Great Negotiations

by Fredrik Stanton

  The oldest son of minor Parisian nobility, Talleyrand began his career in the clergy, and despite elastic morals and a fondness for atheism, he became a bishop at age thirty-four. He left the priesthood soon after to join the French diplomatic corps, which better suited his talents. Although he had been an early supporter of the French Revolution, Talleyrand moved to England when it spiraled out of control. Expelled from England at the request of the French revolutionary government, he spent two years in exile in America, which he detested. “Refinement,” he complained, “does not exist” in the United States.19 things calmed down, Talleyrand returned to France and became foreign minister in 1797.

  Barbé-Marbois was Napoleon’s finance minister. A keen admirer of the United States, he spoke perfect English, had traveled extensively in America, and knew Monroe and Livingston well. His wife was the daughter of the former governor of Pennsylvania, and Barbé-Marbois provided indispensable help during the American Revolution as the French consul general in Philadelphia. Barbé-Marbois was promoted to the Council of Ancients in the French Revolutionary Government before he fell out of favor for objecting to the misappropriation of funds and was sent on trumped-up charges to exile in a prison camp in French Guiana that became notorious as Devil’s Island. Needing someone of integrity and experience to restore France’s neglected finances, when Napoleon took power he released Barbé-Marbois and placed him in charge of the French treasury. Napoleon charged him with carrying out the negotiation for Louisiana under Talleyrand’s guidance.

  The French negotiators began with several disadvantages. Months of French prevarication and stonewalling had exhausted Ambassador Livingston’s patience and filled him with mistrust. Barbé-Marbois described Livingston’s firm belief “that the United States would never possess New Orleans by treaty, and that it ought to be taken by force. His intercourse with the French ministry confirmed him in this impression.”20 The French knew that American goals for the negotiation were much narrower than theirs, as New Orleans and navigation rights along the Mississippi were the only objects Monroe and Livingston had in mind. Napoleon warned his negotiators that neither Monroe nor Livingston was “prepared for a decision which goes infinitely beyond anything that they are about to ask of us.”21

  The morning after Napoleon’s meeting at St. Cloud, Livingston received an urgent request to meet with Talleyrand at his residence on the Rue du Bac in Paris. Livingston went there in the early afternoon, and after light conversation, Talleyrand asked him almost as an afterthought whether the United States “wished to have the whole of Louisiana?” Livingston said no. Unaware of the events at St. Cloud, he assumed this proposal was one of what Barbé-Marbois described as “the many deceptions that had previously been practiced upon him”22 by Talleyrand. “But if we gave New Orleans, the rest would be of little value,” Talleyrand continued. “I should like to know what you would give for the whole.”23 Suspicious but slightly intrigued, Livingston volunteered the token amount of twenty million francs, or just under four million dollars. Talleyrand, bristling at the low price, urged Livingston to think it over, adding coyly that he did not speak from authority. “The idea merely struck me,” he said.24

  They met again the following morning. Livingston, puzzled by Talleyrand’s probing the day before, pressed the French foreign minister on his mysterious proposition, but Livingston’s eagerness made Talleyrand more aloof and evasive. Talleyrand reiterated implausibly that the idea was just an idle brainstorm of his, but again encouraged Livingston to make an offer. The American ambassador declined. Although intrigued, he told Talleyrand he needed to first consult with Monroe, who was about to arrive in Paris. At this, the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders and dropped the subject.

  Monroe reached Paris that afternoon at one o’clock and spent the afternoon with Livingston at the American Embassy reviewing their instructions from Jefferson and Madison. News of the failure of Senator Ross’s resolution depressed Livingston, who felt negotiation was pointless and Talleyrand’s gesture was simply a way of toying with him. “I wish,” he told Monroe, “that the resolution . . . had been adopted. Only force can give us New Orleans. We must employ force. Let us first get possession of the country and negotiate afterwards.”25

  After dinner, Barbé-Marbois stopped by while Monroe and Livingston enjoyed coffee with guests. Over cognac, the French finance minister let them know that he had something important to share with them in private. Monroe had not yet officially received his diplomatic credentials, so Livingston excused himself and hurried alone to Barbé-Marbois’s office at the French treasury.

  While Talleyrand’s fumbled overture had heightened Livingston’s confusion and desperation, Livingston and Barbé-Marbois had a strong working relationship, and in the candlelight the American ambassador tried to impress on his friend the gravity of the situation. Livingston pointed out that at any moment either the Americans could lose their patience or the British could declare war on France and seize Louisiana themselves. He related his conversations with Talleyrand and shared his misgivings over “the extreme absurdity of his evasions.”26

  Barbé-Marbois listened closely before playing his hand. France, he told Livingston, was prepared to offer the entire Louisiana Territory along with New Orleans to the United States in exchange for one hundred million francs. The American ambassador flatly rejected the offer. Barbé-Marbois’s demand amounted to five times the operating budget of the U.S. government, more money than existed in the United States. Undeterred, Barbé-Marbois conceded that the number was high and probed Livingston, asking what the United States might be willing to pay. Livingston gave no reply. Instead, he stalled, telling Barbé-Marbois that he lacked the authority to go anywhere near Napoleon’s number, and he needed to consider the matter and discuss it with Monroe.

  Livingston tried to draw him out. Since Barbé-Marbois admitted the price was high, Livingston pressed him on what he considered fair. The French minister, in a clearly preplanned move, said he felt that the territory was actually worth eighty million francs. Sixty million could be in cash, and twenty million in the assumption of old debts the French government owed American merchants. Even at the reduced price, Livingston countered, he could never agree to something so far beyond their ability to pay. “Our fellow citizens,” he explained to the French minister, “have an extreme aversion to public debts. How could we, without incurring their displeasure, burden them” with such an “enormous charge?”27 He also reminded Barbé-Marbois that the incumbent American administration was friendly to France, while the opposition was more inclined to support England. If Napoleon demanded too much, it could lose Jefferson the upcoming election and turn the White House over to those openly hostile to the French government. He laid this out, and asked Barbé-Marbois whether “the few millions acquired at this expense would not be too dearly bought?” Livingston reminded Barbé-Marbois of the danger of the territory falling into the hands of the British. He stressed the “ardor of the Americans to take it by force,” and “the difficulty with which they were restrained by the prudence of the President.”28

  The French minister acknowledged Livingston’s points but told him the demand was nonnegotiable. Instead, he cautioned the American in a thinly veiled threat that Napoleon could quickly change his mind and withdraw the offer. “You know the temper of a youthful conqueror,” Barbé-Marbois said, “everything he does is rapid as lightning.”29 Barbé-Marbois reiterated the benefits to the United States: “Consider the extent of the country, the exclusive navigation of the River, and the importance of having no neighbor to dispute with you, no war to dread.” With these in mind, he asked Livingston, “Try to see if you cannot come up to my mark.”30 Livingston stood his ground: “There was a point beyond which we could not go, and that fell far short of the sum he mentioned.”31 Livingston left Barbé-Marbois’s office at midnight and returned to the American Embassy, where he quickly wrote a letter to Madison. “A negotiation is fairly opened,” he reported. “The field opened to us is infin
itely larger than our instructions contemplated.”32

  After Monroe presented his diplomatic credentials to Talleyrand, Monroe and Livingston spent the next day deciding on a strategy, as their instructions never anticipated anything on the scale of the offer before them. They recognized the value of the opportunity but knew that such an unprecedented acquisition would bring great and potentially unforeseeable consequences. Beyond the impact on the approaching election, there was no provision in the U.S. Constitution for the addition of territory. No one could tell how doubling the size of the United States would affect America’s delicate political landscape, especially on sensitive issues such as slavery. The federal government carried heavy debts from the Revolutionary War, and too high a price would bankrupt the nation. Monroe argued that they should ask for guidance from Washington before proceeding, but both he and Livingston knew that the opportunity would not survive the wait. After deliberating, the American negotiators decided to go as high as fifty million francs for all of Louisiana, but to give themselves leeway, they agreed “only to mention forty in the first instance.”33

  The following day, April 15, they presented their offer to Barbé-Marbois, who responded that it was so low “that the whole business might be defeated,”34 but agreed to bring it to Napoleon. Barbé-Marbois returned the next afternoon with news that Napoleon had received the offer “very coldly.”35 Napoleon’s interest had faded, the French finance minister warned the Americans, and he feared the negotiation was in jeopardy.

  Monroe and Livingston sweetened the offer to fifty million francs, which Livingston informed Barbé-Marbois was “the greatest length”36 they could go. While this met Napoleon’s initial demand, Barbé-Marbois believed the territory was worth more and decided not to settle for less than eighty. Over dinner on April 18, Barbé-Marbois told them that Napoleon asked for one hundred twenty million francs (slightly more than the estimated value of Tuscany, which he had traded for Louisiana) and would not consider anything below eighty million. The Americans insisted they could not go above fifty million, but a meeting the following day left Barbé-Marbois with an impression of more flexibility in the American position than they let on.37 He reported to Talleyrand: “The negotiation is on a good track. . . . In the course of a rather long meeting . . . enough progress was made to make me hope a satisfactory result was possible for the two countries. I did not hear it expressed directly, but I could infer it from various expressions which [Livingston] let escape involuntarily.”38

  Despite Barbé-Marbois’s hopes, the parties remained far apart on price, with no indication either was willing to make further concessions and time running out. Each side believed that it had the upper hand and that delay would work in its favor. The Americans, convinced that things were moving in their direction, relaxed their pace. “We resolved,” Livingston explained, “to rest for a few days upon our oars.”39 It was a serious miscalculation. Unknown to the American negotiators, powerful forces within the French government began to move against a sale. Talleyrand had just accepted a large bribe from the British to avert the war with England and thwart the sale of Louisiana needed to fund it, as had Napoleon’s brothers, Joseph and Lucien. They began putting considerable pressure on Napoleon to reject the deal and abandon the negotiation.

  Deadlocked on price, the negotiators turned to other aspects of the transaction, starting with the less contentious issues. Once the representatives agreed to negotiate for the entire territory, they faced the curious problem that neither side knew how far the territory actually extended. Beyond New Orleans and scattered settlements along the Mississippi’s banks, most of the Louisiana Territory consisted of unexplored wilderness. Without the benefit of charts or defined borders, the envoys struggled to define exactly what it was they negotiated for. From mid- to late April, Barbé-Marbois and Livingston met Monroe, who suffered a back injury so painful it prevented him from sitting up, in the salon of Monroe’s hotel, where he could talk while lying on a sofa. They pored over maps and descriptions from journal entries written by the few fur traders and explorers who had traveled into the interior, but their efforts yielded nothing except vague and conflicting accounts that were useless for the purposes of a treaty.40

  The French, who owned the region, had no idea where its boundaries lay. There was no time to find out from the Spanish authorities what they thought they had traded to France. Previous treaties offered no help, and a proper survey was out of the question. As Barbé-Marbois puzzled over an old map with the American negotiators in the middle of April, he marveled that “many of these countries are not better known at this day than when Columbus landed at the Bahamas; no one is acquainted with them.”41 Canada, governed by the British, stood to the north. Neither the French, who had ceded Canada to England forty years earlier, nor the Spanish had laid out where Canada ended and the Louisiana Territory began. Barbé-Marbois admitted the northern regions were so remote that the English themselves had never explored them. The Rocky Mountains to the west formed an unpenetrated natural barrier. The Mississippi traced the eastern border, at least as far south as Spanish-owned Florida. At that point, the lines became muddled—and a matter of some importance, because of American designs on Florida for its strategic ports and rivers.

  With time running short and both sides under mounting pressure, the Americans decided at Barbé-Marbois’s suggestion to take the Louisiana Territory as the French had received it from Spain: without clearly described contours, as a vast and largely undefined country. This invited future conflicts, but it was a price the Americans were willing to pay. Sensitive to the ramifications, Barbé-Marbois warned them that the ambiguities “may in time give rise to more difficulties, . . . but if they do not stop you, I, at least, desire that your government should know that you have been warned of them.”42 When Barbé-Marbois reported this, Napoleon, perhaps sensing opportunity for further mischief, replied that “if an obscurity did not exist, it would perhaps be good policy to put one there.”43

  The inhabitants posed a different challenge. For the second time in almost as many years, their fate was being decided without their knowledge or consent in secret deliberations thousands of miles away. Barbé-Marbois, Monroe, and Livingston, each of whom had played prominent roles in the American Revolution, were uncomfortable with the prospect of an action that went so directly against the United States’ founding principles. But with their hands tied, Barbé-Marbois wrote, “This difficulty, which could not be solved, was at once set aside.”44 However, the French did their best to ensure fair treatment for Louisiana’s residents. With the Americans’ support, Barbé-Marbois inserted language guaranteeing them “the enjoyment of all of the rights, advantages, and immunities of the United States,” and stipulating their incorporation into the Union as citizens of one or more future states “as soon as possible.”45

  The negotiators next took up the prickly subject of the French debts. Several years earlier, France and the United States had been entangled in a brief conflict called the Quasi War over maritime rights and alleged American smuggling to the anti-French rebels in Santo Domingo. France’s capture of a large number of American merchant vessels left bad blood between the two countries, and while the conflict ended with France promising to make the ship owners whole, it never followed through. For months Livingston, whose hopes for the vice presidency in 1804 rested on the support of New York merchants and ship owners, had fought unsuccessfully for France to make good on its promise. Barbé-Marbois remarked wistfully that, “The American Minister at Paris had received orders to make this discontent known, and his notes were drawn up with a firmness to which Bonaparte was not accustomed. If one of the continental powers of Europe had dared to employ similar language, the invasion of its territory would have been the consequence.”46 discussions on Louisiana provided an opportunity for Livingston to revive the question, and he pushed for a concession from Barbé-Marbois to pay regardless of the outcome of the negotiation. The French minister, knowing the topic’s importance to Livi
ngston, insisted that the two were now linked. Monroe complained he “was constantly having to overrule the American Ambassador, who kept returning to ‘the claims, the claims,’”47 and Barbé-Marbois became concerned the issue would cause the negotiation to collapse. Livingston finally relented. “The moment was critical,” he reported, “the question of peace or war was in the balance; and it was important to come to a conclusion before either scale preponderated. I considered the convention a trifle compared with the other great object, and as it had already delayed us many days, I was ready to take it under any form.”48

  Early on the afternoon on April 27, Barbé-Marbois brought two proposals to Monroe and Livingston. The first, which he claimed Napoleon had drafted, contained severe terms: a cash payment of one hundred million francs, the American assumption of the twenty million franc debt, and French navigational rights and commercial outposts on the Mississippi in perpetuity. The second, more lenient proposal, composed by Barbé-Marbois, outlined a sixty-million-franc payment plus the debts, and more limited navigational and commercial privileges. Barbé-Marbois acknowledged that the first proposal was “hard and unreasonable,”49 and although Napoleon had not seen the second, Barbé-Marbois felt he could coax Napoleon into accepting it.