by Jon Kukla
By the terms of Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795, the right of deposit had been established at New Orleans for a period of three years. After 1798 the treaty permitted Spain to designate “another part of the banks of the Mississippi [as] an equivalent establishment.” Morales’s proclamation—which Gayoso’s successor, Manuel Juan de Salcedo, denounced as “a direct and open violation of the Treaty”—asserted that the period of “privilege” could be extended no longer “without an express order of the King.”28
Within two days, the news of Morales’s suspension of what Americans regarded as their right of deposit, not privilege, had reached Natchez. From there it spread rapidly upriver to Kentucky and Ohio. By October 26 the news of the closing of the port had reached Lexington, Kentucky, and the following Wednesday it was on the front page of Frankfort’s weekly Guardian of Freedom. “Whether this order was given by the Spaniards, or by the French,” the Guardian reported, “was [a] matter of uncertainty,” but after months of speculation about Bonaparte’s intentions, many westerners were ready to believe the worst. Early in November rumors flew through the bluegrass country, embellishing the story of the closing of the port with claims “that a French army had actually taken possession of Orleans.” The next Wednesday’s Guardian happily contradicted that rumor, “on the authority of a gentleman late from Natchez,” who assured the editor “that no army has arrived … but that the French would take possession of the Colony shortly.” Newspapers throughout the west also buzzed with information from another gentleman “just arrived from Bordeaux, who stated that arrangements were making by France to take possession of the colony, with 10,000 troops” commanded by General Victor.29
More immediately alarming were the reports of Spanish officials turning away flatboats laden with cotton, which gave all Kentucky farmers reason to fear that their autumn harvests “will be in the same predicament.” A subsequent letter stating that some boats arriving at the closed port were being allowed “to land their cargoes, on paying a duty,” offered Guardian readers a moment for optimism early in December, until they read in the next column that the situation at Natchez was one of “very great and general consternation,” with Americans and Spanish alike “much agitated, fully expecting a war.”30
As American citizens and public officials scrambled to discover who had closed the port, and why, speculation quickly focused on Morales’s motives. “It is said by some,” the Guardian of Freedom reported on December 1,
that this behavior proceeds from a grudge the Intendant bears to our countrymen—Others suppose that as avarice has heretofore been his ruling passion, it still operates, and that nothing short of it could render him capable of such madness. Perhaps, say they, he has now received satisfactory information that the French will soon be possessors of this province, and he is determined to make the most of the little time that is left.
American traders in New Orleans doubted that any Spanish official would initiate so drastic a measure without explicit instructions. Morales was “too rich, too sensible and too cautious to take such responsibility on himself,” the unofficial American consul in New Orleans believed, and had often expressed his indifference to “the consequences of measures which he undertook in compliance with orders.”31
It took five weeks for news of the New Orleans crisis to reach Washington, but as soon as it arrived Jefferson and Madison adopted the position that Morales had acted on his own. Only a prompt reopening of the port could dissuade the western states from marching on New Orleans as they had been ready to do many times in the past. Since it is easier for a sovereign to disavow an overzealous subordinate than to be seen reversing his own policy, ascribing the closing of the port to a maverick Spanish bureaucrat gave the Jefferson administration room for diplomatic and political maneuvering toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
The closing of the port “is so direct and palpable a violation of the Treaty of 1795,” Madison wrote, “that in candor it is to be imputed rather to the Intendant solely, than to instructions of his Government.” Equally surprised by the proclamation, the Spanish ambassador in Washington had hastily assured Madison that Morales had overstepped his authority, while firsthand reports from New Orleans indicated “that the Governor did not concur with the Intendant” either. On the other hand, Kentucky’s Guardian of Freedom regarded the text of Morales’s proclamation itself as convincing “evidence that the shutting the port of New Orleans was not an act of the Intendant’s, but of the Spanish government”—and the Guardians editor called upon the president and Congress to do everything in their power to avenge the “insult” and “redress the grievance thus created.”32
“From whatever source the measure may have proceeded,” Madison advised Charles Pinckney the American envoy to Spain, “the President expects that the Spanish Government will neither lose a moment in countermanding it, nor hesitate to repair every damage which may result from it.” The wrath of America’s western citizens, Madison believed,
is justified by the interest they have at stake. The Mississippi is to them every thing. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the atlantic states formed into one stream. The produce exported through that channel last year amounted to $1,622,672 from the Districts of Kentucky and Mississippi [alone], and will probably be fifty per cent more this year … a great part of which is now or shortly will be afloat for New Orleans and consequently exposed to the effects of this extraordinary exercise of power.
After writing to Pinckney Madison also met with the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón. It was anyone’s guess, he warned Pichón, what the five or six thousand Americans who were at that moment floating their harvest downriver might do when they reached New Orleans and found the port closed to their exports. “We have rumours flying through the woods from Pensacola to St. Louis,” General James Wilkinson informed Kentucky senator John Brown, “that inflame our latent combustibility.” Unless the port is quickly reopened, “our citizens will kick up a dust,” James Morrison wrote from Lexington to Virginia senator Wilson Cary Nicholas. “They already talk of war.” Kentucky was “all in a Hubbub,” Robert Barr advised Kentucky senator John Breckinridge, “all ready and waiting to step on board and sail down and take possession of New Orleans.”33
With French troops expected to arrive in New Orleans at any moment, the timing of the Spanish intendant’s action was especially alarming. Many Americans jumped to the conclusion that Bonaparte had pressured Spain to close the port. Northern Federalists began clamoring for war—less because they cared about Louisiana than because their enemy would be France. Congressman John Stratton, of Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, reflected the exasperation of southern Federalists when he decried “the timidity of our executive in meeting this flagrant violation of our Treaty with Spain.” New Orleans could be taken by “the Kentucky Militia alone,” Stratton exclaimed. “No better opportunity ever can occur for furnishing … a pretext for seizing the East Bank of the Mississippi.” Stratton and other southern Federalists believed that “Securing perminantly the free Navigation of that River” was “all important to America.” Angry westerners were in full agreement. They were ready to oust “the reptile Spaniards” from New Orleans before Bonaparte took possession.34
With demands for war coming from either side, the Jefferson administration upheld the convenient fiction that Juan Ventura Morales’s revocation of the American right of deposit and closing of the port of New Orleans was simply a colossal blunder by one overzealous, avaricious, bigoted, and probably stupid colonial official. A colossal but perhaps reversible blunder.
Withdrawing the American right of deposit may have been shortsighted, but it was not the work of a maverick local official. On July 14, 1802, the order to close the port had been issued by Carlos IV himself, as Daniel Clark and other New Orleanians suspected that autumn. Earlier that spring Intendant Morales and other colonial officials had complained to the ministers of the Spanish treasury that
Americans were abusing the right of deposit and heavily engaged in smuggling. Upon the advice of his chief minister, Pedro Cevallos (Manuel Godoy’s successor and cousin by marriage), Carlos IV had secretly directed the intendant of Louisiana to prohibit the deposit of American goods in New Orleans—and Carlos had specifically instructed Morales not to justify his action as “the order of the king.” Instead, he was to pretend that he had reviewed the terms of Pinckney’s Treaty on his own initiative “and found that the limit of three years fixed by article XXII bound his hands so that he could not allow the introduction and deposit of American goods without the express permission of the king.” By following his secret instructions to the letter, Juan Morales deflected responsibility from the king to himself so effectively that a full century passed before historian Edward Channing discovered and published the direct order from Carlos IV that precipitated the Mississippi crisis of 1802.35
Bonaparte was delighted when the news of Morales’s proclamation arrived in a letter from his American envoy early in January 1803. By closing the port, Talleyrand wrote to his ambassador in Madrid, “Spain had taken a step equally in accordance with its rights and with the interests of France.” The American right of deposit was incompatible with Bonaparte’s plans to nurture trade between Louisiana and the French West Indies, “replace” the Americans, and “concentrate [Louisiana’s] commerce into the national commerce.” The first consul and his foreign minister welcomed Morales’s proclamation as a measure that would curb American competitors and encourage French commerce. The closing of the port, however, was the only bit of good news from the New World that reached Bonaparte that winter.36
During the first week of January 1803, as troops assigned to reinforce General Charles Leclerc in St. Domingue waited in the cold at Hellevoetsluis, news of General Leclerc’s death on November 2—and of the catastrophic losses and dismal failure of the Caribbean expedition—reached the first consul. Bonaparte’s dream of reviving the French sugar empire in the West Indies died with his brother-in-law. His anger burst forth after a dinner party on Wednesday, January 12—just two days after Pierre Clement Laussat and the Surveillant cleared the harbor at La Rochelle for New Orleans. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” Bonaparte exclaimed. (These were the “exact words of the First Consul,” Pierre Louis Roederer, director general of public education, noted in his diary.)37
At the end of January the government newspaper in Paris, Le Moniteur, published a story hinting that the first consul was turning his attention to the east and thinking about reconquering Egypt. Great Britain reacted promptly to this threatened breach of the year-old Treaty of Amiens, by which Great Britain had promised to surrender the island of Malta to France and Bonaparte had agreed to return Egypt to the Ottoman Turks. On March 2, George III informed Parliament of Bonaparte’s “very considerable military preparations … in the ports of France and Holland.” The king advocated “additional measures of precaution” against the possibility, which Bonaparte was in fact entertaining, that the French troops and vessels assembled for Louisiana and St. Domingue might be redirected toward an invasion of England. As the ice melted in the harbor of Hellevoetsluis, British warships moved into the English Channel, trapping General Victor’s forces in their harbors as they made ready for war.38
On Sunday afternoon, March 12, Chancellor Livingston and the foreign diplomatic corps attended a salon held by Josephine Bonaparte. “After going the usual round of Ladies in one room,” her husband exchanged a few polite words with Livingston, a few more with the Danish ambassador, “and then went to the other end of the room … and went up to Lord Whitworth,” the British ambassador. Bonaparte told Whitworth “that they would probably have a storm.” Whitworth replied that he “hoped not.”
“I find, my Lord, your nation wants war again,” said Bonaparte.
“No, sir,” Whitworth replied, “we are very desirous of peace.”
“You have just finished a war of fifteen years,” Bonaparte said.
“It is true, sir, and that was fifteen years too long,” Whitworth replied.
“But you want another war of fifteen years,” Bonaparte asserted.
“Pardon me, sir,” Whitworth replied, “we are very desirous of peace.”
Bonaparte then expressed “a few more very strong terms evoking the vengeance of heaven upon those who broke the treaty.”
“I must either have Malta or war,” he declared. Then, being told that “Madame B[onaparte] and the ladies in the next room expected him,” Bonaparte departed.39
The United States had recoiled in republican indignation at Talleyrand’s insistence upon substantial bribes in the XYZ Affair, so when Robert Livingston tempted the first consul’s elder brother with the idea of giving the Bonaparte family land in Louisiana in exchange for American sovereignty, the scheme was as close to outright venality as any American official could come. Great Britain, on the other hand, had fewer qualms about bribery as an instrument of foreign policy.
Napoleon Bonaparte, about 1802—a character study of genius and hubris. Jefferson regarded Bonaparte as “a great man” until the coup d’état of 18—19 Brumaire, and thereafter “set him down as a great scoundrel only.” Talleyrand, who initially opposed the Louisiana Purchase in the hope of diverting him from another war in Europe, wrote that “I served Bonaparte while he was emperor as I had served him when he was Consul… so long as I could believe that he himself was devoted to the interests of France. But as soon as I saw him beginning to undertake those radical enterprises which were to lead him to his doom, I resigned my ministry. For this, he never forgave me.” Exiled on the island of St. Helena, where he died on May ¡, 1821, Napoleon described Talleyrand as “merde in a silk stocking.” (Courtesy Library of Virginia)
Within days of the first consul’s confrontation with Lord Whitworth at Josephine Bonaparte’s salon, Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte sent an intermediary (a Swiss-born acquaintance named Bartholomew Huber who was familiar with officials in London and Paris) to suggest that in return for “a valuable consideration” the Bonapartes might be able to persuade their brother to relax his insistence on Malta or war. Whitworth immediately reported the proposal to the British foreign secretary, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury. “I lose no time in informing you,” Hawkesbury replied three days later, “that if an arrangement could be concluded which should be satisfactory to His Majesty, and by which His Majesty should retain the Island of Malta, the Sum of one Hundred thousand Pounds might be distributed as Secret Service.”40
The sum of £100,000—worth about $16 million today—was indeed a valuable consideration, but with so many men around Bonaparte “partaking in the Pillage of this country,” Whitworth determined that more money was required, especially if the British hoped to enlist Talleyrand’s support. “I have no fixed Idea of what Sum may be necessary,” Whitworth wrote on March 24, “but on calculating what we may expend in one month of War, the sacrifice of a Million, or even two Millions, would be economy.” By the middle of April, the British were secretly negotiating with Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and even Napoleon’s fearsome chief of secret police, Joseph Fouché.41
In the end, the war was not averted and no money changed hands. Nevertheless, the British attempt to bribe Napoleon’s brothers and ministers, which probably came to the first consul’s attention through Fouché, underscored Talleyrand’s and the Bonapartes’ opposition to Napoleon’s decision to sell Louisiana. Talleyrand, of course, had been advocating colonization since his lectures at the National Institute in 1797. He and Napoleon’s brothers hoped that the first consul’s projects in St. Domingue and Louisiana might divert his interest in Malta and Egypt. The attempted bribery also helps to explain both the famous bathroom encounter between Napoleon and his brothers as well as the first consul’s eventual decision to negotiate with the Americans through his incorruptible finance minister, François Barbé-Marbois, rather than Foreign Minister Talleyrand.
The bathroom episode began one
evening when Lucien Bonaparte came home to change clothes for the theater. Joseph was waiting for him. “Here you are at last,” Joseph said, “I was afraid you might not come. This is no time for theater-going; I have news for you that will give you no fancy for amusement. The General wants to sell Louisiana.”42
“Come now,” Lucien replied, “if he were capable of wishing it, the Chambers would never consent.”
“He means to do without their consent,” Joseph answered. “What is more,” he continued, “this sale would supply him the first funds for the war. Do you know that I am beginning to think he is much too fond of war?”—an opinion that Talleyrand shared. The brothers resolved to talk with Napoleon the next morning.
Lucien reached the Tuileries first, where he found the first consul soaking in a bath of rosewater. They exchanged pleasantries until Joseph arrived, whereupon Napoleon asked their opinion of his determination to sell Louisiana.