A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  34. Caroline Maude Burson, The Stewardship of Don Esteban Miró, 1782–1792: A Study of Louisiana Based Largely on the Documents in New Orleans (New Orleans, 1940), 152–64; Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York, 1972), 133–87.

  35. Esteban Miró to Luis de Las Casas, October 7, 1790, in Burson, Stewardship of Don Esteban Miró, 166; Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior, 88–109.

  36. Miró to Antonio Valdés y Bazan, May 20, 1789, and Las Casas to the count of Campo de Alange, February 17, 1791, in Din, “Immigration Policy,” 171, 173.

  37. Jack D. L. Holmes, “Irish Priests in Spanish Natchez,” Journal of Mississippi History 29 (1967): 169–80.

  38. Ibid., 173–76.

  39. Gayoso to Manuel Godoy, March 31, 1795, in ibid., 176–79; Holmes, Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799 (Baton Rouge, 1965), 77–85. Miró’s successor believed that “if disputes and quarrels over religious matters are not cut off at their roots or checked, they will have the most perverse and evil results”; Carondelet to Carlos Louis Boucher de Grand-Pré, July 26, 1795, ibid., 83.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: BANNERS OF BLOOD

  1. Quoted in Schama, Citizens, 367–68.

  2. “Modern History Sourcebook: ‘Ca Ira,’” at www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/caira.html.

  3. Richard E. Greenleaf, “The Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana, 1762–1800,” New Mexico Historical Review 50 (1975): 45–72; Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana (2d ed., New Orleans, 1879), 3: 268–69; Glenn R. Conrad, ed., Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (New Orleans, 1988), 726–27; F. L. Gassier, “Pére Antoine, Supreme Officer of the Holy Inquisition … in Louisiana,” Catholic Historical Review 2 (1922): 59–63; Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba (Baton Rouge, 1997), 45.

  4. Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 48–49; Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3: 268–69. Forty-two compilations of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum appeared between 1559 and 1966 (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indexlibrorum.html).

  5. Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 48–49; Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3: 268–69.

  6. Ibid, (emphasis added); Sir Charles Petrie, King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot (New York and London, 1971), 112–35.

  7. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3: 268–69.

  8. Ibid.; Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 49–50.

  9. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3: 268–69. Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 50.

  10. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, 3: 268–69.

  11. James Pi tot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1799 to 1802, trans. Henry C. Pitot (Baton Rouge, 1979), 31; Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, “Political Condition of the Province of Louisiana,” in Robertson, Louisiana, 1: 283.

  12. Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793 (New York, 1962), 99–101; Schama, Citizens, 281–83.

  13. Schama, Citizens, 305.

  14. Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, quoted in Schama, Citizens, 305.

  15. Schama, Citizens, 305–7; Lefebvre, French Revolution to 1793, 116–19.

  16. Schama, Citizens, 385.

  17. Ibid., 383–88; Lefebvre, French Revolution to 1793, 123–24.

  18. Schama, Citizens, 389–406, 420.

  19. Ibid., 389–406, 420, 619–24.

  20. Ibid., 367–68, 422–25; Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, quoted in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis and New York, 1955), 196n; “Modern History Sourcebook: ‘Ca Ira.’”

  21. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 96–97; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 303–73.

  22. Schama, Citizens, 782–83, 804–5.

  23. W. B. Allen, ed., Works of Fisher Ames (Indianapolis, 1983), 190; Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston, 1962), 48.

  24. Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain (New York, 1965), 1: 17–18.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (Baltimore, 1926; rev. ed., New Haven, 1960), 168–69; Douglas Hilt, The Troubled Trinity: Godoy and the Spanish Monarchs (Tuscaloosa, 1987), 44.

  27. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 20–21; Hilt, Troubled Trinity, 44–45.

  28. J. H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Voyage to Isle de France, Isle de Bourbon, The Cape of Good Hope … with New Observations on Nature and Mankind by an Officer of the King (Paris, 1773), quoted in Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). ii.

  29. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 22–25; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (2d ed., New York, 1963), 49–50. In 1789, St. Domingue provided 64 percent of the French export trade, 2.2 times the value of Britain’s exports to its remaining colonies.

  30. Ibid.; Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1988), 23–26.

  31. Fick, Making of Haiti, 15–22.

  32. John Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Leslie Bethel, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (London and New York, 1984), 47.

  33. James, Black Jacobins, 17; Fick, Making of Haiti, 34–39.

  34. James, Black Jacobins, 12–13, 22–24; Martin Ros, Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti, trans. Karin Ford-Treep (New York, 1994), 14–15, 20–21.

  35. Ros, Night of Fire, 2.

  36. Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint Domingue Slave Insurrection of 1791: A Socio-Political and Cultural Analysis,” Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1991): 16–18; see also James, Black Jacobins, 18, 85.

  37. Thomas Marc Fiehrer, “The Baron de Carondelet as Agent of Bourbon Reform: A Study of Spanish Colonial Administration in the Years of the French Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1977), 478–79.

  38. Governor Miró to Luis de Las Casas, July 2 and August 28, 1791, Spanish Despatches, Book 5, Legajo 1440, nos. 204 and 240.

  39. Fiehrer, “Baron de Carondelet,” 478–79.

  40. Ibid., 480–81; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988), 26–27.

  41. Fiehrer, “Baron de Carondelet,” 481–82.

  42. Lester D. Langley The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1795–1850 (New Haven, 1996), 106–10.

  43. Kimberly Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, N.C., 1997), 154–62.

  44. Fiehrer, “Baron de Carondelet,” 480; Kimberly Hanger, “Conflicting Loyalties: The French Revolution and Free People of Color in Spanish New Orleans,” Louisiana History 34 (1993): 25–33.

  45. Hanger, “Conflicting Loyalties,” 25–33.

  46. Ibid. López and Declouet married in 1797, two years after she instituted ecclesiastical proceedings to prove her descent from Native Americans and have their eldest daughter’s baptism record transferred from the nonwhite to the white register books in the diocesan archive; Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 93–94.

  47. Paul LaChance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society in the Americas 1: 2 (June 1979): 169; Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 150–51; Fick, Making of Haiti, 118–34.

  48. Ulysses S. Ricard, Jr., “The Pointe Coupée Slave Conspiracy of 1791,” Proceedings of the International Congress of the French Colonial Historical Society (in press; typescript at Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans), 10, 13; Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 1795,” Louisiana History 11 (1970): 342. The decree was published in French and English and widely distributed througho
ut the Caribbean; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992), 346.

  49. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 344–61. Influences of American and French revolutionary thought in Eastern Europe are summarized in Béla K. Király and Goergoe Barany, eds., East Central European Perceptions of Early America (Lisse, 1977).

  50. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 344–61.

  51. Ibid.; Joseph de Pontalba to Jeanne Louise de Pontalba, March 27–30, 1796, quoted in LaChance, “Politics of Fear,” 168.

  52. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 344; Holmes, “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Pointe Coupée,” 343–62.

  CHAPTER NINE: A NEW ERA IN WORLD HISTORY

  1. Quoted in Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York, 1973), 86.

  2. Lachaise to the Democratic Society of Lexington, Kentucky, May 9, 1794, Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, Conn., 1976), 368.

  3. Schama, Citizens, 639–40.

  4. Ibid., 643; Ammon, Genet Mission, 20. Genet spelled his name without a circumflex accent on the second e, which gained currency among American writers about 1900; ibid., vii.

  5. Ibid., 1–6.

  6. Ibid., 6–9.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid., 25–29. On the eve of Genet’s appointment, the French plan was “to begin their attack at the mouth of the Mississippi, and to sweep along the bay [i.e., Gulf] of Mexico Southwardly, and … have no objections to our incorporating into our government the two Floridas”; Jefferson, “Notes on Conversations with William Stephen Smith …,” February 20, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 25: 244–45. Article 22 of the 1778 treaty stipulated that “it shall not be lawful for any foreign Privateers … who have Commissioners from any other Prince or State in enmity with either Nation to fit their Ships in the Ports of either one or the other of the aforesaid Parties.” Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 819n.

  9. Ammon, Genet Mission, 30–31.

  10. Ibid., vii, 44–53; John Dawson to James Madison, May 13, 1793, Madison Papers, 15: 15.

  11. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 354–57; Ammon, Genet Mission, 37–41; Jefferson to Monroe, June 4, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 26: 190.

  12. “I wondered at first at this restriction,” Jefferson noted, “but when E[dmund] R[andolph, Washington’s attorney general,] afterwards communicated to me his conversation of the 24th I became satisfied it was a small sacrifice to the opinion of Hamilton”; Jefferson, “Notes on the Reception of Edmond Charles Genet,” March 30, 1793; Jefferson to Madison, May 19, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 25: 469–70; 26: 62.

  13. Jefferson, “Opinion on the Restoration of Prizes,” May 16, 1793; Jefferson to Madison, May 19, 1793; Jefferson Papers, 26: 50–51, 61–62.

  14. Jefferson to Madison, July 7, 1793, ibid., 26: 444.

  15. Jefferson to William Carmichael and William Short, March 23, 1793; Jefferson, “Notes of… Conversations with Edmond Charles Genet,” July 5, 1793, ibid., 25: 430–31, 26: 438; Dorchester quoted in Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001), 45.

  16. Jefferson, “Notes of… Conversations with Edmond Charles Genet,” July 5, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 26: 438.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Jefferson to Governor Isaac Shelby, June 28, 1793 (with revisions made in July), Jefferson Papers, 26: 393–96, 438–39; “American Philosophical Society’s Subscription Agreement for Andre Michaux’s Western Expedition,” January 22, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 25: 81. Michaux’s journal was published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26 (1889). Michaux also carried letters of introduction to Clark and Shelby from Kentucky senator John Brown; Frederick Jackson Turner, ed., “Correspondence of George Rogers Clark and Edmond Genet,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896 (Washington, D.C., 1897), 982–83.

  19. James Alton James, The Life of George Rogers Clark (Chicago, 1928), 408–11, 418, 495; Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier (Norman, Okla., 1977), 15–30; Malcolm Everett Gardner, “The Projected Attack of George Rogers Clark and Citizen Genet Against Spanish Louisiana, 1793–1794” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1932).

  20. Steffen, William Clark, 26–29; John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775—1783 (Williamsburg, 1988), 222–24. Regardless of Clark’s private difficulties with debt or alcohol, he was certainly as capable of organizing a successful expedition as Anthony Wayne, whose debts stemmed from his incompetence as a rice planter and whom Washington feared was “addicted to the bottle”; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 249.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., “Letter of Thomas Paine [to Dr. James O’Fallon, February 17], 1793,” AHR 29 (1923–1924): 504. The letters written by Clark and O’Fallon later in 1792 are not known to be extant.

  23. Kellogg, “Letter of Thomas Paine, 1793,” 504.

  24. Morris and Paine detested each other, but Morris invited Genet to dinner on December 28, 1792, and described him to Washington as a man “more of Genius than Ability and you will see in him at first Blush the Manners and Look of an Upstart.” When Paine was imprisoned by Robespierre in December 1793 and seemed destined for the guillotine, Morris did little to help, observing that “if he is quiet in prison, he may have the good luck to be forgotten,” but if not “the long suspended axe might fall on him”; Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy Under George Washington (Durham, N.C., 1958), 330–36.

  25. John Carl Parish, “The Intrigues of Doctor James O’Fallon,” MVHR 17 (1930–1931): 259; Gardner, “Projected Attack of Clark and Genet,” 17–19; see also unsigned fragment, February 3, 1793, and Clark to Genet, October 25, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 973, 1016.

  26. Clark to Genet, February 5, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 970.

  27. Ibid.

  28. When not collecting botanical specimens and notes, as on his November-December 1793 trek from Danville to Philadelphia, Michaux averaged 23.2 miles a day. On this trip out to meet Clark, Michaux covered only 12.3 miles a day.

  29. Richard Lowitt, “Activities of Citizen Genet in Kentucky, 1793–1794,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 22 (1948): 258–59.

  30. Ibid.; Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York, 1972), 59. A few months later, after meeting with Lachaise, Logan changed his mind and offered to join Clark in the expedition against Louisiana; Logan to Clark, December 31, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1026.

  31. John Clark to James O’Fallon, May 28, 1792, Draper Manuscripts, 4 CC 172, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.

  32. James O’Fallon to Fanny Clark O’Fallon, November 23, 1793, Draper Manuscripts, 2 M 47, ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.; Cayton, “Treaty of Greenville,” 235–69; see also Wayne to O’Fallon, September 16, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1001.

  35. James O’Fallon to Fanny O’Fallon, November 23, 1793, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Gayoso to Carondelet, December 23, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1031; Parish, “The Intrigues of Doctor James O’Fallon,” 261.

  36. James O’Fallon to Fanny O’Fallon, November 23, 1793; Freeman, Affairs of Honor, 172.

  37. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 364; Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1779–1792 (New York, 1942), 125–49; E. Merton Coulter, “The Efforts of the Democratic Societies of the West to Open the Navigation of the Mi
ssissippi,” MVHR 11 (1924): 376–89; Albrecht Koschnik, “The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, Circa 1793–1795,” WMQ 3d ser. 63 (2001): 615–36.

  38. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 127, 361, 365.

  39. Clark to Genet, October 3, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1008; Gardner, “Projected Attack of Clark and Genet,” 61–62; Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 140.

  40. Lowitt, “Activities of Citizen Genet in Kentucky,” 259.

  41. Jefferson to Morris, August 16, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 26: 697–711, quoted at 710.

  42. Viar and Jaudenes to Jefferson, August 27, 1793, with enclosure, ibid., 26: 771–74; Carondelet to Godoy, October 25, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1017.

  43. Viar and Jaudenes to Carondelet, August 21, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 999–1000.

  44. Jefferson to Viar and Jaudenes, August 29, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 26: 785–86.

  45. Jefferson to Shelby, August 29, 1793, with enclosure, ibid., 26: 785–86.

  46. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 59–60, 223.

  47. Patricia Watlington, “John Brown and the Spanish Conspiracy,” VMHB 75 (1967): 52–68; Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 358–59, 363.

  48. Shelby to Jefferson, October 5, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 27: 196; Shelby to Charles Depauw, November 28, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1023.

  49. Morris to Jefferson, February 13, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 25: 192; Clark to Michaux, October 3, 1793, Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1009.

  50. Carondelet to Godoy, January 1, 1794, and enclosed extract of a letter from Gayoso to Carondelet, n.d.; Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 1028–29.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Clark to Genet, February 5, October 3, 1793; Clark to Charles Depauw, January 5, 1794; Turner, “Correspondence of Clark and Genet,” 970, 1008.