A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  When Bonaparte thought about colonies, he focused on the Caribbean, sugar, and St. Domingue. When he thought about Louisiana, his musings followed the arguments advanced by Eléonore Moustier’s report in January 1789 and by French diplomats in their negotiations with Manuel Godoy’s representatives at Basle in 1795, at San Ildefonso in 1796, and again at Madrid in 1798. The familiar argument had three main points: First, the produce of the Mississippi Valley could support French sugar, coffee, and cocoa plantations in the West Indies. Second, French possession of Louisiana would realign the balance of power in North America to the detriment of Great Britain and as a brake on American ambitions. Third (and the incentive for Spain’s agreement), France could do a better job of defending Louisiana from the United States or Great Britain than could Spain.47

  By the end of the century, Spain and France were in basic agreement about the retrocession of Louisiana. For Carlos IV and Queen Maria Luisa (deprived for the moment of the advice of Manuel Godoy, who had been forced into a short retirement from politics),48 the only remaining question was, What could France offer Spain in exchange for Louisiana?

  “Frankly,” Godoy’s temporary replacement, Mariano Luis de Urquijo, remarked to the Spanish ambassador in Paris,

  [Louisiana] costs us more than it is worth. In giving it to the French we would incur the disadvantage of a contraband trade into Mexico, but… it would be very useful to maintain a barrier between the [Americans] and ourselves—a barrier against their plans of colonization—by means of a nation like France.

  Under the Directory, France had offered the most attractive swap that Spain could imagine, a promise to restore Gibraltar to Spanish sovereignty. The only hitch was that France did not own the strategic 2.3-acre rock that controls the straits between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. England had captured Gibraltar in 1704 and the United Kingdom has held it ever since. Godoy had always declined this and other mere promises from France.49

  On July 22, 1800, Bonaparte and Talleyrand instructed their ambassador to Spain, Charles Jean Marie Alquier, to reopen negotiations for Louisiana, and in August Bonaparte dispatched his confidant General Louis Alexandre Berthier as minister plenipotentiary to augment the mission. Within a month Alquier and Berthier found the right price for the retrocession. In exchange for Louisiana and six Spanish warships, Bonaparte offered to create a kingdom in north-central Italy for Maria Luisa’s brother, Ferdinand, duke of Parma. On October 1, 1800, Spain secretly agreed to the Second Treaty of San Ildefonso ceding Louisiana back to France. A few months later, by the Convention of Aranjuez, signed on March 21, 1801, France took title to Louisiana and the fateful island of Elba in return for placing Prince Louis of Parma (the duke’s son and Queen Maria Luisa’s nephew and son-in-law) on the newly created throne of the kingdom of Etruria, which included Tuscany, Parma, Florence, and the principality of Piombino.50

  The deal assuaged Maria Luisa’s family interests, delighted Carlos IV with the expectation of shifting to France the cost of maintaining his American frontier (a drain of about $337,000 a year on the Spanish treasury). The treaty pleased the French because it opened the way for the revival of the French sugar empire in the Caribbean. Both nations agreed to keep the retrocession secret for fear that either the British or the Americans would react by capturing Louisiana before Bonaparte could take possession.51

  With arrangements in place for the recovery of Louisiana, Bonaparte threw his energies into two visionary schemes. One was his intended conquest of England. The other was the recovery of St. Domingue. Both would require large and expensive seaborne expeditionary forces. To buy himself an interval of “maritime peace” to prepare for these invasions, Bonaparte signed a truce with Great Britain on October 1, 1801—one year to the day after the secret retrocession of Louisiana—that was confirmed on March 25, 1802, as the Treaty of Amiens.52

  For America, the important by-product of these developments was a linkage between the fate of Louisiana and the fortunes of the French expedition against Toussaint L’Ouverture. Bonaparte’s intended invasion of England never materialized, and his vision for the Caribbean would collapse with the defeat of his expedition by the rebellious slaves of St. Domingue. “Louisiana had been destined to supply the other colony with provisions, cattle, and wood,” the consulate’s secretary of the treasury, François Barbé-Marbois, wrote years later, “and as St. Domingo was lost to France, the importance of Louisiana was also diminished.”53

  * Two hogsheads = 3 tierce = 6 barrels = 12 kegs = 24.5 cubic feet.

  — CHAPTER TWELVE —

  The Embryo of a Tornado

  One of the greatest follies I ever was guilty of was sending that army out to St. Domingo…. I committed a great oversight and fault in not having declared St. Domingo free, acknowledged the black government, and, before the peace of Amiens, sent some French officers to assist them. Had I done this, it would have been more consonant with the principles under which I was acting.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena, September 4, 18171

  There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market.

  —Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 18022

  MY DEAR SIR,” American diplomat William Vans Murray informed John Quincy Adams from The Hague on March 30, 1801, “I fear that we have another iron in the fire—that France is to have the Floridas and Louisiana!!!” A moderate Federalist congressman from Maryland prior to his appointment by President John Adams as minister to the Netherlands, Murray wrote that he was “endeavoring to ascertain the truth, but think, now, that there is great reason to believe it.”3 After five years of false reports and speculation about French designs in the Caribbean, it was not surprising that early hints of the actual retrocession of Louisiana were somewhat exaggerated. Spain, of course, had refused to surrender Florida and was at that moment doing its best to delay the surrender of Louisiana, too. Bonaparte had the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in hand, but all the Spanish ministers who had negotiated the deal were out of power. The royal favorite, Manuel Godoy, was once again in charge.

  Officially the Prince of the Peace was the commanding general of the Spanish armies, a post he accepted after declining Carlos IV’s invitation to resume his former position as chief minister. When Godoy had offered a list of alternate candidates, one Pedro Cevallos had caught the king’s eye. Asked for his opinion of the man, Godoy responded, “He’s my cousin by marriage.”

  “So much the better,” the king replied. “I can then count on him not to reject your advice.” For the next seven years Godoy ruled Spain through the office of First Minister Pedro Cevallos, who carefully heeded his counsel and routinely forwarded state papers to the royal favorite, even during the Portuguese campaign. Godoy also maintained an intimate correspondence with Queen Maria Luisa. “Do not imperil yourself too much,” she pleaded. “Do not tire yourself…. Ah, Manuel, what battles my imagination conjures up!”4

  Impatient to take possession of Louisiana, Bonaparte vented his anger at Godoy in a letter to his Spanish ambassador. “Tell the Queen and the Prince of the Peace,” he warned, “that if they continue this system [of procrastination], it will end with a thunderbolt.” Godoy countered by pressing for clarification of one important detail about the retrocession of Louisiana that his predecessor had left too vague in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso and its conventions. At Godoy’s behest, Pedro Cevallos formally requested a “guarantee not to sell or alienate in any manner the property and use of this Province.” In reply, on July 22, 1802, the French ambassador assured Carlos IV that

  the desire of France in this respect is perfectly in conformity with the intentions of the Spanish Government, and the sole motive for entering Louisiana was the restoration of a possession which had constituted a part of French territory. I am authorized to declare to you in the name of the First Consul that France will never alienate
it.

  With that final assurance in writing, on October 15, 1802, Carlos IV signed at Barcelona a royal order authorizing the delivery of Louisiana to France.5

  Godoy had been out of office when Carlos IV had naively accepted Bonaparte and Talleyrand’s verbal promise never to sell Louisiana. Oral contracts, the saying goes, are not worth the paper they are written on, but Bonaparte’s written assurances were not much better. Although sincere enough at the time, his pledge never to alienate Louisiana lasted about ten months.

  • • •

  “Pauline was the prettiest and also the worst-behaved person imaginable,” one of Bonaparte’s officers said of the first consul’s promiscuous younger sister. “I’m on good terms with my brother,” she proclaimed shortly after the coup of 18–19 Brumaire. “He’s slept with me twice already.” True or not, Pauline’s lust was notorious and many of her liaisons were with men Bonaparte despised. “Before she left for Santo Domingo,” one of them wrote, “there were no fewer than five of us in the same house sharing Pauline’s favors. She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.”6

  One afternoon in May 1799 during a lull in the Italian campaign, Bonaparte was working in his study in the Baroque palace of Montebello outside Milan when he heard rustling noises behind a folding screen in the next room. Rising to investigate, Bonaparte discovered Pauline in the embrace of Colonel Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, a staff officer who had served with him since the siege of Toulon. A month later, on June 17, 1799, the handsome and promising young officer was married to Pauline. Along with a substantial dowry from her brother came a promotion in rank.7

  On October 24, 1801—three weeks after the preliminary signing of the Treaty of Amiens brought temporary peace to the high seas—General Leclerc took command of a French expedition to recover St. Domingue. Gathering in the wings at Dunkerque were ships and provisions intended for a second expedition of four thousand men to take possession of Louisiana under the command of General Claude Perrin Victor.8

  Delayed by foul weather in November, Leclerc launched his expedition on December 14, 1801, from the natural harbor at Brest, near the entrance to the English Channel at the westernmost tip of Brittany. With decent winds and the preliminary truce of Amiens in force, the warships of Leclerc’s squadron crossed the Atlantic and reached the coast of St. Domingue without incident, luffing their sails off Cap Français on Monday, February 1, 1802. Augmented by ships carrying troops from other ports in France and the Netherlands—three thousand each from Rochefort and Toulon, twelve hundred from Nantes, fifteen hundred each from Cádiz and Flushing, a thousand from Le Havre, and eight hundred from Guadeloupe—Leclerc’s invasion force was huge. Tobias Lear, the American consul at Le Cap and President Washington’s former personal secretary, reported that forty-six ships carrying forty thousand troops had arrived and twenty-five more ships and another twenty thousand soldiers were expected.9

  Since 1796, when he was hailed as the black Spartacus foretold by the Abbé Raynal, Toussaint L’Ouverture had professed a consistent loyalty to republican France, which had abolished slavery throughout its territories two years earlier. Watching the arrival of Leclerc’s flotilla from the hills above the capital, L’Ouverture’s well-grounded suspicions of Napoleon’s intentions grew stronger. Why send such a force if one’s intentions were amicable? “Friends,” muttered Toussaint L’Ouverture as he gazed at Leclerc’s warships, “we are doomed. All of France has come. Let us at least show ourselves worthy of our freedom.” In the city below, General Henri Christophe, the future president of Haiti, stood ready to torch the capital rather than surrender it to Leclerc.10

  Born of slave parents in 1743, the self educated tactician and statesman Toussaint L’Ouverture began his rise to prominence as a physician to the insurgent army during the 17Q1 slave uprising against the French colonial regime in St. Domingue (Haiti) and soon became a leader of the black troops. After the National Convention abolished slavery throughout the French empire in 1794, he supported the French against British invaders and was promoted to general in 1795. By 1801, still professing allegiance to revolutionary France and its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Toussaint L’Ouverture had consolidated his own authority on the liberated island. Although his troops repulsed the expedition sent by Napoleon to reinstate slavery on St. Domingue, Toussaint L’Ouverture was captured by treachery, sent to France, and imprisoned high in the Jura Mountains near the Swiss border. He died there of cold and starvation on April 7, 1803—-five months after yellow fever claimed the life of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, commander of Napoleon’s disastrous Haitian expedition. (Courtesy Library of Virginia)

  About noon on February 2 Leclerc sent a cutter into the harbor bearing copies of a proclamation from Napoleon. “Whatever may be your origin, and your colour,” Leclerc proclaimed in the name of the first consul, “you are all Frenchmen, you are all free and equal before God and the Republic.” Hoping to avert the loss of lives and property, including as many as seventy American merchant vessels in the harbor, Lear met with General Christophe the next evening. When Toussaint L’Ouverture had successfully turned back a British invasion, Lear reminded Christophe, he had frequently avowed that, so long as freedom was guaranteed to the blacks, “the Island belonged to France and they had a right to take it when they pleased.” Christophe replied “in the most decided tone, that he could put no confidence in their declaration to confirm the freedom of the Blacks—that they meant to deceive him.”11

  For two days Leclerc’s fleet hovered off Cap Français, “the wind so light that they did not attempt to come in,” while oarsmen carried empty reassurances and stern warnings back and forth across the harbor and while citizens packed their treasures and fled to the country (or in the case of the Americans to the merchant ships anchored in the harbor). Christophe’s orders from Toussaint L’Ouverture were no secret, and everyone knew that despite Leclerc’s friendly rhetoric he had landed “a large body of troops” and taken Fort Dauphin, ten miles to the west. “Hostilities having commenced,” Christophe advised Lear, his orders were to “oppose the entrance of the fleets—and that the first Gun fired should be a signal for setting fire to the town.”12

  Just before sunset on Thursday, February 4, two French warships moved toward Fort Picolett at the entrance to the harbor. “A shot was fired at her from the Fort, which was returned, and a short cannonading took place.” Then came the sound of cannon fire from two small forts five or six miles away. “This firing was the signal for begining to set fire to the town and plantations in the plain and neighborhood,” Lear wrote.

  Our situation on board the Vessels gave us a full view of every thing which was done in every quarter. About seven o’clock the City began to blaze, and by ten it appeard to be inveloped in a general flame and exhibited an awful scene of conflagration.

  “The destruction of the Town is far greater than in 1793,” Lear wrote on Friday. “I judge there are not more than 70 houses … saved. The loss of property is total.” Henri Christophe had set fire to Cap Français, but by carefully following Bonaparte’s deceitful plans Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc ignited the war for Haitian independence and made it an especially vicious and dishonorable conflict—but one in which Toussaint L’Ouverture’s countrymen did show themselves capable of freedom.13

  The remarkably candid duplicity of the first consul’s secret instructions to General Leclerc matched the fundamental lie upon which the entire expedition was based: in the name of the ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—forty thousand French troops were sent to reimpose the slave system of the ancien regime in St. Domingue. “In order to better understand the[se] instructions,” Bonaparte wrote, “the time of the expedition should be divided into three periods.” In the first two or three weeks, Leclerc was to land and organize his forces and acquaint “the mass of [his] army with the customs and the topography of the country.” In the second phase, “the rebels a
re pursued to the death.” In the final phase—to begin when generals Toussaint, Moïse, and Dessalines “no longer exist”—all scattered elements of their armies were to be “destroyed with time, perseverance, and a well contrived system of attack.” Finally, “after the third period … the old pre-Revolutionary regulations [shall be] put into force.” Plain and simple, Leclerc’s overall objective was to turn back the clock and revive the slave-based sugar colony of the ancien regime.14

  Deceit was a key element of the mission. “The conduct of the captain-general,” Bonaparte wrote,

  will vary with the three periods above mentioned. In the first period, only the blacks who are rebels will be disarmed. In the third, all will be so treated….

  All Toussaint’s principal agents, white or colored, should, in the first period, be indiscriminately loaded with attentions and confirmed in their rank; in the last period, all sent to France….

  If Toussaint, Dessalines, and Moyse are taken in arms, they shall be passed before a court-martial within twenty-four hours and shot as rebels.

  No matter what happens, during the third period all the Negroes, whatever their party, should be disarmed and set to work.15

  Bonaparte never used the word slavery in his instructions to Leclerc—blacks were to be “set to work” and “the old pre-Revolutionary regulations put into force”—but this verbal deceit was in keeping with the entire racist tenor of the mission. “White women who have prostituted themselves to negroes, whatever their rank, shall be sent to Europe.” And “any individual who should undertake to argue about the rights of blacks who have caused so much white blood to flow, shall under some pretext be sent to France, whatever his rank or services.” In private, Bonaparte’s attitudes were consistently racist. “The moment the blacks are disarmed and their principal generals deported to France,” he wrote Leclerc in July, “you will have accomplished more for the commerce and civilization of Europe than has been done in the most brilliant campaigns.” “I am for the whites,” he told his Council of State, “because I am white. I have no other reason, and it is a good reason.”16