by Jon Kukla
Checked at sea, Napoleon nevertheless ruled the Continent. He had crowned his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Naples in 1806 and his brother Louis Bonaparte king of Holland. His Confederation of the Rhine gave him control of the German states except Austria, Prussia, Brunswick, and Hessen. By 1807 Britain and France were locked in the economic warfare defined by Napoleon’s Continental System, forbidding British trade with all European nations, and Britain’s Orders in Council, which prohibited neutral nations from trading in ports that complied with Napoleon’s decrees. When President Jefferson responded in 1807 with his disastrous embargo, his attempt to avoid war and maintain neutrality by prohibiting American trade with European belligerents, the United States took its first steps toward the War of 1812.
America’s situation as a neutral power was difficult enough, but Spain’s position on the Continent was worse. Once again openly employed by Carlos IV and Maria Luisa as Spain’s admiral-general and “Alteza Serenísima,” or Most Serene Highness, Manuel Godoy had been secretly courting Napoleon’s favor in the hope of obtaining a small kingdom when the emperor got around to carving up Portugal. Godoy’s admiration turned to alarm, however, when Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena and captured Berlin in October 1806. “If Czar Alexander does not succeed in bringing down this colossus,” Godoy whispered to the Russian ambassador, “our turn will come and we shall be the last victims.”45
Napoleon promptly crushed the Russian army at Friedland in June 1807 and forced Alexander to sue for peace. Then he turned his attention south. “The Spanish Royal House are my personal enemies,” Napoleon confided to the Austrian diplomat Prince Klemens von Metternich, the man who arranged Napoleon’s marriage to the archduchess Marie Louise after his divorce from Josephine and who in 1814–1815 rearranged the face of Europe in the Congress of Vienna. “They and I,” Napoleon said, “cannot be on thrones at the same time.”46
Spain would be messier. Cultivating the hatred between Prince Ferdinand, Carlos IV and Maria Luisa’s son, and Godoy, their favorite, Napoleon had planted seeds of destruction in very fertile soil. He toppled the Bourbon monarchy on May 6, 1808, sending the trinity of Carlos, Maria Luisa, and Godoy into permanent exile in Italy. When Napoleon put his brother on the throne vacated by His Most Catholic Majesty, however, the Spanish people rose in revolt and drove Joseph Bonaparte out of Madrid. “We cannot recognize as our king,” one Spanish churchman said to another, “someone who is a freemason, a heretic, and a Lutheran, as are all the Bonapartes and indeed all the French people.” The ensuing struggle for Spain, depicted on Goya’s patriotic canvases and known as the Peninsular War, pitted a large French army against British forces led by Arthur Wellesley, future duke of Wellington. The war also inspired the term guerrilla, or “little war,” to describe the Spanish irregulars and civilians who continued to fight despite the defeat of Spain’s royal army.47
Napoleon’s war on the Iberian Peninsula started ominously when Talleyrand resigned in protest (a departure that had become a reliable omen of any regime’s impending doom). The Spanish Ulcer, as the French called the war, dragged on until 1813—a year before Napoleon’s first abdication and two years before his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.48 For six years the Peninsular War tied down an entire army that Napoleon might have used elsewhere to decisive advantage (or merely squandered in his disastrous campaign against Russia). And for six years Napoleon’s Spanish Ulcer precluded any progress in America’s negotiations about the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase.
By the end of the first year of the Peninsular War, many of Spain’s more talented and experienced career officials had allied themselves with the Junta Central, which aimed to put Prince Ferdinand on the throne. It was their foresight that sent forty-seven-year-old Luis de Onís y González to the United States as the representative of the patriotic provisional government based in Aranjuez. Born in Salamanca, Onís had studied Greek and Latin at eight, taken legal training at the University of Salamanca, and devoted thirty years to the Spanish diplomatic service. Onís spoke fluent French, German, and Italian, and passable English, and he was a protégé of Carlos Ill’s great minister, the count of Floridablanca, president of the Junta Central until his death on November 20, 1808.49
Onís’s credentials made little impression on President James Madison’s administration when he landed in New York on Wednesday, October 4, 1809. Reluctant to offend Napoleon and his brother, the United States declined to recognize Onís as a representative of Spain, citing “the contending claims of Charles and Ferdinand” to the throne—despite former President Jefferson’s private admission that by American principles “the right of the Junta to send a Minister could not be denied.”50
By the time Secretary of State James Monroe did accept Onís’s diplomatic credentials—on December 19, 1815—the Spanish Ulcer had been lanced. Bourbons were back on their thrones in Spain and France. Talleyrand was helping the Congress of Vienna restore a balance of power among the monarchies of Europe. And the French colossus, Napoleon, stood master of the forty-seven-square-mile island of St. Helena, twelve hundred miles off the African coast in the South Atlantic. In the Americas, Mexico and other Spanish colonies were striving for independence, Louisiana had been admitted to the union in 1812, and the United States had ended the unhappy War of 1812 with a flourish—Andrew Jackson’s magnificent defeat of Wellington’s veterans at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8.
Four more years of negotiation stood ahead. Years of “tiresome reiteration” and the “higgling and splitting of hairs,” according to one chronicler, as Onís and John Quincy Adams, President James Monroe’s secretary of state, nailed down the final boundaries of that vast unmeasured world beyond the river. They chose February 22, 1819—Washington’s birthday (which happened to be a Monday)—to sign the Adams-Onís Treaty, “designed to end all the differences between the two governments which have been pending for eighteen years.” A jubilant Senate unanimously ratified the treaty two days later, while the disgruntled Spanish ratified it two years later.51
The Adams-Onís Treaty secured Texas for Spain and surrendered the Floridas to the United States (provisions that were later controversial but readily accepted by Americans at the time). Together with the Convention of October 20, 1818, between the United States and Great Britain, the treaty set the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase at the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods, in Minnesota, to the Rocky Mountains. It drew a boundary between Oregon and California at the forty-second parallel but left the northern boundary between the Rockies and Pacific undefined.52
As defined by the Adams-Onís Treaty, the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase started at the mouth of the Sabine River on the Gulf of Mexico and ran northerly along the west bank of that river to the thirty-second parallel (near Logansport, Louisiana). From there the line ran due north to the Red River (near Ogden, Arkansas), followed the river west to the hundredth meridian (southwest of Hollis, Oklahoma), and then ran due north to the Arkansas River (at Dodge City, Kansas) and west along the river. At this point in the negotiation (and in the final treaty) geographic ignorance intruded upon legal precision. Based upon the John Melish map of 1818, Adams and Onís thought the Arkansas River began at the forty-second parallel. In fact it rises just above the thirty-ninth parallel west of Leadville, Colorado (two hundred forty miles due south of the forty-second parallel at Seminoe Reservoir, near Hanna, Wyoming). On the Melish map the Arkansas River intersected the forty-second parallel near the southwest corner of Idaho, whence Adams and Onís ran the boundary due west to the Pacific Ocean (now the northern boundary of California, Nevada, and Utah).*
“For the first time our government begins to see its way to the Northern Pacific Ocean with any thing like a clear and definite view of sovereignty,” Joel K. Mead’s National Register crowed from the capital in response to the Adams-Onís Treaty.
This map of the Louisiana Purchase was published in the first edition of François Barbé-
Marbois’s Histoire de la Louisiane et de la Cession de Cette Colonie par la France aux Etats-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1829J. The boundaries shown were drawn in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. An American edition of Barbé-Marbois’s History, translated under the supervision of Jared Sparks, was published in 1830. Barbé-Marbois died in Paris in 1835. (Collection of the author)
It is thus we stride, from object to object; and shall eventually light upon the banks of the river Columbia and the shores of the Pacific! What magnificent prospects open upon us!
But the Louisiana Purchase had other implications that were less magnificent. Within a year, in 1820, the American debate over slavery focused on the admission of Missouri as a slave state—as the immediate aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase led the nation inexorably toward the Civil War.53
* The thirteen states carved from the Louisiana Purchase are Arkansas, Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Portions of New Mexico, Texas, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba within the watershed of the Mississippi River were excluded by the Convention of 1818 and the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.
— EPILOGUE —
A Various Gabble of Tongues
A thick fog enveloped every thing … and at sunrise we were in front of [New Orleans] without being able to see it. We therefore cast anchor… on the West or South bank, but so thick a fog enveloped the city that the ear alone could ascertain its existence. London is heard indeed at 7 or 8 miles distance, in the incessant low rumbling of coaches and other carriages. On the arrival of a stranger in [Philadelphia] an incessant crash of drays meets his ear. But on arrival in New Orleans in the morning, a sound more strange than any that is heard anywhere else in the world astonishes him. It is a more incessant, loud, rapid, and various gabble of tongues of all tones than was ever heard at Babel….
The strange and loud noise heard through the fog … from the voices of the market people and their customers was not more extraordinary than the appearance of these noisy folks when the fog cleared away, and we landed. Everything had an odd look … and I confess that I felt myself in some degree, again a Cockney, for it was impossible not to stare at a sight wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America.
Benjamin Henry B. Latrobe, January 12, 18191
AT DAWN on Saturday, May 11, 1804, cannon sounded a “Grand National Salute” from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan and the fort on nearby Governors Island as New York City launched a grand celebration of the first anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. The event was orchestrated by the city’s new mayor, and former United States senator, De Witt Clinton. American flags were visible everywhere, flying over the principal buildings of the city and from the masts of all the ships in the harbor. As church bells pealed in triumph, Mayor Clinton, the sheriff, and scores of municipal officials gathered in City Hall Park for a gigantic parade. Rank upon rank of militiamen—cavalry, infantry, and artillery—marched through the streets of Manhattan behind their commander, who rode a profusely decorated white stallion as he held up the front end of a very long white silk banner inscribed with the words: “Extension of the Empire of Freedom in the Peaceful, Honorable, and Glorious Acquisition of the Immense and Fertile Region of Louisiana, December 20th, 1803, 28th Year of American Independence, and in the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson.”2
Behind the soldiers and politicians came the members of New York’s Tammany Society, carrying a fifteen-foot-long white muslin map of the Mississippi River and the territory of Louisiana. As the procession marched through lower Manhattan, cannons roared salutes to the three nations, and bands played rousing music, including “Hail, Columbia,” an unnamed “Spanish piece,” and “Bonaparte’s March.” At last the parade turned back up Broadway and arrived again at City Hall Park, where the soldiers fired crisp salutes and the assembled populace gave three resounding cheers for Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase.3
Seven hundred miles to the south on the next day, May 12, the southern Federalist Dr. David Ramsay, the most able historian of the nation’s founding generation, was mounting the pulpit of St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to deliver his Oration on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States. Ramsay was one of dozens of orators in cities and towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard raising their voices in a jubilee of oratory in the spring of 1804 to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.4
“Louisiana is Ours!” David Ramsay proclaimed. As to the significance of America’s acquisition of that vast territory, Ramsay acknowledged “the establishment of independence, and of our present constitution” as “prior, both in time and importance; but with these two exceptions,” Ramsay believed, “the acquisition of Louisiana, is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states.”5
Historical perspective had not changed much one hundred forty-nine years later when the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and “Easy Chair” columnist for Harper’s magazine, Bernard DeVoto, wrote an essay commissioned by Collier’s magazine about the Louisiana Purchase upon the occasion of its sesquicentennial in 1953. Because he lived after the shots at Fort Sumter and surrender at Appomattox, DeVoto added one event to the comparative list, but otherwise his opinion about the Louisiana Purchase echoed Ramsay’s:
No event in all American history—not the Civil War, nor the Declaration of Independence nor even the signing of the Constitution—was more important.
DeVoto wrote about westward expansion, exploration, and commerce, and he wrote about constitutional change and the Civil War, and he came close to proving his point. But Bernard DeVoto knew that something was missing. “However it may be put,” he lamented, the peaceful transfer of sovereignty from Spain, to France, to the United States for nine hundred thousand square miles of territory was a story “still too momentous to be understood.”6
Despite some misgivings about the constitutional issues, most Americans agreed that the Louisiana Purchase was, in Talleyrand’s words, “a noble bargain”—la bonne affaire! The Mississippi and its western tributaries alone drain a million square miles. The price of securing the Ohio-Mississippi waterway and doubling the size of the United States was 80 million francs ($15 million) financed for twenty years by the Barings Bank of London and Hope & Co. of Amsterdam. International negotiations, completed in 1819, refined the boundaries between American and Spanish territories and also transferred Florida to the United States.
Still, $15 million was a lot of money at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially to strict-constructionist Jeffersonians paying off the national debt that Alexander Hamilton had created to strengthen the central government. “Some people have expressed fears lest our government may have given too much for Louisiana,” a New Jersey wit advised the editors of the Trenton True American:
I would wish you to inform your readers that a company of monied men in this and the neighboring states is forming, for the purpose of purchasing Louisiana [from] our government… for the purchase money and the expence of the negotiation.7
They would have made a killing. When the 6 percent loans were repaid, the total cost of Mississippi navigation and the whole Louisiana Territory was $23,527,872.57—about 4 cents an acre.8
Millions of acres of cheap fresh lands drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries were ideal for cotton—a commodity with a lucrative new market in the steam-driven mills of Manchester, a fiber readily processed by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, and a crop well suited to plantation agriculture and slave labor. Along the Lower Mississippi, enterprising planters switched their cash crop from indigo to cotton with amazing speed. In 1798 Julien Poydras was sending a barge back and forth from Pointe Coupée to New Orleans carrying thirty barrels of indigo on each trip and exporting thirty-nine thousand pounds of indigo to London at 10 bits per pound. That November, however, he sent one boat to New Orleans “loade
d with cotton for an American.” By the following October, Poydras was “applying myself entirely to cotton.” “The price of indigo does not interest me this year,” he told one merchant, “I hardly made any and will get little from others”—“we are all over head and ears in cotton.” By December 1799 Poydras was bragging about his “superb double mill to gin the cotton” and his brisk business buying up cotton at 24 piastres a hundredweight and shipping and selling it quickly “to profit by the present high prices.” The price of indigo, meantime, had fallen to 6 bits “but there is hardly any.”
Within two years Poydras had a cotton press and a bevy of gins and was sending his boat to New Orleans filled with cotton every fifteen days. By August 1800 he had a contract with James Freret to export 100,000 250-pound bales of cotton and another for 22,000 bales through Lisle Sarpy—and he could assure both merchants that “should I not have enough of my cotton to fill your order, I have on hand a supply of other cotton to do so.” In two short years, Julien Poydras had gone from exporting twenty tons of indigo to an annual wholesale trade of fifteen thousand tons of cotton.9 Poydras may have been unusually quick to plant cotton, but American planters and other crops were not far behind.
When William C. C. Claiborne’s ancestors had landed at Jamestown in 1616, English colonists regarded the lands they took in North America (as earlier in Ulster) as a wilderness peopled only with savages, the remnants of Native American tribes decimated by European disease. Thomas Jefferson lived in a plantation community of two hundred people on his mountaintop at Monticello. He walked daily among faces that exhibited a whole range of tones, even within his own family, but Jefferson saw only white and black, free and slave. The “amalgamation” of black Americans “with the other color,” he wrote in 1814, “produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”10 His representatives and his countrymen brought similar attitudes to their 1803 encounter with the racial diversity of Louisiana.