With no word from Vergennes after the Spanish refusal, Franklin decided to force Vergennes’s hand. After brushing off Wentworth for weeks, Franklin invited him to dinner. His meeting Wentworth, which he knew would be reported by the efficient French secret service, signaled that the Americans might be willing after all to entertain reconciliation with Britain, and left Vergennes under the impression that Franklin had begun negotiating terms. Lord North had sent Wentworth to Paris to approach the American commissioners to head off a deal with France, but Franklin used it as the means he needed to seal one. Franklin met Wentworth on January 6, and they spoke alone for two hours. Wentworth told Franklin if they set aside their personal grudges, a rejoined Britain and America would be “the greatest empire on earth,” and asked what terms it would take for reconciliation. Franklin replied that he would accept independence or nothing. In that case, Britain was willing to fight for another ten years to prevent American independence, Wentworth told Franklin. “America,” Franklin retorted, “is ready to fight fifty years to win it.” Franklin would not budge. He wandered on, talking about the past, complaining about British atrocities in the colonies, keeping the conversation going for the benefit of Vergennes’s spies outside without revealing or agreeing to anything. Deane joined them at the end of their talk, and the three sat down for dinner. Franklin’s purpose, of course, was not to engage Wentworth in a meaningful discussion on the substance of his proposals, but to keep him occupied in conversation long enough to generate a convincing impression of entertaining his offer, for the benefit of Vergennes and the French cabinet.
Wentworth returned to London the next day empty-handed, and the British concluded that it must be because the Americans already had an agreement with France in their pocket, but Franklin now had a decisive tool to convince the French government to move quickly, which he sealed by failing to report to the French ministry (as he usually did religiously when receiving foreign visitors) his meeting with the British representative. Franklin’s meeting with Wentworth, as intended, led Vergennes to believe that unless he acted quickly, the Americans might do the unthinkable and come to terms with Britain. “I am certain that they are negotiating briskly,” Vergennes wrote. “I see proposals most eagerly listened to, and I am afraid.”46 “They play us off against one another,” the British ambassador, Lord Stormont, cautioned Vergennes. “Franklin’s natural subtlety gives him a great advantage in such a game. It is easy to see that on such a situation peace between England and the House of Bourbon hangs by the slightest of all threads.”47
The day after Franklin met Wentworth, Vergennes convened the Royal Council of Ministers in French Prime Minister Maurepas’s bedroom, where the prime minister lay stricken with gout, and convinced them that if France did not act, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would slip from their hands. The council voted unanimously in favor of an alliance despite Spain’s opposition.
Gerard met the commissioners at Deane’s apartment in Paris on the Rue Royale the following day. He asked them two questions: “What is necessary to be done to give such satisfaction to the American commissioners as to engage them not to listen to any propositions from England for a new connection with that country?” and, “What would work the same effect on the American people?” Franklin consulted privately with his colleagues, and when Gerard returned an hour later, Franklin gave their reply to the first question (they hadn’t had a chance to get to the second.) “The immediate conclusion of a treaty of commerce and alliance,” he said, “would close their ears to any proposal which should not have as its basis entire liberty and independence.” Gerard informed the American commissioners that the king was finally prepared to conclude a treaty. Franklin, according to Gerard, “softened by this resolution, which he did not appear to expect, observed that this was what they proposed and solicited vainly for a year past.” Gerard assured them he would produce a document within days that would include a commercial treaty and, more importantly, a treaty of military alliance, although to Franklin, Deane, and Lee’s disappointment, French involvement in the war would not be automatic, as Gerard insisted that France retain its ability to decide when to enter the conflict.48
Three days later the American commissioners replied in writing to Gerard’s second question, laying out in greater detail what was needed to prevent the United States from coming to terms with England: either France’s immediate entry into the war, or enough financial support to sustain the revolution until the English were thrown out of North America and American independence was secure. The commissioners demanded “an immediate engagement” by France “to guarantee the present possessions of the Congress in America, with such others as they may acquire on the continent during the war, and either to enter into a war with England or furnish Congress with the money,” until “all that the English now possess on the continent shall be conquered.”49 A gift from France of six or eight warships would ensure victory arrived more quickly. “Their first word,” Vergennes wrote, “when I caused them to be sounded, and they have not yet altogether retracted it, was that only an immediate war could make them engage to come to no arrangement with the mother country without our consent.”50 For diplomatic reasons, it was important for France not to be the party initiating hostilities in a war with England. However, as signing an alliance with and providing open aid to the rebellious colonies would be an intolerable infringement on English sovereignty, a declaration of war by Britain would be the inevitable outcome.
Franklin, Deane, Lee, and Gerard signed the Franco-American treaties in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris on February 6, 1778. The treaty of alliance declared that the two countries “mutually engage not to lay down their arms, until the independence of the United States shall have been formally or tacitly assured by the Treaty or Treaties that shall terminate the War.” The alliance, which would come into effect at the outbreak of hostilities between France and England, was “to maintain effectually the liberty, sovereignty, and independence, absolute and unlimited of the said United States, as well in matters of Government as of commerce.”51 France promised to continue the conflict until American independence was secured. Significantly, the treaties avoided entangling the United States in permanent alliances that might involve it in future European wars and left the United States free to grant equal political and commercial privileges to other nations. “No monopoly of our trade was granted,” Franklin pointed out in a letter to Congress. “None are given to France but what we are at liberty to grant to any other nation.”52
Within five months France and England were at war. Spain joined the fight against Britain a year later in return for a French promise to help it capture Gibraltar from the British. French help was indispensible in turning the tide of the war. Ninety percent of the gunpowder used by Washington’s army came from France. The French shipped over thirty thousand muskets, four hundred tons of gunpowder, five thousand tents, and sixty pieces of field artillery. American soldiers wore French clothes, fired French weapons, and their wages were largely paid by France. The combined might of the French and Spanish navies broke the British navy’s monopoly in the Atlantic and, by threatening an invasion force off the English Channel (as well as fighting in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, the Caribbean, and India), turned the war into a global conflict and forced a dispersion of British forces that fatally weakened the British war effort. At the decisive battle of Yorktown in 1781, which marked the defeat of the British and secured American independence, a French fleet, French troops, and French heavy cannon provided the margin of victory. The fleet, commanded by Admiral Francois-Joseph De Grasse, prevented British reinforcements from relieving General Charles Cornwallis’s besieged force, while over eight thousand French soldiers under Count Rochambeau fought in the final engagement. Support for the American war cost the French treasury over a billion livres (equal to three times France’s national budget), drove the country deeply into debt, and led to taxes that provoked the French Revolution in 1789. Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793
.
Chapter 2
The Louisiana Purchase
1803
The United States’ first major international crisis, and its most profitable, began twenty-two years after the British surrender at Yorktown, when France in 1803 secretly bought the Louisiana Territory from the Spanish monarchy in exchange for the kingdom of Tuscany. The Spanish had governed the Louisiana Territory, an uncolonized expanse of wilderness that extended from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, as an absentee landlord, but Napoleon Bonaparte planned to make it the centerpiece of a French empire in the New World. He assembled an occupation fleet to take possession of his new prize and ordered authorities in the strategic port of New Orleans to block American goods from passing down the Mississippi, bringing half the country’s trade to an abrupt halt. “Since the question of Independence,” Alexander Hamilton observed, “none has occurred more deeply interesting to the United States than the cession of Louisiana to France. This event threatens the early dismemberment of a large portion of our country; more immediately the safety of all the Southern States; and remotely the independence of the whole union.”1
Residents of the states west of the Appalachian Mountains called for war and threatened secession if Washington would not act, and Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to demand an immediate attack on New Orleans. “The people of the west are impatient to do themselves justice,” he declared, “and if the French are allowed time to arrive, the Americans, in those parts of the Union, will refuse to pay taxes to a government too feeble to protect them. Never will there be so favorable an occasion to annex [a gateway] without which half our states could not exist.”2
The resolution failed narrowly, but the political pressure forced President Thomas Jefferson to call out the militia and put the country on a war footing. “This little event,” President Jefferson predicted, “of France’s possessing herself of Louisiana . . . is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies.”3
The European situation, meanwhile, was in flux. Unusually cold weather kept the French flotilla bound for New Orleans ice-bound in Holland, creating a brief window for negotiation before French forces arrived. In the New World, a successful uprising in Santo Domingo, in which thirty thousand French troops, including Napoleon’s brother-in-law, perished, curbed France’s appetite for colonial adventures. The Peace of Amiens, a fragile, yearlong pause in the Napoleonic wars between England and France, was falling apart and it became obvious that France would soon once again be at war with England. Twenty British warships patrolled the Gulf of Mexico, and the British made no secret of their plans to seize New Orleans from the French at the first sign of hostilities. If the British gained control of New Orleans and the Mississippi, they could easily roll back what had just been so hard won in the Revolutionary War.
Jefferson knew France needed money for the approaching European war. Years of revolution, mismanagement, and conflict had left the French treasury desperate for cash, and even the French treasury minister admitted that the revolutionary government “had made the disorders of the French finances too well known for a foreign state to expect to treat in any other way than with ready money.”4 President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison hoped there might be a chance to turn this to their advantage.
Still, a peaceful solution seemed unlikely. “There is not the most remote possibility,” Hamilton wrote, “that the ambitious and aggrandizing views of Bonaparte will commute the territory for money. Its acquisition is of immense importance to France, and has long been an object of her extreme solicitude. The attempt therefore to purchase, in the first instance, will certainly fail, and in the end, war must be resorted to, under all the accumulation of difficulties caused by a previous and strongly fortified possession of the country by our adversary.”5
On January 10, 1803, Jefferson asked former Virginia Governor James Monroe for his help. “I have but a moment to inform you,” Jefferson wrote his fellow Virginian, “that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at New Orleans . . . threatens to overbear our peace. In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs. I shall tomorrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France, and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline; because the whole public hope will be rested on you.”6
The burly, six-foot-tall Monroe, one of Jefferson’s closest friends, had previously served as the American ambassador in Paris. A revolutionary patriot, he suffered the hardships of Valley Forge as a young lieutenant and was wounded in the shoulder at the Battle of Trenton, where General Washington promoted him for bravery under fire. After the victory at Yorktown, Monroe returned to school before apprenticing as a lawyer under Jefferson. His service as a delegate to the Continental Congress and as a U.S. senator from Virginia established his political credentials, and in 1794 President Washington chose him to be the American ambassador to France, a position he held for three years. His term as governor expired in December 1802, and he had been looking forward to making some money and returning to practicing law when he received President Jefferson’s letter.
Monroe left for Paris on March 9 with a heavy heart. Once he arrived he would be completely isolated, as communication across the Atlantic was so poor it could take up to three months to send an urgent message and receive a reply, and there was no guarantee that Napoleon, who once famously said, “Peace is opposed to my interests,” 7 would even agree to meet with him. The failure of several previous diplomatic attempts, as a result of France’s refusal to acknowledge the Spanish treaty’s existence, led the American ambassador in Paris to write despondently “with respect to a negotiation for Louisiana I think nothing will be effected here.”8 Before Monroe departed, President Jefferson warned him: “All eyes, all hopes are now fixed on you . . . for on the event of this mission depends the future destinies of this republic.”9
Monroe would join the American ambassador to France, Robert Livingston. Fourteen years older than Monroe, Livingston was in certain respects an unlikely diplomat. He spoke barely a word of French and was almost completely deaf. He had, however, an agile mind and unshakable persistence. He had served with Jefferson on the committee of five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, had chaired the New York Constitutional Convention, and as chancellor of New York in 1789 administered the oath of office to George Washington when he became the first president of the United States. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand– Perigord, the French foreign minister, had developed a dry respect for his abilities, calling him “the most importunate negotiator I have ever encountered.” Tall and self-confident, Livingston’s austere aristocratic exterior concealed an affable temperament and a keen intellect. His family was prominent politically (his brother was district attorney and mayor of New York), and rumors circulated of his ambitions to run for vice president in 1804. Monroe ranked high on the list of potential rivals, and Livingston resented and feared his new partner’s arrival.10
Monroe reached Le Havre on April 8, exhausted and ill after a rough Atlantic crossing. As Monroe’s carriage made its way toward Paris, Napoleon gathered his advisers at his palatial estate at St. Cloud. Napoleon’s longstanding dreams of building a French empire in the New World faded as, with war inevitable in Europe, he worried about losing Louisiana to the British. He saw, as Jefferson and Madison hoped, that a sale to the United States could place Louisiana permanently beyond England’s reach and raise money for the coming war. There was little time. He ordered his ministers to open negotiations with the Americans immediately, not just for New Orleans, which was what they asked, but the entire Louisiana Territory. However, he warned that the price must be high. Otherwise he preferred to make “a desperate attempt to keep these fine countries,”11 accurately foresaw that “whatever nation held the
Mississippi Valley would eventually be the most powerful on earth.”12
Napoleon, concerned about possible interference by the British, wanted the matter handled discreetly. “The cabinet of London is informed of the measures adopted at Washington,” he cautioned, “but it can have no suspicion of those which I am now taking. Observe the greatest secrecy, and recommend it to the American Ministers. You will acquaint me, day by day, hour by hour, of your progress.” 13 Emphasizing that he knew what he offered was priceless, and his need for money, he continued: “If I should regulate my terms, according to the value of these vast regions to the United States, the indemnity would have no limits. I will be moderate, in consideration of the necessity in which I am making a sale. But keep this to yourself. I want fifty million francs, and for less than that sum I will not treat.”14
Napoleon’s key ministers were Talleyrand and Francois de Barbé—Marbois. Short, fat, and clubfooted, Talleyrand was also charming, treacherous, and effective. “He understands the world,” Napoleon said. “He knows thoroughly the Courts of Europe; he has finesse to say the least of it; and he never shows what he is thinking.”15 A skillful negotiator, Talleyrand’s favorite tactic was delay. “The lack of instructions and the necessity of consulting one’s own government are always legitimate excuses in order to obtain delays in political affairs,”16 he once wrote. He was also entirely without scruples and breathtakingly corrupt. His contemporaries thought of him as a reptilian character, and treated him with a mixture of fear and awe, but mostly fear. One described him as having “no fixed principles, he changes them as he does his linen,”17 while Gouverneur Morris, a former American ambassador to France, found him “polished, cold, tricky, ambitious and bad.”18
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