by Jon Kukla
15. Grayson to Madison and to Monroe, November 22, 1786, ibid., 24: 31,
16. Gouverneur Morris reflecting upon the framing of the Constitution in a letter to Henry W Livingston, November 25, 1803; Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (rev. ed., New Haven, 1937), 3: 401. Robert William Fogel asserted the greater value of waterways in Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Economic History (Baltimore, 1964).
17. Diary entry, October 4, 1784, Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (Charlottesville, 1976–1979), 3: 67 (emphasis added).
18. Michael B. Chesson, Richmond After the War, 1865–1890 (Richmond, 1981), 5.
19. Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (New York, 1940; Richmond, 1992), 525.
20. For the Daily Advertiser, September 17, 1789, Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates (Baltimore, 1988), 406–10.
21. Donald Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (New York and Toronto, 1937 and 1956), 206–7. Creighton stated that his study “of the St. Lawrence as the inspiration and basis of a transcontinental, east-west system, both commercial and political in character” was “not meant to provide a final and self-sufficient interpretation of Canadian history” (ibid., iii, v), but it has much to offer Americans curious about our good neighbors to the north.
22. Steven E. Siry De Witt Clinton and the American Political Economy: Sectionalism, Politics, and Republican Ideology, 1787–1828 (New York, 1990).
23. W. W. Abbot, “George Washington, the West, and the Union,” in Don Higginbotham, ed., George Washington Reconsidered (Charlottesville, 2001), 199–202.
24. George Washington to Jacob Reade, November 3, 1784, and to Henry Knox, December 5, 1784, ibid., 206–7.
25. George Washington to George Plater, October 25, 1784, ibid., 207.
26. Washington to Governor Benjamin Harrison, October 10, 1784, Washington Papers, 2: 92–93.
27. James Monroe to James Madison, September 29, 1786, Letters of Delegates, 23: 576. Monroe’s letter to Mason is not extant, and Mason’s actual sentiments are not directly known. Mason had long upheld Virginia’s claim to the Mississippi, and in 1786 Washington believed he “will advocate the navigation of that river,” as Mason did in the Virginia ratification debates of 1788; Robert A. Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, 1 725–1792 (Chapel Hill, 1970), 852n and passim.
28. James Monroe to James Madison, September 29, 1786, Letters of Delegates, 23: 576.
29. Richard Henry Lee to George Washington, July 16, 1787, ibid., 24: 357. Richard Henry Lee described himself as “much interested in the establishment of a wise and free republic in Republic Massachusetts Bay, where yet I hope to finish the remainder of my days. The hasty, unpersevering, aristocratic genius of the south suits not my disposition”; quoted in Burton J. Hendrick, The Lees of Virginia (New York, 1935), 352.
30. Henry Lee to Washington, April 21, July 3, August 7, August 12, September 8, and October 11, 1786, Letters of Delegates, 23: 247, 382, 437–38, 440n, 554, 590–92. The evidence for Lee’s complicity is in Gardoqui’s confidential dispatches 14, 16, 17, 18, of November 29, 1786, May 12, July 6, and December 5, 1787, and his expense account for 1786–1787 (Archivo Central de Alcalá, Legajo 3895), cited in Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (Baltimore, 1926; rev. ed., New Haven, 1960), 94–95.
31. James Madison to George Washington, November 8, Washington to Madison, November 18, Madison to Henry Lee, November 23, Madison to Thomas Jefferson, December 4, Edward Carrington to James Madison, December 18, and Henry Lee to Madison, December 20, 1786, Madison Papers, 9: 166–68, 170–71, 175–76, 189–92, 218–20; Thomas Boyd, Light-Horse Harry Lee (New York, 1931), 152–63; Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 96.
32. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, March 15, 1784, Jefferson Papers, 7: 25–27.
33. For the Daily Advertiser, September 17, 1789, Diary of William Maclay, 410 (emphasis added).
34. Ibid.
CHAPTER SIX: BOURBONS ON THE ROCKS
1. Edmund B. D’Auvergne, Godoy: The Queen’s Favorite (Boston, 1913), 26–27; Douglas Hilt, The Troubled Trinity: Godoy and the Spanish Monarchs (Tuscaloosa, 1987), 17.
2. Quoted in Sir Charles Petrie, King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot (New York and London, 1971), 218.
3. Records and Deliberations of the Cabildo, Book no. 3, from January 1, 1788, to May 18, 1792; City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, 60–61.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. The founding of this hospital by Andrés Almonester is ably treated in Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba (Baton Rouge, 1997), 46–49.
6. Records and Deliberations of the Cabildo, Book no. 3, 60–61.
7. Robertson, Louisiana, 1: 247, 249–50.
8. John D. Bergamini, The Spanish Bourbons: The History of a Tenacious Dynasty (New York, 1974), 103; D’Auvergne, Godoy, 24; Douglas Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 17; Ramón Colón de Carvajal, “Clocks and Clock Workers for the King,” in Jana Martin, ed., The Majesty of Spain: Royal Collections from the Museo del Prado and the Patrimonio Nacional (Jackson, Miss., 2001), 196; Petrie, King Charles III of Spain, 223–27.
9. Petrie, King Charles III of Spain, 224.
10. Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 15–16. Maria Luisa’s given names were Luisa Maria Teresa and she signed her personal letters Luisa; Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain (New York, 1965), 5n.
11. D’Auvergne, Godoy, 26–29; Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 17.
12. Bergamini, The Spanish Bourbons, 104; Jana Martin, ed., The Majesty of Spain, 44, 70, 85; Petrie, King Charles III of Spain, 225.
13. D’Auvergne, Godoy, 26–35.
14. Hilt, Troubled Trinity, xiii; Petrie, King Charles III of Spain, 226.
15. Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 33, 60; Bergamini, Spanish Bourbons, 106.
16. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 1: 24; Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 104; Bergamini, Spanish Bourbons, 109.
17. Bergamini, Spanish Bourbons, 108.
18. Ibid., 106, 109.
19. Godoy’s Memoirs quoted in Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 32–33.
20. Annette Kolodny ed., “The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist: Philadelphia to Natchez, 1783–84,” in William L. Andrews, ed., Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives (Madison, Wis., 1990), 215.
21. Emily Foster, ed., The Ohio Frontier: An Anthology of Early Writings (Lexington, Ky, 1996), 79; “Diary of Elizabeth House Trist,” 215.
22. John Filson, Kentucke (Wilmington, Del., 1784), and Timothy Flint, Indian Wars of the West (Cincinnati, 1823), quoted in Bernard W Sheehan, “Paradise and the Noble Savage in Jeffersonian Thought,” WMQ, 3d ser, 26 (1969): 333.
23. The leaders of Virginia’s Loyal Land Company (one of several rival companies in the colony) were Dr. Walker, the mapmakers Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry, and the Reverend James Maury, all from Albemarle County, along with John Lewis, from Staunton, and Edmund Pendleton, from Caroline County; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1960), 575–76; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (New York, 1978), 21–25. The percentage of slaves in Kentucky increased steadily from 16.9 percent in 1790, to 18.3 percent in 1800, 19.8 percent in 1810, and 22.5 percent in 1820, compared to the increase in the five southern Atlantic states from 35.3 percent in 1790 to 38.7 percent in 1820; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970, at www.icpsr.umich.edu.
24. Lexington Kentucky Gazette, August 18, 1787, quoted in Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 30.
25. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000).
26. The combined population of the Apalache, Caddo, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, an
d Tunica tribes in the Lower Mississippi area was about thirty thousand; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992), 114–15n; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 274.
27. John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge, 1970), 212.
28. Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 2: xviii, 125.
29. Clark, New Orleans: An Economic History, 213–14.
30. Daniel Clark to James Madison, September 8, 1803, Territorial Papers, 45; Josephe Xavier de Pontalba and Phineas Bond quoted in Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Commerce of Louisiana and the Floridas at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” HAHR 8 (1928): 197n, 198n.
31. The late Julian P. Boyd presented Knox’s tabulations in his “Threat of Disunion in the West,” a chapter-length editorial note in Jefferson Papers, 19: 437.
32. Carlos de Grand-Pré to Governor Miró, April 14, 1790, in Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 3: 325.
33. Miró to Josef de Ezpeleta, January 28 and February 20, 1788, Spanish Despatches, Book 3, Legajo 1394, nos. 5 and 48.
34. Miró to Josef de Ezpeleta, February 20, 1788, Spanish Despatches.
35. Miró to Domingo Cabello, October 30, 1789, Spanish Despatches, Book 4, Legajo 1425, no. 36; Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784–1841 (Toronto, 1963), 9–10.
36. Miró to Cabello, October 30, 1789, Spanish Despatches. Miró wrote that Fitzgerald entered the Mississippi byway of the St. Peter River (now the Minnesota River), which flows from the southwest to meet the Mississippi at Minneapolis; Timothy Flint, A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States or the Mississippi Valley (Cincinnati, 1828), 2: 438; I am grateful to Edward James Redmond, of the Map Division of the Library of Congress, for this information.
37. Herbert Eugene Bolton, “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands” (originally published in 1930), in John Francis Ban-non, ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman, Okla., 1964), 51.
38. Carondelet, Military Report on Louisiana and West Florida, November 24, 1794, in Robertson, Louisiana, 1: 297–98.
39. Joseph G. Dawson III, ed., Louisiana Governors: From Iberville to Edwards (Baton Rouge, 1990), 64–69; anonymous Spanish report quoted in Jack D. L. Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of Spanish Governors of Louisiana,” HAHR 42 (1962): 537–38.
40. Carondelet, Military Report, in Robertson, Louisiana, 1: 298–99.
41. Ibid., 1: 298–99, 344–45; Territorial Papers, 33.
42. Jack D. L. Holmes, Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799 (Baton Rouge, 1965), 4–5; Dawson, Louisiana Governors, 70–74. Both reports are published in Robertson, Louisiana, 1: 269–354.
43. Holmes, Gayoso, 4–10.
44. Fray Bailío Antonio Valdés to Carlos III, November 2, 1787, quoted in ibid., 10.
45. Floridablanca to Gardoqui, Aranjuez, May 24, 1788, quoted in Michael A. Otero, “The American Mission of Diego de Gardoqui, 1785–1789” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1949), 224.
46. Holmes, Gayoso, 10–11, 30; Dawson, Louisiana Governors, 64–65.
CHAPTER SEVEN: QUESTIONS OF LOYALTY
1. Wilkinson’s declaration of allegiance to Spain, August 22, 1787, translated in William R. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” AHR 9 (1903–1904): 497.
2. Esteban Miró to Antonio Valdés y Bazan, April 11, 1789, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Papeles de Estado, Legajo 3893A, translated in Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 491n.
3. James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Time (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1816), 2: 114.
4. James Ripley Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior: Major-General James Wilkinson (New York, 1938), xii, 1–9.
5. Ibid., 9–65.
6. Humphrey Marshall, quoted in ibid., 71.
7. Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (Baltimore, 1926; rev. ed., New Haven, 1960), 113; Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York, 1972), 103–4. I follow Watlington’s enumeration of the Kentucky conventions.
8. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 104; Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 113.
9. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 114.
10. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 38–39, 56–57, 118–19; Madison to Muter, January 7, 1787, Madison Papers, 9: 231; Sandra Gioia Treadway, ed., Journals of the Council of State of Virginia, vol. 5 (Richmond, 1982), 395.
11. Muter to Madison, February 20, 1787, Madison Papers, 9: 280; Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 56–57, 119–21, 130–31; James Wilkinson to James Hutchinson, June 20, 1785, in “Letters of General James Wilkinson, addressed to Dr. James Hutchinson, of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1888): 57.
12. Wilkinson to Hutchinson, June 20, 1785, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1888): 56.
13. Arthur P. Whitaker, “James Wilkinson’s First Descent to New Orleans in 1787,” HAHR 8 (1928): 82–97.
14. Robert C. Anderson to the Governor of St. Louis, January 1, 1787, ibid., 94. Miró already knew about General (not Colonel) Thomas Green, whose letter extolling Clark’s raid at Vincennes had been intercepted and forwarded to Gardoqui, who presented it to John Jay, who forwarded it to Congress, which immediately passed resolutions condemning these irresponsible acts; Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 117–18.
15. Wilkinson a son Excellance le Gouverneur de St. Louis, December 20, 1786, in Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 93–94.
16. Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky. Exhibiting an Account of the Modern Discovery; Settlement; Progressive Improvement; Civil and Military Transactions; and the Present State of the Country (2d ed., Frankfort, Ky, 1824), 271. Following Watlington’s example, I, too, have edited Marshall’s exuberant punctuation; Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 124.
17. Grand-Pré to Miró, June 18, 1787, Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 95–96; Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 140; Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior, 77.
18. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 140; Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 494 and n.; Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 90. Some writers contend that Wilkinson was arrested upon his arrival in New Orleans, that he had previously corresponded with Miró, or that resident Americans had persuaded Miró not to confiscate Wilkinson’s cargo. Whitaker convincingly refutes these statements and confirms Wilkinson’s statement that he arrived in New Orleans as a “perfect stranger” (ibid., 83–84).
19. Translated in Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 496–97. Assiduously parsing the words of his oath and declaring it “a meaningless gesture” with “no allegation of fealty of Spain,” Wilkinson’s biographers protest too much; Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior, 81; Thomas Robson Hay and M. R. Werner, The Admirable Trumpeter: A Biography of General James Wilkinson (Garden City, N.Y., 1941), 87.
20. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 505.
21. Ibid., 498.
22. Ibid., 499.
23. Ibid., 501–3.
24. Ibid., 503.
25. Ibid., 501, 505; Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior, 86.
26. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 504n; Hay and Werner, Admirable Trumpeter, 88.
27. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 505.
28. Ibid., 500.
29. Michael A. Otero, “The American Mission of Diego de Gardoqui, 1785–1789” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1949), 224; Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Spanish-American Frontier, 1783–1795: The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley (Li
ncoln, Neb., 1927), 101.
30. From Blountville and Sevierville, Tennessee, to New Madrid, Missouri, perhaps a dozen localities in the Mississippi watershed owe their existence to separatist schemes, colonization projects, or land companies led by William Blount, John Sevier, and James Wilkinson (for the three towns mentioned) as well as Pierre Wouves d’Arges, Bryan Bruin and his son Peter Bryan Bruin, William Butler, William Fitzgerald, Richard Henderson, Andrew Jackson, James Kennedy, Augustin Macarty George Morgan, Mauricio Nowland, James O’Fallon, Peter Paulus, James Robertson, Daniel Smith, James White, and countless associates and investors—all jockeying for land, political advantage, financial support, and prospective settlers. The resulting historical literature is vast and often tangled, as in Thomas Perkins Abernethy’s classic Western Lands in the American Revolution (New York, 1937). Of the older scholarship about individual entrepreneurs, Arthur P. Whitaker’s “Spanish Intrigue in the Old Southwest: An Episode, 1788–89,” MVHR 12 (1925–1926): 155–76, and Max Savelle’s “The Founding of New Madrid, Missouri,” MVHR 19 (1932–1933): 30–56, are instructive. Examples of more recent work include Andrew R. L. Cayton “‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” JAH 79 (1992–1993): 39–67, and Peter J. Kastor “‘Equitable Rights and Privileges’: Divided Loyalties in Washington County, Virginia, During the Franklin Separatist Crisis,” VMHB 105 (1997): 193–226. Gilbert C. Din’s “Immigration Policy of Governor Esteban Miró in Spanish Louisiana,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73 (1969–1970): 155–75, is definitive on its subject, and Din’s “Pierre Wouves d’Arges in North America: Spanish Commissioner, Adventurer, or French Spy?” Louisiana Studies 12 (1973): 354–75, dispels mysteries about the French adventurer whose colonization proposals encouraged Aranda and Floridablanca to shift their attitudes about immigration as a means to bolster Spanish control of the Louisiana borderlands.
31. Whitaker, Spanish-American Frontier, 101–2.
32. Ibid.
33. “Miró’s Offer to Western Americans, April 20, 1789,” in Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 3: 269–71.