A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  By a strict party-line vote, the Senate confirmed Monroe’s appointment on Tuesday afternoon. Congress authorized the money on Wednesday, and Jefferson’s allies quickly sent word to their constituents. On January 12, for example, Republican congressman David Holmes, of Harrisonburg, Virginia, put the administration’s spin on recent events in a letter to his neighbor James Allen (the early national politician’s equivalent to a sound bite for the evening news). Holmes knew he could count on Allen, a state senator who was then in Richmond for the legislative session, to spread the administration’s perspective among his colleagues, who in turn would inform wider circles of friends and constituents.

  “The proceedings of congress have been uninteresting except upon one Subject,” Holmes wrote, summarizing the talking points about Jefferson’s public policy toward Louisiana.

  The conduct of the Spanish officer at Orleans in refusing to permit our Western Citizens from landing their produce at that place as usual and refusing to assign any other on the Banks of the River … has exerted much Sensibility. The intimate connection between the free Navigation of the Mississippi, and the existence of a Union with the Western country is felt by the administration. … R is Not only the intention of the Executive to Secure Permanently that object but to enlarge our Privileges. Mr. Monroe whos Nomination has been confirmed by the Senate (15 to 12) Will join Messrs. Livingston and Pinckney to negocíate upon this Subject. It is generally believed that the conduct of the Spanish Officers at Orleans, has not received the Sanction of their Government but [is] a Swindling act of their own. If this Should not be the case and negotiation fails … War or what is more to be deprecated a dismemberment of the Union Must take place.

  Holmes, who was later elected the first governor of Mississippi, hoped that “the impatience of the Western People will not drive them to any improper acts, before Peacefull measures Can be Tried.”12

  As promised, on Thursday, January 13, Jefferson informed Monroe of his confirmation by the Senate. Regardless of whether his talents were actually necessary in Europe, where Chancellor Livingston and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney were ably representing American interests in Paris and Madrid, Monroe’s political appeal at home was irresistible. In private friendship and in politics, no man except James Madison was more closely identified with the president. Monroe’s reputation as a stalwart defender of western interests in the Mississippi Valley dated to the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786 and the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. He owned land in the west and had many friends there. He also knew the salons and officials of Paris from his days as President Washington’s minister, and he had friends among the French republicans, although fewer among the members of Bonaparte’s court.

  The two minor liabilities that Monroe brought to the assignment stemmed from his tenure as minister to France in the 1790s. First, many of his French political friends were out of favor with Bonaparte. Second, Monroe was a proud man—a “man of the sword” ready to defend his reputation on the field of honor. His sensitivity to French public opinion had been heightened by the embarrassment of being recalled by President Washington in 1796. The inconvenient friends were easily managed. Monroe gave his Parisian butler a list of names “with instruction [that] should any of them call, not to admit them, always giving some excuse which should not be offensive.” Although his vanity never interfered with the work at hand, Monroe’s interest in gauging the warmth of his welcome was almost obsessive, and it did incline him to undervalue Livingston’s accomplishments in the months prior to his arrival.13

  The announcement of Monroe’s appointment was a master stroke in domestic politics. “The measure has already silenced the Federalists here,” President Jefferson wrote, “and the country will become calm as fast as the information extends over it.” For the moment, all Monroe needed to do was show up. In the longer view, however, both men knew they were gambling Monroe’s (and the administration’s) political reputation and future. “All eyes, all hopes, are now fixed on you,” Jefferson advised his friend.

  James Monroe, in an engraving from the 1816 portrait by John Vanderlyn. When Monroe abandoned his new law office in Richmond and accepted the appointment as special minister to France in 1803, his decision proved a turning point both for his political career and his personal finances. After returning from Europe, Monroe served in James Madison’s cabinet and then as the last president of the Virginia dynasty. With each year of public service after 1803, Monroe slid further into debt until his death in New York City on July 4, 1831. The Barings Bank of London had made millions financing the Louisiana Purchase. Only the bank’s forbearance on a substantial personal loan and a last-minute congressional appropriation of $30,000 saved the remnants of Monroe’s estate from his creditors. (Collection of the author)

  Were you to decline, the chagrin would be universal… for on the event of this mission depends the future destinies of this republic. If we cannot by a purchase of the country insure to ourselves a course of perpetual peace and friendship with all nations … war cannot be distant.

  • • •

  The domestic implications of the Mississippi crisis were paramount in Jefferson’s decision to send a second and highly visible emissary to France. The president also had other compelling arguments for sending someone, and for choosing Monroe.

  Based on his own diplomatic experience, Jefferson knew that written instructions, no matter how carefully composed, were cumbersome and chronically out of date by the time they crossed the Atlantic. Much had happened in the fifteen months since Chancellor Livingston had sailed for Europe. In 1802 the president’s eloquence had been equal to the task of revising American policy toward France after the discovery of the retrocession of Louisiana: “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Now, however, because he was a skillful writer and because so many things had changed, Jefferson knew that the complexities of diplomacy involving Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—with two of the four on the verge of sweeping them all into war—required something more supple than ink on paper. (As writers, perhaps Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt were in Jefferson’s league, but in time of crisis they also had the telegraph.)14

  Jefferson’s goal had not changed. He wanted possession of New Orleans and the Floridas so that America controlled the rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. Neither had his diplomatic methods. Come what may, the president had to have reliable spokesmen in Paris who knew what he wanted and who possessed authority sufficient to attain it. As Jefferson had recently advised an ally in Congress, the crux of effective statesmanship was “doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.”15

  As he had with Chancellor Livingston (and informally with Pierre Du Pont), Jefferson offered Monroe “full and frequent oral communications” in preparation for the French mission. The negotiations toward “our object of purchasing N[ew] Orleans and the Floridas,” Jefferson recognized, are “liable to assume so many shapes, that no [written] instructions could be squared to fit them.” The president wanted his new emissary to be “well impressed with all our views and therefore qualified to meet and modify… every form of proposition which could come from the other party.” Monroe was a perfect choice because he “possess [ed] the unlimited confidence of the administration and of the western people; and generally of the republicans everywhere.”

  “Were you to refuse to go,” Jefferson cautioned, “no other man can be found who does this.” Not surprisingly, when Jefferson’s letters of January 10 and 13 reached him in Richmond, the former governor canceled his trip to New York and the west, put the new law office on hold, and began packing his bags for Paris.

  By Sunday, March 6, 1803, Jefferson’s minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary and his family had their baggage aboard the Richmond, a vessel of about four hundred tons, as they wrapped up their visit with Elizabeth Kortright Monroe’s family. Clearing the port of New York in
a snowstorm on Tuesday, the Richmond made an uneventful crossing in thirty-one days. At Le Havre a salute from the battery protecting the mouth of the Seine welcomed the ship into the harbor on Friday, April 8, 1803. Stepping onto French soil at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the returning minister and his family were escorted to their hotel by an honor guard of fifty French soldiers.16

  Conveniently, one of the other passengers from the Richmond was heading immediately for Paris. Monroe entrusted him with a note informing Livingston of his safe arrival and his intention to rest for a day and then travel to the capital. Soon thereafter, however, municipal officials told Monroe that news of his arrival had already reached Bonaparte—a hundred miles away in Paris—by semaphore telegraph. Devised by engineer Claude Chappe and adopted by the French legislative assembly in 1792, this “optical telegraph” was based on a semaphore with three arms that could be placed in a combination of ninety-two discrete positions. Chappe’s system made it possible—using a coded vocabulary of ninety-two words on each of ninety-two pages for a total of nearly eighty-five hundred words—to relay messages by semaphore from one signal tower to the next. For the first time in history, information moved faster than a horse could carry a dispatch rider. News of Monroe’s arrival reached Paris in hours rather than days.17

  On Sunday, Monroe’s note reached Robert Livingston, confirming the nearly instantaneous news via Chappe’s semaphore telegraph. At that moment, only five other people in the world—Talleyrand, Barbé-Marbois, Decrès, and possibly Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte—were aware of the drastic shift in Napoleon’s attitude toward Louisiana. Chancellor Livingston was not yet among them. Nor could he know that within days the first consul would be echoing his own arguments as justification for selling the province.

  Excited perhaps as much by the telegraph as by his curiosity about events in America, Livingston dashed off a quick, genial, and fateful note of self-deprecating welcome to his old friend and new colleague. “Dear Sir,” Livingston wrote,

  I congratulate you on your safe arrival, and have long and anxiously wished for you. God grant that your mission may answer yours and the public expectations. War may do something for us—nothing else would. I have paved the way for you, and if… we are now in possession of New Orleans, we should do well. … I have apprized the Minister of your arrival; and told him you would be here on Tuesday or Wednesday18

  Forever after, ignoring Livingston’s phrase about paving his way, Monroe regarded this polite and hastily written note as proof, as the Virginian wrote in his autobiography, that “Mr. Livingston gave a very discouraging prospect of the success of his mission.” Surely the surprising turn of events that awaited them in Paris owed principally to the triumphant return of James Monroe, minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary.19

  The arrival of Jefferson’s new emissary, regardless of his identity, signaled that the Americans meant business. But so did the arrival in Paris on April 8 of copies of the New York Chronicle bearing the entire text of Pennsylvania senator James Ross’s militant resolutions asserting America’s “indisputable right to the free navigation of the river Mississippi.” As a resident of the west, former college Latin teacher, and unsuccessful candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Ross, a forty-one-year-old Pittsburgh lawyer, was the Federalists’ point man in the Mississippi crisis. He introduced the heart of their war plan on February 16, 1803. Ross proposed an appropriation of $5 million and authorization to call up as many as fifty thousand militia—from South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and the Mississippi Territory, “together with the naval and military force of the union.” With these resources, the president was “to take immediate possession of… a convenient deposit for [American] produce and merchandize in the island of New Orleans … or the adjacent territories.”20

  The Republican alternative came in the form of substitute resolutions introduced by Kentucky senator John Breckinridge, Monroe’s personal friend and Jefferson’s political ally. Breckinridge’s resolutions authorized the president to direct the state governors “to organize, arm and equip” as many as eighty thousand militia and “hold [them] in readiness to march at a moment’s warning.” This Republican alternative gave the president more room for diplomacy and was more respectful of state prerogatives. Either way, however, the senators’ message to France and Spain—and to the American westerners—was firm and clear.21

  “Upon what then do we really differ?” Senator Ross asked his colleagues. “Upon nothing but the time of acting—Whether we shall take measures for immediate restoration and security” as Alexander Hamilton’s Pericles essays advocated, “or whether we shall abstain from all military preparation, and wait the [result] of negociation,” as Jefferson was doing. “There is no disagreement but on this point,” Ross accurately concluded, “for if negociation fails, every man who has spoken has pledged himself to declare war.”22

  On February 25 the United States Senate had substituted Breckinridge’s resolutions for Ross’s by a strict party-line vote of fifteen to eleven—and then promptly passed the measure by a unanimous vote of all the senators present. Bonaparte was a strategic genius, but when Robert Livingston sent Talleyrand a copy of the New York Chronicle on April 8, 1803, it did not require genius to read the implications of James Ross’s resolutions. Had the wording of Breckinridge’s substitutes been known, the French reaction would have been the same. Both sets of resolutions sent the same message to foreign powers, as Senator Ross himself admitted, “except that one set of resolutions puts greater power into the hands of the President than the other.”23

  One more bit of news that reached Talleyrand and Bonaparte in the first week of April—completely unknown to Monroe or Livingston—was pivotal to the success of the American negotiations in Paris. Congress had authorized Monroe as a minister to France and, if necessary, Spain. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison, however, had intimated to the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón, that if Monroe were disappointed in France he would seek an alliance with Great Britain. “According to all I can gather,” Pichón warned Talleyrand, “I see that Mr. Monroe has carte blanche and that he will go to London if he is badly received at Paris.”24

  War with Great Britain was imminent. Leclerc was dead, his Haitian expedition was a disaster, and the reinforcements for St. Domingue and Louisiana were trapped at Hellevoetsluis. New Orleans was vulnerable, and the westerners were armed and angry. On April 8, 1803—while James Monroe and his family were coming ashore at La Havre in the pilot boat of the Richmond—Talleyrand and Bonaparte took Ross’s resolutions and Pichon’s warning to heart. Talleyrand, who had strongly opposed the idea of selling Louisiana, was now ready to see it as “an advantageous arrangement” to compensate for “the inevitable loss of a country that war was going to place at the mercy of another nation.”25 Two days later, on Easter Sunday, the first consul summoned François Barbé-Marbois and Denis Decrès to the garden of his palace at St. Cloud and announced his intention to sell Louisiana to the United States.26

  Early Monday morning, April 11, Napoleon Bonaparte renounced Louisiana to Barbé-Marbois and directed him to sell it to the United States. “Do not even wait for the arrival of Mr. Monroe,” the first consul said, “have an interview this very day with Mr. Livingston.” That afternoon, however, it was Foreign Minister Talleyrand, not the treasury minister, who invited Chancellor Livingston to his office on rue du Bac, on the Left Bank in St.-Germain-des-Prés.27

  Livingston opened the conversation by reiterating his conviction that in reaction to Spain’s revocation of the right of deposit the United States was certain to seize New Orleans and the Floridas either now or at the first outbreak of the next European war. Talleyrand listened patiently. Then he wondered aloud “whether we wished to have the whole of Louisiana.”28

  “No,” Livingston replied (accurately reflecting Jefferson’s objectives), “our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas.” However, as he had suggested on earlier occa
sions, it would be wise policy on the part of France “to give us the Country above the River Arkansas in order to place a barrier between [French Louisiana] and Canada.”

  If France sold New Orleans to the United States, Talleyrand responded, the rest of Louisiana had little value. “What,” he asked Livingston, would you “give for the whole”?

  Livingston doubted the sincerity of Talleyrand’s question. His skepticism, Barbé-Marbois wrote long after the event, was “justified by the many deceptions that had been previously practiced upon him.” Dickering over land prices was nothing new, however, so the Chancellor started low. He “supposed we should not object to twenty Millions provided our Citizens were paid.” (Twenty million francs was about $3.75 million, and Livingston wanted to keep Talleyrand and Bonaparte from evading their promise to settle American claims from the Quasi-War of 1797–1800.)29

  “This was too low an offer,” Talleyrand replied, inviting Livingston to “reflect upon it and tell him tomorrow.”

  “As Mr. Monroe would be in Town in two days,” Livingston suggested that he “would delay my further offer until I had the pleasure of introducing him.”

  After fifteen months in Paris, Livingston knew the former bishop of Autun well enough to see an immediate connection between Talleyrand’s next remark and the recent news of the saber rattling by the United States Senate. With the shrug of indifference by which he habitually veiled matters of utmost importance, Talleyrand ventured “that he did not speak from authority, but that the idea had struck him.”30

  That evening the Chancellor wrote a letter to Madison, with key passages in code, explaining the full significance of his conversation with Talleyrand. “I have reason … to think,” he surmised, “that this resolution [to sell Louisiana] was taken in council [with Bonaparte] on Saturday, for on Friday I received Mr. Ross’s motion [and] I immediately sent it to Mr. Talleyrand with an informal note expressive of my fears that it would be carried into effect.” Livingston had also sent a French translation of Ross’s motion to General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who had immediately taken it to Joseph Bonaparte. The Ross resolutions, Livingston believed, were the “exciting causes” of Napoleon’s change of heart about Louisiana, “which … we shall be able on the arrival of Mr. Monroe to pursue to effect.”31