by Jon Kukla
“I flatter myself,” Lucien warned, “that the Chambers will not give their consent.”
“You flatter yourself,” Napoleon answered sarcastically. “That is precious, in truth!”
“And I flatter myself,” Joseph interjected, “as I have already told the First Consul.”
“And what did I answer?” Napoleon growled.
“That you would do without the Chambers,” said Joseph.
“Precisely!” said Napoleon. “And now, gentlemen, think of it what you will; but both of you go into mourning about this affair—you, Lucien, for the sale itself; you, Joseph, because I shall do it without the consent of any one whatsoever. Do you understand?”
“You will do well,” Joseph snarled as he stepped toward the tub, “not to expose your project to parliamentary discussion; for … I will put myself first at the head of the opposition.”
Napoleon laughed scornfully. “You will have no need to lead the opposition, for I repeat that there will be no debate.”
Months of relentless advocacy by Chancellor Livingston now paid off, as the first consul claimed the New Yorker’s arguments as his own. “It is my idea,” Napoleon declared as he rose from the tub. “I conceived it, and I shall go through with it, the negotiation, ratification, and execution, by myself. Do you understand? by me who scoffs at your opposition.”
“Good!” Joseph shouted in a rage. “I tell you, General, that you, I, and all of us, if you do what you threaten, may prepare ourselves soon to go and join the poor innocent devils whom you … have transported to Sinnamary,” site of the infamous prison colony near Cayenne in French Guiana.
“You are insolent!” Napoleon thundered as he fell back into the tub, dousing Joseph and Lucien with a torrent of rose-scented water.
Soaked to the skin, Lucien Bonaparte had the presence of mind to invoke the words of Neptune from Virgil’s Aeneid,
I will show you … ! But no, first I had better set the waves at rest; after that you are going to pay dearly for your offence.
As Napoleon’s valet fainted and fell to the floor, the three brothers regained their composure.43
After Joseph left to change his clothes, Lucien and Napoleon continued the argument. “Do you want me to tell you the truth?” Napoleon asked. “I am today more sorry than I like to confess for the expedition to St. Domingue.” His decision to sell Louisiana stemmed from his realization that the dream of reviving the French empire in the Caribbean had indeed died with their brother-in-law General Leclerc. “Our national glory,” Napoleon told Lucien, “will never come from our marine.”44
The exact date of this conversation among the Bonaparte brothers is uncertain, and the incident itself may well be apocryphal. Nevertheless, by April 10, 1803, Napoleon had resolved to offer Louisiana to the Americans—and he would not be dissuaded. His timing was exquisite. Chancellor Livingston had put everything in order, and James Monroe had landed at Le Havre. He would arrive in Paris on April 12.
After mass on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1803, Bonaparte summoned Denis Decrès, minister of marine and colonies, and François Barbé-Marbois, minister of finance, to his palace at St. Cloud. A well-educated nobleman from the province of Champagne, Decrès had served with Admiral de Grasse in the West Indies and breached the British blockade at Malta during Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. Gruff and authoritarian in his manner, hardworking and unswervingly loyal to the first consul, forty-two-year-old Rear Admiral Decrès was one of the few sailors to whom Bonaparte presented a sword of honor. For the previous two years he had been coordinating, with mixed success, preparations for the intended expeditions against St. Domingue, Louisiana, and now perhaps England.45
At fifty-eight, Barbé-Marbois was a career diplomat and administrator with a literary and scientific bent and proven affection for the United States. Serving in the 1780s as secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia and later as charge d’affaires, he had worked with Livingston, Monroe, Jay, and many other American leaders. Barbé-Marbois had compiled the twenty-two questions circulated to the thirteen American states that inspired Thomas Jefferson to compose his Notes on the State of Virginia in answer to his queries. In 1784 he had married Elizabeth Moore, daughter of the president of Pennsylvania’s executive council. Although he had never seen Louisiana, Barbé-Marbois had traveled north to the Mohawk River in upstate New York. He had also served four years as Louis XVI’s last intendant in St. Domingue, where “the ability and the virtue he practices in both public and private life” earned him “a host of enemies in the colony”46
During the final negotiations of the Louisiana Purchase in April 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte conferred with his principal negotiator, François Barbé-Marbois, on long walks in the gardens at St. Cloud, a few miles west of Paris. The palace was destroyed in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Two miles northwest stands the seventeenth-century Chateau de Malmaison, Bonaparte’s gift to Josephine in 1799. (Collection of the author)
A moderate in the French Revolution, Barbé-Marbois was exiled during the Terror and then imprisoned by the Directory for twenty-six months at Sinnamari and Cayenne, in French Guiana. Returning to France after the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, Barbé-Marbois took charge of the public treasury in February 1801. Recognized as “a man of talents and integrity,” Barbé-Marbois worked closely with Bonaparte for the next five years, amazed by the first consul’s “capacity for comprehending everything, [and] the quickness and depth of his reflections.”47
“I know the full value of Louisiana,” Bonaparte told Decrès and Barbé-Marbois, “and I have been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763.” Nevertheless, he continued, effective French control of Louisiana would be threatened by the British navy in the event of war, so “I must expect to lose it.” The British had twenty ships in the Gulf of Mexico, Bonaparte said, “whilst our affairs in St. Domingue have been growing worse every day since the death of Leclerc.” Rather than letting the British capture Louisiana, the first consul announced, “I think of ceding it to the United States.”48
“They only ask of me one town in Louisiana,” Bonaparte said, echoing the arguments that Jefferson had advanced through Livingston, “but I already consider the colony as entirely lost.” Once again echoing the arguments he had read in Livingston’s printed memorandum, Bonaparte concluded “that in the hands of this growing power, [Louisiana] will be more useful to the policy and even to the commerce of France, than if it should attempt to keep it.”49
“We should not hesitate to make a sacrifice of that which is … slipping from us,” Barbé-Marbois replied.
War with England is inevitable; shall we be able with very inferior naval forces to defend Louisiana against that power? … Can we restore fortifications that are in ruins, and construct a long chain of forts upon a frontier of four hundred leagues?
The expense would drain French resources, Barbé-Marbois continued, again echoing Livingston’s arguments, giving Britain “a secret joy in seeing you exhaust yourself in efforts of which she alone will derive the profit.” Louisiana has been settled for one hundred years, the finance minister observed, borrowing yet another argument from Livingston, “and in spite of efforts and sacrifices of every kind the last accounts of its population attest its weakness.”50
Admiral Decrès disagreed. “We are still at peace with England,” he said, and “the colony has just been ceded to us.” If peace continued, the sale of Louisiana would be seen as a “premature act of ill-founded apprehension,” contrary to the honor of France. “There does not exist on the globe,” the minister of marine and colonies asserted, “a single city susceptible of becoming as important as New Orleans.” Its proximity to the American west already made it one of the most commercial ports in the world, Decrès asserted. “The Mississippi does not reach there till it has received twenty other rivers, most of which surpass in size the finest rivers of Europe.” Gazing a century into the future, Admiral Decrès imagined the construction “at th
e isthmus of Panama [of] a simple canal… to connect one ocean with the other.” Louisiana, he said, “will be on this new route, and it will then be … of inestimable value.” If France were forced to abandon St. Domingue, he concluded, “Louisiana will take its place.”51
Having heard the candid advice of his ministers, Bonaparte ended the conversation and the three men retired to their rooms.
Early Monday morning, April 11, Bonaparte sent for Barbé-Marbois. “Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,” he declared.
I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without any reservation. I know the price of what I abandon, and I have sufficiently proved the importance that I attach to this province. … I renounce it with the greatest regret. To attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.
“I direct you to negotiate this affair with the envoys of the United States,” the first consul said. “Do not even await the arrival of Mr. Monroe: have an interview this very day with Mr. Livingston.” The conflict with Great Britain was about to resume. “I want fifty millions” for Louisiana, Bonaparte said, “and for less than that sum I will not treat. … I require money to make war on the richest nation of the world.”52
Now it was the first consul’s turn to gaze far into the future. “In two or three centuries,” he observed, “the Americans may be found too powerful for Europe … but my foresight does not embrace such remote fears. … It is to prevent the danger, to which the colossal power of England exposes use, that I would provide a remedy.”53
Barbé-Marbois listened carefully as Bonaparte outlined his strategy for the negotiation. “Mr. Monroe is on the point of arriving,” and was surely carrying secret instructions from President Jefferson about how much money to offer for New Orleans. The first consul anticipated that neither Livingston nor Monroe was “prepared for a decision which goes infinitely beyond any thing that they are about to ask of us.” Therefore, he instructed Barbé-Marbois:
Begin by making them the overture, without any subterfuge. You will acquaint me, day by day, hour by hour, of your progress…. Observe the greatest secrecy, and recommend it to the American ministers.
The treaty talks that culminated in the Louisiana Purchase commenced that evening, while James Monroe’s carriage was still rolling toward Paris.54
— CHAPTER FOURTEEN —
Midnight in the
Garden of Rue Trudon
The purchase [was] a pretty expensive one … but we have removed by it a dangerous rival (whether this government or that of Britain possessed the country) for ever from our shores. We have enabled our government to live in perpetual peace, and… acquired the means of living at no very distant period, absolutely independent of Europe or the east indies, since the produce of every soil and of every climate may now be found or placed within our own country. Whatever the opinion of the present day may be I am content to stake my political character with posterity upon this treaty.
—Robert R. Livingston to Rufus King, May 11, 18031
THE FIRST NEWS of Juan Ventura Morales’s proclamation closing the Mississippi to American trade reached President Jefferson on Thursday, November 25, 1802, two weeks before he was slated to present his State of the Union address. Despite the angry reactions of the press and public, Jefferson sidestepped the news from New Orleans in what Alexander Hamilton called his “lullaby message” to Congress on December 8. Retired from public office but not from politics, the great New York Federalist was not shy about offering martial advice in the newspapers over pen names like Titus Manlius and Pericles.2
The crisis in Louisiana threatened “the early dismemberment of a large portion of the country,” Hamilton warned his countrymen, using the pen name Pericles, and “more immediately the safety of all the Southern States.” In the long run it threatened “the independence of the whole union.” Of America’s two options, the choice was clear to a statesman who regarded Julius Caesar as the greatest man who ever lived. Hamilton sneered at the first option: “to negocíate and endeavour to purchase, and if this fails to go to war.” He favored the second: “to seize at once on the Floridas and New-Orleans, and then negocíate.”3
If President Jefferson called ten thousand men to arms and embraced these “decisive measures,” Hamilton wrote,
he might yet retrieve his character; induce the best part of the community [that is, Hamilton’s Federalist friends] to look favorably upon his political career, exalt himself in the eyes of Europe, save the country, and secure a permanent fame.
“But for this, alas!” the American Caesar frowned, “Jefferson is not destined!”4
Firmly and quietly, the president had already initiated negotiations through Pierre Du Pont and Robert Livingston for possession of New Orleans and the Floridas. Now, facing “the agitation of the public mind on occasion of the late suspension of our right of deposit at N[ew] Orleans,” something more dramatic was needed. “The measures we have been pursuing being invisible,” Jefferson admitted, “do not satisfy”5
Among those invisible measures was Jefferson’s plan for a scientific expedition up the Missouri River and across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. Soon after taking office, Jefferson had invited Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis to serve as his private secretary—citing his “knolege of the Western country” as a valuable attribute for the position. With Lewis close at hand, planning for the mission began in earnest, building upon the instructions he had drawn up for Andre Michaux in 1793. The project was cloaked in secrecy, but not for diplomatic reasons—indeed Jefferson consulted secretly the Spanish, French, and British representatives about his plans for “a small caravan” to explore the Missouri River, and he secured foreign passports for its commanders.6
The secrecy answered domestic political considerations: Jefferson did not believe that the Constitution authorized the outfitting of a scientific and “literary” expedition at public expense. Nevertheless, “the President has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative, and a lover of glory,” the Spanish envoy reported to his superiors, and he was eager
to perpetuate the fame of his administration not only by measures of frugality and economy which characterize him, but also by discovering … the way by which the Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the coasts of the South Sea [i.e., the Pacific Ocean].
To indulge his scientific curiosity and advance the good of the country, Jefferson emphasized the commercial significance of the expedition in his secret message to Congress on January 18, 1803. “While other civilized nations have encountered great expense to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge by undertaking voyages of discovery,” Jefferson asked for only $2,500 and only for a constitutional purpose. “The interests of commerce place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress,” he wrote. “That it should incidentally advance the geographical knowledge of our own continent,” the president cagily admitted, “can not but be an additional gratification.” Congress approved the money, and planning was well under way before Robert Livingston and James Monroe bought Louisiana. Their diplomatic coup transformed the expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark into a great national adventure—and both opportunities forced the apostle of strict construction to stretch the Constitution beyond what he regarded as the limits of its expressly delegated powers.7
Federalist critics condemned Jefferson’s response to the Mississippi crisis as “in every respect the weakest measure that ever disgraced the administration of any country.” The French charge d’affaires saw things differently. “However timid Mr. Jefferson may be,” Louis André Pichón advised Talleyrand, in words that would bolster the American bargaining position in Paris, “I cannot help seeing that there is a tendency toward adopting an irrevocably hostile system [toward France]. This circumstance will be decisive for Mr. Jefferson. If he acts feebly, he is lost.”8
On Monday, January 10, President Jefferson dispatched an urgent note to
James Monroe, who had completed his second term as governor of Virginia at noon on Christmas Eve. “I have but a moment to inform you,” the president wrote, “that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at N[ew] Orleans … threatens to overbear our peace.” The note arrived in Richmond as Monroe and his family were packing for New York. Elizabeth Kortright Monroe and the girls planned to visit her parents while her husband joined Kentucky senator John Breckinridge on a jaunt to inspect his landholdings in the west. After twenty years in public office, Monroe was looking forward to opening a law practice in Richmond, settling his debts, and making some money9
Instead, Jefferson’s letter presented him with a fait accompli, the “temporary sacrifice” of a new public assignment. “I shall tomorrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France,” the president wrote, “and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline.”
The whole public hope will be rested on you. I wish you to [stay] either in Richmond or Albemarle till you receive another letter from me, which will be written two days hence if the Senate decide immediately. … In the meantime pray work night and day to arrange your affairs for a temporary absence; perhaps for a long time.10
The capital was busy on Tuesday, January 11. While the Senate considered Monroe’s appointment as special envoy to France and Spain to secure “our rights and interests in the river Mississippi and in the territories eastward thereof,” the House gathered in secret session to appropriate $2 million for “any expenses which may be incurred in relation to the intercourse between the United States and foreign nations.” This bland legislative language veiled the intended object of purchasing New Orleans and the Floridas.11