A Wilderness So Immense
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As Godoy sat down, Diego de Gardoqui took the floor. “In corroboration of what the Duke of Alcudia explained,” the crown’s resident American expert began, “the greatest evil that could happen to Spain was that that new power [the United States] should succeed in uniting with England to work in common accord against this monarchy.” Gardoqui then produced a three-year-old memorandum he had written to Floridablanca advocating a settlement of the question of Mississippi navigation. He went on to describe his negotiations with John Jay, their tentative agreement in 1786, and “the failure of Congress to accept the same.” Brandishing a map of North America to illustrate his arguments, Gardoqui described a “strong pro-British party in America, particularly in the northern states,” and warned that these commercial interests “might succeed in dominating the whole country if Spain did not take advantage of their irritation” over English “spoliations” against the rights of neutral shipping on the high seas.7
Gardoqui’s views were seconded by the veteran councilor Pedro Rodriguez, count of Campomanes, who advocated securing the friendship of the United States by “granting] them some extension of lands as they desired.” If a generous settlement of the boundaries won American friendship, Campomanes argued, “the sacrifice of between thirty and fifty leagues … was not of so much importance” compared to the risk of “losing all.” As for the Mississippi, Campomanes conceded that England had had no authority to grant the right of navigation to the United States in 1783. Nevertheless, when “he observed the ardor which those States had for it, and the efforts which they were making to get it,” Campomanes reminded the council “that the free navigation of a river through the territories of different princes was no new thing.” Godoy and Gardoqui had offered “powerful reasons … for gaining the friendship of the [United] States,” Campomanes concluded, and “he was of the opinion that the free navigation of the Mississippi might be considered in terms … most useful to Spain.”8
With the support of Spain’s resident expert on American affairs and a veteran statesman whose experience reached back into the golden days of Carlos Ill’s reign, Godoy stood on firm ground in recommending that Spain offer the United States “favors as to boundaries and the navigation of the Mississippi, as long as they would assure us … a good and sincere friendship.” Without dissent, the council agreed that instructions be sent “straightway” to Viar and Jaudenes in Philadelphia, charging them to welcome a renewal of negotiations with the American government and the appointment by both sides of “commissioners plenipotentiary to meet on the spot to fix the boundary line by common agreement.” For the moment, Great Britain was to be informed only that “an adjustment of outstanding issues was under way,” while Spain cultivated the United States “carefully in order to fix them for our friendship and in time secure a real alliance.” Godoy, Gardoqui, and Campomanes had made the case for a complete reversal of Spanish policy toward its boundaries with the United States and the navigation of the Mississippi River, and on July 7, 1794, “all of this the Council approved and His Majesty resolved that it should be done immediately.”
Manuel Godoy’s letter to Viar and Jaudenes in Philadelphia outlined the terms they were to propose to President Washington’s administration. “Little will be risked,” he wrote,
in fixing the [boundary] according to the claims of the [United] States, as much as may be compatible with our treaties with the Indians, and in granting the [navigation of the Mississippi] with the restrictions which the interest of his [Majesty’s] subjects requires; but the King desires … a solid alliance and reciprocal guarantee of our possessions and those of the States in America. To this end His Catholic Majesty desires that the President send a person with full power … for a treaty of alliance to be independent of the circumstances and relationships of the [current European] war.
Not surprisingly, in light of its importance, four drafts of this new statement of policy were prepared and discussed between the council meeting on July 7 and the departure on July 31 of a special courier who carried the final instructions to Philadelphia. On July 26, reviewing the penultimate draft, Godoy struck out all reference to Kentucky’s disposition “to separate themselves from dependence on Congress and … place themselves under His Majesty’s protection.” As far as the king and his ministers were concerned, the frontier intrigues with James Wilkinson and others were over, too. Ironically, however, Godoy’s last-minute deletion of the reference to Kentucky separatism (coupled with the fact that he and Gardoqui kept Short and Carmichael entirely in the dark about Spain’s new intentions) occasioned a full year of confusion between the two nations.9
When Godoy’s instructions reached Josef de Jaudenes early in December 1794—his colleague Viar having turned his attention to commercial affairs as consul-general—Jaudenes promptly deciphered the new instructions and acknowledged their receipt in a letter to Godoy dated December 8. Then he did absolutely nothing about them for nearly four months.
In early spring, William Short informed Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, Jefferson’s successor, that Godoy had sent an important new overture to the Spanish envoy in Philadelphia, but that its exact nature remained a mystery. When asked, Jaudenes evaded Randolph’s queries about Godoy’s intentions with a false assertion that he had been unable to decode the ciphered text with absolute certainty, and that he was therefore waiting for clarification from Madrid. A few weeks later, in March 1794, Randolph learned from Short that Jaudenes had acknowledged his receipt of Godoy’s new instructions back in December. Summoning Jaudenes to his office, Randolph demanded to know the substance of Godoy’s message. Finally, on March 25, 1794—more than eight months after Carlos IV and his Council of State had decided upon their new policy toward the United States—Jaudenes produced a document that purported to represent his new instructions from Godoy10
Why the long delay? And why was Jaudenes so reluctant to convey Godoy’s friendly overture to the American secretary of state? Something more than procrastination was afoot.
As a senior aide in the Spanish embassy in the 1780s, Jaudenes had been party to Gardoqui’s various conversations and confidential reports about separatist schemes in the American west. Now, during the summer of 1794, while the Washington administration was coping with local insurrections in western Pennsylvania against the excise tax on whiskey, someone from a “secret committee of correspondence of the West” and some unnamed “Kentucky Senators” approached Jaudenes about yet another attempt at separation. Eager to exploit the opportunity (about which Godoy’s new instructions were conveniently silent owing to that last-minute deletion), Jaudenes had given encouragement and $100 to a Kentucky separatist who called himself Mitchell. Jaudenes had simply been stalling for time, deferring compliance with his instructions from Godoy in favor of his own maverick project.
Perhaps the real indication of Jaudenes’s ineptitude, however, was the skimpy payment of $100, for the mysterious Mitchell never came back to Philadelphia. Instead, the western plotters took their plans to Governor Carondelet in New Orleans, where the royal purse was known to be deep and open. Months would pass before Manuel Godoy had all the pieces of this strange puzzle in view, but Jaudenes had been scammed. The whole episode—and all the delay and confusion it caused—was just one more scheme by General James Wilkinson, for which he would expect another reward in Spanish gold dollars.11
To save face about the pretended garbling of Godoy’s instructions, when Jaudenes finally presented Godoy’s overture to Secretary Randolph on March 25, 1795, the envoy hedged its language with so many conditional phrases that no one in the Washington administration could recognize the document for what Godoy intended: an invitation to negotiations based on the pivotal transformation in policy decided nine months earlier by the Spanish Council of State.12
Like most eighteenth-century bureaucratic prose, the reports and correspondence of Spanish colonial officials have a deferential tone that strikes the modern ear as verbose. The opening and closing sentences of Jaudenes’s com
munication to Secretary Randolph are far worse—so much worse, in fact, that their subterfuge had to have been intentional. Rather than admit that Randolph had caught him in a lie about the garbling of Godoy’s instructions, Jaudenes began his summary with this paragon of equivocation:
The points on which I understand it to be the will of the King my master to adjust the pending negotiations with the United States, are, subject to the receipt of further explanatory declarations for which I am waiting, as follows.
And he closed the message with similar evasions:
The preceding is what I persuade myself I ought to deduce from the despatch in question and what I have received from my superior to the present time, to be the will of the King.
Sandwiched between this amazing mumbo jumbo, the rest of the document honestly summarizes the chief elements of Godoy’s original proposal. All the main points are present: an offer to settle boundary questions “favorably” and another to “grant the navigation of the Mississippi with the restrictions demanded by the interests of his subjects,” the hope for a treaty of alliance and commerce, and the request for an ambassador with “full powers.” Delayed for months, however, and then bracketed by these remarkable equivocations, the profound significance of Godoy’s overture was completely buried in Jaudenes’s guilty rhetoric. As a result, Secretary Randolph and President Washington did not bother with a reply, for Jaudenes had left them nothing substantive to which they could reply—indeed nothing to suggest that anything might have changed.13
In a letter to William Short a week after Jaudenes delivered his version of Godoy’s overtures, Secretary Randolph reflected the confusion caused by the envoy’s obfuscation. Randolph wondered whether “the hints of propositions in Mr. Jaudenes’s letter” indicated that Spain might be willing to negotiate the matters in question. On the other hand, the “evasions” and “depressions of their temper at one moment and exstacy at another, as events smile or frown,” seemed to demonstrate that Spanish policy was “governed by a species of political cowardice … which deceives itself by merely postponing the evil day, and which will grant nothing upon principles of liberal policy”14
Luckily for both nations, the future of Spanish-American relations did not depend on the petty talents of Josef de Jaudenes and could no longer be interrupted by the intrigues of James Wilkinson. By the spring of 1795, when Jaudenes finally reported to Godoy about the delivery of his overture, entirely independent events in America enabled Jaudenes to “flatter [him]self” that his king’s request for a new ambassador “is covered by the nomination recently made by the executive power of the United States.” By another curious twist of fate (but not in response to Godoy’s new proposals), President Washington had appointed Thomas Pinckney as “envoy extraordinary and sole commissioner plenipotentiary” to the court at Madrid. Pinckney’s appointment was rather a direct consequence of George Rogers Clark’s aborted expedition against Louisiana and of the pressures exerted on the American government by Governor Isaac Shelby and his constituents in Kentucky15
• • •
In May 1794—two months prior to the pivotal July 7 meeting of Spain’s Council of State and while he was still pursuing his policy of procrastination and delay, Manuel Godoy had instructed Spain’s commissioners in Philadelphia to complain that their diplomatic counterparts in Madrid, William Carmichael and William Short, lacked the authority or personal stature necessary for successful negotiations. “Unless the ministers whom the United States should nominate were to be considered by His Majesty in every circumstance as possessing that character, splendor, and carriage which corresponds with residence near the royal person and with the gravity of the subjects to be treated,” Godoy had declared, how could anyone expect His Most Catholic Majesty to pay the infant republic any heed? The objective sought by this former cadet of the palace guard was merely delay, but there was just enough truth in his brazen exaggeration to make the complaint plausible. Carmichael was near death’s door, his health deteriorating so rapidly that he could no longer sign his own name, and despite real talent and ample experience, William Short was not an Adams, a Franklin, or a Jefferson.16
At home, as President Washington contemplated the choice of a suitably impressive ambassador to Spain, William Short’s European experience was a domestic liability. He was virtually unknown to anyone on the western waters—where people cared about the Mississippi—because he had been living abroad since 1784, when he began his diplomatic apprenticeship as Jefferson’s secretary in Paris. In addition, because Jaudenes’s antics had entirely obscured Godoy’s real intentions, the president’s expectations for success were so low that William Short’s qualifications seemed superfluous. “Peace and harmony with all nations being the supreme policy of the United States,” Washington thought it “best to cast upon Spain the odium of the miscarriage of the negotiation, if at length it should miscarry.” Nothing great was expected from a diplomatic assignment meant only to “yield to the subtleties of [Spain’s] procrastination.”17
Jefferson was President Washington’s first choice for the job, but the master of Monticello was enjoying his retirement from political affairs. When Jefferson declined, the president turned his thoughts toward an old colleague and great admirer whose political reputation was familiar in Madrid and legendary among men of the west. From his modest law office at Red Hill overlooking the Staunton River Valley—a view that remains unspoiled to this day—Patrick Henry declined the honor as well.
Washington’s third choice was both inspired and expedient. With Chief Justice John Jay embarking as Washington’s special envoy to the Court of St. James’s, why not send America’s resident ambassador from London to Madrid with the same special status? Thomas Pinckney was an urbane southerner, a political moderate, no less committed to the navigation of the Mississippi River than his cousin Charles Pinckney, who had vindicated America’s claim to the river on the floor of Congress in August 1786—and, conveniently, he was at that very moment already on the correct side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Born in Charleston in 1750, Thomas Pinckney and his elder brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, like their cousin Charles, stood among the preeminent low-country aristocrats of South Carolina. Their father (also named Charles) had served as speaker of the colonial legislature and a member of the royal governor’s council, and had taken the family to London during the 1750s, when he served as South Carolina’s agent to the British Board of Trade and Plantations. From her horticultural experiments in the 1740s at Belmont plantation, on the Cooper River near Charleston, their remarkable mother, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, had single-handedly introduced silk and indigo production to the colony, where the valuable blue dye quickly joined rice as one of South Carolina’s major commodities for export.
When the family had returned to South Carolina in 1758, Thomas and his brother Charles Cotesworth had stayed in England to study at the Westminster School, Christ Church, Oxford, and the Middle Temple—and had traveled extensively in Europe. Admitted to the bar in 1774, Thomas had promptly rejoined his elder brother in South Carolina and taken an active role, both political and military, in support of the American Revolution. The younger Pinckney served in 1777 as the American liaison to the comte d’Estaing, commander of the French fleet, had been wounded and captured at the Battle of Camden in 1780, and was exchanged in time to serve again with Washington in the Yorktown campaign that ended the war.
After the war, Thomas Pinckney served two terms as governor of South Carolina in 1787 and 1788 while his brother and cousin safeguarded their state’s interests in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, defending both slavery and the slave trade and insisting that treaties be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. Thomas Pinckney presided over the state convention that ratified the Constitution. In the politics of the new republic, the brothers offered firm but temperate support for Alexander Hamilton’s economic and commercial policies (while their cousin Charles’s suspicion of northern partisanship inclined him toward Jefferson a
nd the Democratic-Republicans). Eventually the Federalist party advanced both brothers as candidates for vice president, Thomas in 1796 and Charles Cotesworth in 1800, but in the meantime President Washington employed both men on diplomatic missions, Thomas as ambassador to Great Britain in 1791 (and from there to Madrid in 1795) and Charles Cotesworth as minister to France in 1796. If Spain demanded a man of “character, splendor, and carriage,” America had few candidates more eligible than a wealthy Pinckney from Charleston, South Carolina.
President Washington’s choice of Thomas Pinckney as the new minister to Madrid was a devastating disappointment to William Short. “I have been long enough in public service,” he lamented in a private letter to friends, and “I have had all the thorns—others have gathered the roses.” By 1795 the young man now recognized as America’s first professional diplomat had “experienced this in two instances”—Gouverneur Morris’s appointment as ambassador to France and Pinckney’s appointment to Madrid. “It shall be my fault if I experience it in a third.” In a gracious letter to the secretary of state, however, Short declared that his personal disappointment “will in no degree diminish my earnest wishes for the success of Mr. Pinckney’s Mission (which you will see from my late letters is already insured) nor my best efforts to serve him.”18
Despite Short’s personal disappointment, he and Pinckney worked well together in Spain, in part because the gentleman from South Carolina was sensitive to the parallel between Short’s feelings and his own reaction to Washington’s decision to send John Jay to London. “If I were to say I had no unpleasant feelings” about Jay’s appointment, Pinckney admitted to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, “I should not be sincere; but the sincerity with which I make this declaration will, I trust, entitle me to credit, when I add, that I am convinced of the expediency of adopting any honorable measures which may tend to avert the calamities of war,” and “that I consider Mr. Jay’s … diplomatic experience and general talents, as the most probable method of effecting this purpose.” “Under these circumstances,” he assured Randolph, “I will cheerfully embrace every opportunity of promoting the objects of Mr. Jay’s mission and of rendering his residence here [in London] agreeable.”19