by Jon Kukla
19. Autobiography of James Monroe, 158. On April 15, 1803, Monroe vented his feelings in a private letter addressed to Madison but “not sent” (State Papers and Correspondence, 164–65; Ammon, Monroe, 617n0), although Monroe allowed John Mercer to make a copy (Madison Papers: State, 4: 522–23n3).
20. Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 214; Dangerfield, Livingston, 358. The entire debate was published on June 1, 1803, in William Duane, Mississippi Question: Report of a Debate in the Senate of the United States … on Certain Resolutions Concerning the Violation of the Right of Deposit in the Island of New Orleans (Philadelphia, 1803). E. B. Williston, comp., Eloquence of the United States (Middleton, Conn., 1827) reprinted Ross’s resolutions (2: 236), John Breckinridge’s Republican substitute resolutions (2: 282), and major speeches by De Witt Clinton, James Ross, and Gouverneur Morris, February 23–25, 1803 (2: 236–319). The resolutions and debates were extensively reported in contemporary American newspapers as well.
21. Lowell H. Harrison, “John Breckinridge and the Acquisition of Louisiana,” Louisiana Studies 7 (1968): 20–22; Duane, Mississippi Question, 34–35; Williston, Eloquence of the United States, 2: 282.
22. Speech of James Ross, February 24, 1803, in Duane, Mississippi Question, 97–98.
23. Ibid., 111; Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 202–3.
24. Pichón to Talleyrand, February 18, 1803, Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 202–3.
25. Talleyrand to Decrès, May 24, 1803, ibid., 203.
26. “Many years later,” wrote E. Wilson Lyon in reference to Monroe’s letter to the marquis de Lafayette on May 2, 1829, “Monroe contended that Napoleon’s sudden action was due to the news of [Monroe’s] arrival at Havre, but, if this were true, it is difficult to see why Bonaparte did not delay the whole matter until Monroe joined Livingston”; Lyon, Louisiana in French Diplomacy, 214n.
27. Dangerfield, Livingston, 361.
28. Quotations from this conversation are from Livingston’s detailed letter to James Madison, April 11, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 4: 500–2.
29. Ibid., Francois Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana; Particularly of the Cession of That Colony to the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1830; rpt., Baton Rouge, 1977), 278.
30. Livingston to Madison, April 11, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 4: 500–2.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ammon, Monroe, 212; Monroe to Madison, Madison Papers: State, 5: 297.
34. Dangerfield, Livingston, 376–80; Ammon, Monroe, 215–18; and Madison Papers: State, passim.
35. The events of April 12 and 13 are recounted in Livingston’s famous letter to Madison, dated “Paris 13 April 1803 (Midnight).” The Historic New Orleans Collection displays the recipient’s copy (19MSS132) in its History Galleries at 533 Royal Street. Quotations are from the definitive transcription in Madison Papers: State, 4: 511–15, except that Livingston’s disconcerting capitalization of ordinary words beginning with s has been suppressed. Harry Ammon makes the case that “although it does not materially affect the sequence of events,” Livingston penned this letter in the wee hours of April 14th, describing events that occurred on the 12th and 13th; Ammon, Monroe, 616n28. In the same note, however, Ammon apparently conflates Livingston’s two meetings with Talleyrand on the 11th and 12th into one on the 11th; ibid.
36. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 512; Dangerfield, Livingston, 361, 363. Livingston’s house stood near 72 rue Auber.
37. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803; Monroe to Madison, September 17, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 4: 512, 5: 440.
38. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 512.
39. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803; Monroe to Madison, September 17, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 4: 512, 5: 440; Danger-field, Livingston, 313.
40. Monroe to Madison, September 17, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 5: 440. This account of conversations on the evening of April 13 was written after adherents of Monroe and Livingston had begun squabbling in the newspapers over which minister had done more to bring about the Louisiana Purchase. John Mercer and Fulwar Skipwith were present at the dinner and walked home with Monroe. If Monroe’s memory was accurate, on the walk home Skipwith made disparaging remarks about Livingston having “complained of his misfortune” in respect to Monroe’s arrival just as the deal was coming together. The present narrative affords less credence to Monroe’s report of Skipwith’s alleged remarks than does Ammon, Monroe, 210–11, and none to the assertion that “a rupture” between Livingston and Monroe was imminent at that time. For his part, Livingston strove to keep Monroe in the loop, meeting with him the next morning to inform him “in substance what Mr. Marbois afterwards told me himself”; Monroe to Madison, April 19, 1803; Monroe to Madison, September 17, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 538–39; 5: 440.
41. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 512.
42. Livingston to Madison, midnight, April 13 [sic, 14], 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 513; Livingston’s run-on sentence has been corrected by the insertion of a period after “treasury.”
43. James Monroe to James Madison, April 15, 1803; Madison Papers: State, 4: 520–21.
44. Ibid; Ammon, Monroe, 212–13.
45. Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana, 280–81.
46. Ibid., 281.
47. Livingston to Madison, April 18, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 525–26.
48. Ibid.
49. Photographs of Monroe’s twelve-page journal of the treaty negotiations, April 27-ca. May 10, 1803, are reproduced in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Papers of James Monroe Listed in Chronological Order from the Original Manuscripts in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1904). Ford’s calendar has been supplanted by Daniel Preston, ed., A Comprehensive Catalogue of the Correspondence and Papers of James Monroe (Westport, Conn., 2001).
50. Monroe’s journal, April 27-ca. May 10, 1803.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Appendix B: Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Article III.
54. Monroe’s journal, April 27-ca. May 10, 1803.
55. Ibid; Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana, 312.
56. Barbé-Marbois, History of Louisiana, 310; Monroe’s journal, April 27-ca. May 10, 1803.
57. The importance that Jefferson attached to these cabinet deliberations about Louisiana is apparent from the way he recorded them. For more than two years Jefferson kept close at hand a single sheet of paper, docketed “Louisiana,” on which he recorded notes of nine cabinet meetings about the Mississippi crisis and the implications of the Louisiana Purchase during thirty months from May 1803 through November 1805. The document is found on Reel 29 of the Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, filed with undated material at the end of the chronological sequence of 1803 documents. I am indebted to Barbara Oberg, of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, at the Library of Virginia, for assistance in locating this document after I discovered that Caryn Cossé Bell’s otherwise valuable Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge, 1997), 31n47, cites the wrong date. The attorney general attended only three of these nine meetings, but except for Madison’s early departure from the meeting on July 16 and Robert Smith’s absence on October 4, 1803, the other four cabinet secretaries all participated. The membership and operation of Jefferson’s “executive council” is described in Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 (Boston, 1970), 5–66, and more generally in James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800—1828 (New York, 1966), and Noble E. Cunningham, The Process of Government Under Jefferson (Princeton, 1978), 60–71.
58. Notes of cabinet meetings, May 7, 1803-November 19, 1805, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
59. Ibid.
CHAPT
ER FIFTEEN: AN IMMENSE WILDERNESS
1. Gates to Jefferson, July 7, 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
2. Calculator VII, The Balance and Columbian Repository (Hudson, New York), September 20, 1803, quoted in Victor Adolfo Arriaga Weiss, “Domestic Opposition to the Louisiana Purchase: Anti-Expansionism and Republican Thought” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1993), 142.
3. Boston Independent Chronicle, June 30, 1803, quoted in Suzanne Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain: The Louisiana Purchase” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1977), 177. The three brief notices in the New-York Evening Post are quoted in [Douglass Adair], “Hamilton on the Louisiana Purchase: A Newly Identified Editorial from the New-York Evening Post,” WMQ, 3d ser, 12 (1955): 273; Roy F. Nichols, “The Louisiana Purchase: Challenge and Stimulus to American Democracy,” LHQ 38 (1955): 1–25.
4. King to Monroe and Livingston, May 7, [May 11,] 1803, Edward Alexander Parsons, ed., Original Letters of Robert R. Livingston, 1801–1803 (New Orleans, 1953), 122–23; Hawkesbury to King, State Papers and Correspondence, 197; personal conversations with Robert V. Remini and Tim Pickles. Monroe and Livingston’s letter of May 9 is misdated May 7 in State Papers and Correspondence, 183. For the cooperation between King and Livingston to avert a British expedition see Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American Federalist (Chapel Hill, 1968), 270–77, and Parsons, ed., Original Letters of Robert R. Livingston, passim.
5. King to Madison, May 16, 1803, and enclosures, Madison Papers: State, 5: 2–4; Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 177. King’s July 2 letter to Madison from New York stated that “the Receipt of my dispatches will have apprized you of my arrival”; Madison Papers: State, 5: 140, and see King to Madison, July 8, 1803, ibid., 5: 151–52. Two weeks later Madison wrote a Virginia neighbor that “our official information, which is indirect by a letter from our Envoys to Mr. King, amounts only to what you see in the Newspapers”; Madison to Isaac Hite, July 16, 1803, ibid., 5: 187.
6. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, July 5, 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress; Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 177; European Magazine, July 1803.
7. Gates to Jefferson, July 7, 1803, David Campbell to Jefferson, October 23, 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress; Pichón to Talleyrand, July 7, 1803, Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 181–82.
8. John Smith to Jefferson, August 9 and August 30, 1803, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress; Pichón to Talleyrand, July 7, 1803, Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 181–82.
9. James Madison to Daniel Clark, July 20, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 5: 202.
10. Livingston and Monroe to Madison, May 13, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 4: 601–2.
11. Ibid., 602.
12. Ibid., 602–3.
13. Notes of cabinet meetings, May 7, 1803-November 19, 1805, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid; John Breckinridge to Thomas Jefferson, September 10, 1803, Territorial Papers, 47–48.
17. Pichón to Talleyrand, July 7, 1803, Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 181–82; George William Erving to James Madison, May 16, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 5: 7–8.
18. James Monroe to James Madison, May 14, 1803, ibid., 4: 611; Erving to Madison, August 31, 1801, ibid., 2: 38–40. Founded by Fisher Ames and other Federalists associated with the old Essex Junto, the Palladium was intended as a national voice for the party of the “rich and wise and good.” Its mission was to “whip Jacobins as a gentleman would a chimney-sweeper, at arm’s length, and keeping aloof from the soot”; Winfred E. A. Bernhard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758–1808 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 332–33; Fisher Ames to Jeremiah Smith, December 14, 1802, William B. Allen, ed., Works of Fisher Ames (rev. ed., Indianapolis, 1983), 1451. For Rufus King’s political ambitions see Theodore Sedgwick to Alexander Hamilton, January 27, 1803, Harold C. Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1979), 26: 79–80; Ernst, Rufus King, 274–87.
19. Erving to Madison, May 16, 1803, Madison Papers: State, 5: 8.
20. Adair, “Hamilton on the Louisiana Purchase, [July 5, 1803,]” 273–74, 277.
21. Ibid., 274–75, 278.
22. Ibid., 276.
23. Ibid.
24. Columbian Centinel, July 3, 1803, quoted in Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 184–85. Ames’s brother, an avid Republican, revealed the identity of Fabricius in his diary; Charles Warren, ed., Jacobin and Junto, or Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758–1822 (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), 162. In light of David Hackett Fischer’s corrections in “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” WMQ, 3d ser,21 (1964): 191–235, it should be noted that Fisher Ames described himself “as one of the Essex Junto” in a letter to Jeremiah Smith, February 16, 1801; Works of Fisher Ames, 1408. Elisha P. Douglass, “Fisher Ames, Spokesman for New England Federalism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959): 693–715, is a good survey of Ames’s career.
25. Columbian Centinel, July 3, 1803, quoted in Van Meter, “A Noble Bargain,” 184–85.
26. Ames to Dwight, March 19, 1801; Ames to King, February 23, 1802; Ames to Christopher Gore, October 3, 1803; “The Dangers of American Liberty” (emphasis added); Works of Fisher Ames, 1409, 1427, 130, 1463, 160.
27. “The Republican X,” August 30, 1804; “Monitor,” April 17, 1804; Works of Fisher Ames, 263, 266, 268, 225; Kevin M. Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan of Destruction’: New England Federalists and the Idea of a Northern Confederacy, 1803–1804,” Journal of the Early Republic 21 (2001): 423–24. Based on the census of 1790, Essex attorney Nathan Dane attributed thirteen of the south’s forty-four seats in Congress (and the same number of electoral votes) to the representation of slaves under the three-fifths clause; Andrew Jay Johnson III, “The Life and Constitutional Thought of Nathan Dane” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1964), 81.
28. Ames to Thomas Dwight, October 31, 1803; Works of Fisher Ames, 1468–69; Abraham Ellery to Alexander Hamilton, October 25, 1803, Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, 26: 166–67; Josiah Quincy to Oliver Wolcott, September 5, 1803, Robert A. McCaughey, Josiah Quincy, 1772–1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 30–31; Samuel Taggart, An Oration Delivered at Conway, July 4, 1804 (Northampton, Mass., 1804), 7–8, quoted in James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York, 1970), 111.
29. Higginson to Pickering, November 22, 1803, J. Franklin Jameson, ed., “Letters of Stephen Higginson, 1783–1804,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896 (Washington, D.C., 1897), 1: 837.
30. Johnson, “Life and Constitutional Thought of Nathan Dane,” 85; Richard E. Welch, Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist: A Political Portrait (Middletown, Conn., 1965), 242–43; Alexander Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, July 10, 1804, in Joanne B. Freeman, ed., Alexander Hamilton: Writings (New York, 2001), 1022.
31. Thomas Jefferson to Martin Van Buren, June 29, 1824; I am indebted to John P. Kaminski for a transcript of this letter in which Jefferson wrote “that for thirty years past, [Pickering] has been industriously collecting materials for vituperating the characters he had marked for his hatred.”
32. Notebook, 1827 (Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1: 216); Pickering to Fisher Ames, March 11, 1806; Pickering to James McHenry, January 5, 1811; and Pickering to James McHenry, December 29, 1808; all quoted in Edward Hake Phillips, “Timothy Pickering’s ‘Portrait’ of Thomas Jefferson,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 92 (1958): 309.
33. Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan,’” 434. Throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century, four out of five members of Congress lived in boardinghouses occupied only by colleagues from their state or region. Men who lived and dined together overwhelmingly voted together. James Sterling Young’s study of roll-call votes revealed that congressmen living in the same boardinghouse voted either unanimously or with one
dissent three times out of four (74.2 percent) and senators four times out of five (83.3 percent); Young, Washington Community, 1800–1828, 101–5.
34. Pickering to Richard Peters, December 24, 1803; Pickering to George Cabot, January 29, 1804; Henry Adams, Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 1800–1815 (Boston, 1905), 338–42.
35. Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (New York, 1923), 6–9; Lynn W Turner, William Plumer of New Hampshire, 1759–1850 (Chapel Hill, 1962), 133–50, and Plumer to Bradbury Cilley, January 15, 1804, quoted 138.
36. Tapping Reeve to Uriah Tracy, February 7, 1804, Adams, Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 342–43; Mary-Jo Kline and Joanne Wood Ryan et al., eds., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1983), lx-lxi; Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan,’” 437.
37. Roger Griswold to Oliver Wolcott, March 11, 1804; Adams, Documents Relating to New-England Federalism, 355–58.
38. Plumer’s Memorandum, 517–18; Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan,’” 438–39; Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr: The Years from Princeton to Vice President, 1756–1805 (New York, 1979), 336–42. For evidence that the separatists’ dealings with Burr were known to the likes of Hamilton and King, see Rufus King’s memorandum of the April 4 meeting between Burr and Griswold, dated April 5 and based on King’s conversations with Griswold, Wolcott, or both; Kline and Wood, Papers of Aaron Burr, 862–65.
39. Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan,’” 440; William Keteltas to Aaron Burr, February 27, 1804, Kline and Wood, Papers of Aaron Burr, 844–46; Syrett, ed., Hamilton Papers, 26: 187–90.
40. New York City Commercial Advertiser, April 14, 1804, quoted in Kline and Wood, Papers of Aaron Burr, 842; Thomas Fleming, Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America (New York, 1999), 231–33.
41. Lomask, Aaron Burr, 1756–1805, 343; Gannon, “Escaping ‘Mr. Jefferson’s Plan,’” 440; James Cheetham, in the American Citizen, May 5, 1804, quoted in Fleming, Duel, 253.