general, James Brown, on January 13, 1794, Governor Shelby dispatched a forceful letter to the secretary of state. “I have great doubts,” he wrote, “whether there is any legal authority to restrain or punish” Clark and his expedition,
for if it is lawful for any one citizen of this State to leave it, it is equally lawful for any number of them to do it. It is also lawful for them to carry with them any quantity of provisions, arms and ammunition; and if the act is lawful in itself, there is nothing but the particular intention with which it is done that can possibly make it unlawful, but I know of no law which inflicts a punishment on intent only.
Shelby also felt “little inclination to take an active part in punishing or restraining any of my fellow citizens for a supposed intention, only to gratify or remove the fears of the ministers of a foreign prince who openly withholds from us an invaluable right.” Nevertheless, “whatever may be my private opinion, as a man, as a friend to liberty, an American citizen, and an inhabitant of the Western Waters,” he concluded, “I shall at all times hold it as my duty to perform whatever may be constitutionally required of me as Governor of Kentucky, by the President of the United States.”
While Governor Shelby’s ultimatum made its way east, Clark’s call for volunteers appeared in the January 25 issue of Cincinnati’s weekly Centinel of the North-Western Territory and the February 4 issue of John Bradford’s Kentucky Gazette in Lexington:
George R. Clark, Esq.
Major General in the armies of France, and Commander in Chief of the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi River.
PROPOSALS
For raising the volunteers for the reduction of the Spanish posts on the Mississippi, for opening the trade of the said river, and giving freedom to its inhabitants, etc. All persons serving the expedition to be entitled to one thousand acres of Land—those that engage for one year, will be entitled to two thousand acres—if they serve two years or during the present war with France, they will have three thousand acres of any unappropriated Land that may be conquered…. All lawful Plunder to be equally divided agreeable to the custom of War…. Those that serve the expedition will have their choice of receiving their land or one dollar a day.
G. R. CLARK
In the east, the first published report of Clark’s plans, a mid-November letter from Fort Washington, appeared in Philadelphia newspapers on January 4 and reached the Connecticut Courant by January 13. “A revolution is on foot in Louisiana,” exclaimed another letter from Cincinnati that was published in the Maryland Journal, the Virginia Centinel, and the Haverhill, Massachusetts, Guardian of Freedom:
The French inhabitants on the west side of the river Mississippi inspired by the glorious cause of their brethren in Europe, are determined to shake off the despotic yoke of Spain. … By the best accounts, the French and American settlements on the Mississippi, can bring into the field an army of 6,000 men, all excellent marksmen. … A contemplative mind will easily conceive the great advantages that would accrue to the world in general, and the United States in particular, should such an event actually take place—it would open the road for millions of the human race to emigrate to this favor’d spot, on which nature has lavished its gifts…. The road once opened, would be die means of civilizing not only die natives of die soil, but… die Spaniards themselves over die Gulf of Mexico, whom priest-craft and ignorance has made useless to society. Such a revolution would produce more: it would put Americans in die full possession of die navigation of die most noble river within their territory, the right of which (contrary to nature’s law) has been arbitrar[il]y withheld, and by diem shamefully given up to a people whom we neither ought to love or fear.55
The tricolor of France was a flag of convenience for George Rogers Clark and his Kentucky neighbors. In his hands, Citizen Genet’s grand expedition against Louisiana had always been an American enterprise—designed to put “Americans in the full possession of the navigation of the most noble river within their territory.” Clark’s moment for military glory may have escaped, but his demonstration of Louisiana’s vulnerability forced Spain and America back to the bargaining table in earnest.
When Governor Shelby’s ultimatum reached the secretary of state’s office in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, former governor of Virginia and formerly Washington’s attorney general, was behind the desk. Jefferson had retired to Monticello on December 31, but the impending change of personnel at the French embassy was more immediately important. On March 6, 1794, promptly upon his arrival in Philadelphia, Genet’s replacement, Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, issued a proclamation canceling all French support for Clark’s expedition. Two weeks later, President Washington issued his own proclamation against enlisting citizens of the United States “for the purpose of invading and plundering the territory of a nation at peace with the United States.” For good measure the commander in chief also dispatched General Anthony Wayne to “establish a strong military post at Fort Massac on the Ohio, and prevent by force, if necessary, the descent of any hostile party down the river.” George Rogers Clark’s boats, guns, ammunition, provisions, and men never got farther than “a Small Camp” on the Mississippi four hundred miles south of Louisville “Fortifyd within fifty Miles of the Enemys lines.”56
The ultimate failure of George Rogers Clark’s expedition was not the work of his adversaries but of his patron. Citizen Genet’s deteriorating relationship with Washington’s administration, exacerbated by the months of dawdling for which Genet and Michaux were solely responsible, gave Spanish Louisiana the “accidents” and “measures” for which Carondelet and Gayoso had desperately hoped.57 In the decade ahead, the fate of Louisiana would not be decided by George Rogers Clark and an army of Kentucky frontiersmen. After 1794 the destiny of the Mississippi River and its watershed would be determined by American statesmen, by European armies and diplomats, by rebellious Caribbean slaves, and by ordinary American farmers and merchants.
“Causes unforeseen had put a stop to the march of two thousand brave Kentuckians, who were about to go and put an end to the Spanish despotism on the Mississippi,” the French agent August Lachaise lamented to the Democratic-Republican Society of Lexington in May 1794, “where Frenchmen and Kentuckians, united under the banners of France, might have made one nation, the happiest in the world—so perfect was their sympathy.” Perhaps. But the perspective of Governor Isaac Shelby was closer to the mark: “My letter of the 13th January, 1794,” Shelby recalled,
was calculated rather to increase than to diminish the apprehensions of the General Government as to the Western country. This letter had the effect desired, it drew from the Secretary of State information in relation to the navigation of the Mississippi, and satisfied us that the General Government was, in good faith, pursuing the object of first importance to the people of Kentucky.58
Responding to the pressure created by George Rogers Clark’s expedition and Governor Isaac Shelby’s ultimatum, on November 24, 1794, the Senate of the United States confirmed Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina, as President Washington’s envoy to Madrid,
where he was charged to negotiate a commercial treaty in which “our right to the free use of the Mississippi River shall be most unequivocally acknowledged and established, on principles never hereafter to be drawn into contestation.”59 Goethe’s new era of world history was dawning over the American frontier.
— CHAPTER TEN —
Mr. Pinckney’s Mission
The success of Mr. Pinckney’s Mission… you will see from my late letters is already insured.
—William Short to the Secretary of State, January 16, 17951
The Southern boundary of the United States which divides their territory from the Spanish Colonies of East and West Florida, shall be designated by a line beginning on the River Mississippi at the Northernmost part of the thirty first degree of latitude North of the Equator, which from thence shall be drawn due East to the middle of the River Apalachicola or Catahouche, thence along the middle thereof to its junction with the Flint, thence straight to the head of St. Mary’s River, and thence down the middle there of to the Atlantic Ocean.
—Article II, Pinckney’s Treaty, October 27, 1795
It is likewise agreed that the Western boundary of the United States which separates them from the Spanish Colony of Louissiana, is in the middle of the channel or bed of the River Mississippi … and his Catholic Majesty has likewise agreed that the navigation of the said River in its whole breadth from its source to the Ocean shall be free only to his Subjects, and the Citizens of the United States, unless he should extend this privilege to the Subjects of other Powers by special convention.
—Article IV, Pinckney’s Treaty, October 27, 1795
His Catholic Majesty will permit the Citizens of the United States for the space of three years from this time to deposit their merchandize and effects in the Port of New Orleans and to export them from thence without paying any other duty than a fair price for the hire of the stores, and his Majesty promises either to continue this permission if he finds during that time that it is not prejudicial to the interests of Spain, or if he should not agree to continue it there, he will assign to them on another part of the banks of the Mississippi an equivalent establishment.
—Article XXII, Pinckney’s Treaty, October 27, 1795
ON MONDAY, July 7, 1794, Carlos IV and his court were in Madrid, moving from the spring gardens of Aranjuez to La Granja de San Ildefonso, the summer palace in the mountains near Segovia, about forty miles northwest of the capital. The king and his chief minister, Manuel Godoy, now duke of Alcudia, had convened a meeting of their Council of State for a sweeping reconsideration of Spain’s diplomatic situation in Europe and the Americas. The war against France was not going well. In fact, at that moment a French army was advancing across the Pyrenees, despite reports of turmoil in Paris where sans culottes were rioting in the streets again over food shortages and the rising price of bread. In three weeks, more drastic news would arrive from Paris when the sinister Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s future head of secret police, and a coalition of Maximilien Robespierre’s political enemies brought the arch-Jacobin and the radical party’s leaders to the guillotine at the Place de la Revolution on the evening of July 28—the eleventh day of Thermidor by the revolutionary calendar.
Across the Atlantic, the deposed French minister to the United States, Edmond Charles Genet, having declined a return trip to Paris and a probable date with the guillotine, was heading for the Arcadian bliss of a three-hundred-twenty-five-acre farm near Jamaica, Long Island, and the loving arms of the New York belle Cornelia Tappan Clinton, daughter of the state’s ardently republican governor. In the Mississippi Valley, George Rogers Clark was establishing himself in St. Louis, on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, to escape creditors hounding him with bills for provisions, boats, and arms assembled for the aborted expedition against Louisiana.
In New Orleans, Governor François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, was tallying up the cost of his defenses against Clark—about $294,562, including $12,000 in bribes to General James Wilkinson and $8,640 in reimbursements for Wilkinson’s expenses “to retard, disjoint and defeat the mediated irruption of General Clark in L[ouisian]a.” The governor was also writing to Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the British lieutenant governor for Upper Canada, to suggest a joint campaign of Canadian troops and “warlike Indian tribes” against the American frontier settlements.
While Governor Carondelet dreamt of employing Spain’s current alliance with Britain in the defense of Louisiana against the Americans, Godoy, however, was preparing to abandon that alliance in order to end Spain’s disastrous war with France. With this impending turnabout in mind, Godoy was troubled by the news from London of the arrival on June 8, 1794, of United States chief justice John Jay, dispatched as a special envoy by President Washington to negotiate a treaty that maintained American neutrality and averted a war over British affronts on the high seas and in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. Caught once again in a monumental clash between Britain and France, both the Americans and the Spanish were negotiating from weakness.2
Godoy advised the Council of State that “if the United States should succeed in reaching a reconciliation with England,” Spain’s “situation in respect to the States [would become] even more critical.” Great Britain, he feared, “was already acting as if she intended to declare war on [Spain] on some pretext or another … [and] establish her sovereignty over all the seas.”
For the past five years, since Diego de Gardoqui’s departure from New York in October 1789, Spain and the United States had made scant progress in the negotiations begun by John Jay and Gardoqui in 1785. As instructed, Gardoqui’s successors in New York and Philadelphia, Josef Ignacio de Viar and Josef de Jaudenes, had done little—while their American counterparts in Spain, the ailing William Carmichael and Jefferson’s trusted protégé William Short, had been shunted back and forth between Godoy and Gardoqui in a transparent game of deliberate procrastination.3
Part of the problem, Short explained, was the Americans’ status as diplomats of the third rank—ordinary charges d’affaires. By the diplomatic etiquette of the Spanish court, Carmichael and Short had “no opportunity of speaking with the Minister until [their foreign rivals] of the first and second order have finished their audience.” By then, Short groaned, Godoy “has had his head already saturated with their communications and is on tip-toe generally with his watch in his hand to be precisely at the hour assigned with the King or elsewhere.”4
As long as it had suited their purposes, Godoy and Gardoqui had impatiently glanced at their watches, hurried to other appointments, and generally put off the Americans with one excuse after another—but all that was about to change. Now it was time, Godoy told Gardoqui and the other members of his council of state, “to take the precautions which prudence and necessity” required. “One of these was to procure friends” among those nations “who could help us most and who as enemies could most harm us,” Godoy announced, and “such precisely were the United States.”5
“In addition to insuring our possessions on that continent,” Godoy advocated friendship toward the United States as a means of “depriving the English of the great assistance which they got from those provinces in the war before the last”—the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War. Carried away by his rhetoric, Godoy even voiced the unlikely thought that a friendly overture to the United States might “enable us to count them for our own defense, and for offense against the enemy.” Then he promptly focused again on the real situation. “The time had come,” Godoy believed, when negotiations with the United States
could no longer be delayed as had been done up till now, because of not consenting to the principal point of the free navigation of the River Mississippi to the sea, which the United States pretend should be conceded to them.
At this point in this pivotal meeting, Godoy asked the council “to weigh and combine the different matters, points and circumstances.” Then he sat down to hear their suggestions.
For Godoy, more than the
fate of the Mississippi River was at stake. In a meeting of the council just three months earlier, with Carlos IV present, the veteran minister Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda, had attacked not only Godoy’s handling of the war with France but his capacity for high office as well. Godoy had responded tolerably well (depending on whose account of the incident one trusts), but it was Aranda who lost the encounter when the king took offense at a sarcastic zinger aimed at the royal favorite. “With my father you were stubborn and insolent,” Carlos IV interrupted, “but you never went so far as to insult him in council.” Within two hours the count of Aranda was locked in a carriage heading south to Granada, where he spent the next year in confinement at the palace of the Alhambra.
Manuel Godoy was twenty-seven years old, “conscious of the paucity of his years and experience,” and acutely aware of the dangers he faced. The court was buzzing about the three-month-old Princess Francisco de Paula—born to Queen Maria Luisa in March—whose striking resemblance to Godoy, at least in the eyes of those who doubted the king’s paternity, revived old gossip with a new Jacobin spin: “Godoy,” taunted a verse circulated by a republican conspirator,
… how can I admire him
if the queen aroused him
with her lustful desire—O rage!—
and pulled him out of the barracks
so as to have sex with
Señor Duke of Alcudia.6
Aranda’s criticisms also had the sting of truth. The year-old war with France was not going well. Royal troops who had advanced gloriously against the republican enemy last year were being pushed back across the Pyrenees. Their British ally had demonstrated more enthusiasm for destroying the French fleet than for helping Spain on the ground. Carondelet’s and Gayoso’s reports from Louisiana about Clark’s impending attack were consistently bleak, and the separatist plots of Wilkinson and others had come to nothing. Spain faced serious choices.