El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  THE ISSUE OF West Florida’s unresolved status also resurfaced during the tumult of the 1790s. Now back under Spanish control after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the colony still had a small population.29 The United States persisted in its demands about the disputed Florida boundary, and in 1795 the first minister of Spain, Manuel de Godoy—who had replaced Floridablanca—yielded to them. Distracted by Spain’s involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe, and desiring a good relationship with the United States while simultaneously displaying little interest in Louisiana, in October 1795 he signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, also known as Pinckney’s Treaty in the United States after the negotiator Thomas Pinckney.30 This treaty granted the United States everything it wanted, including confirmation of the West Florida boundary at N 31°, navigation and trade rights for U.S. ships on the Mississippi, a joint U.S.-Spanish effort to prevent cross-border Indian attacks, and sharing trade with Native Americans rather than competing over it.31 Upon hearing its terms, James Madison received the initial impression that, as he told Thomas Jefferson, it “adjusts both the boundary and the navigation in a very satisfactory manner.”32 By 1798, the United States had created its Mississippi Territory, which reached along the thirty-first parallel from that river to the Chattahoochee River, today part of the border between Alabama and Georgia.33

  This drive for expansion was not a confident one, however, as U.S. leaders considered each move west in these earliest years of nationhood to be a potential snag that could unravel the delicate fabric of the republic.34 Once Congress ratified Pinckney’s Treaty, Madison tempered his earlier enthusiasm, calling the deal “a bitter pill to some,” in part because it was “inviting additional emigrations to the Western Country.”35 They had cause for concern, as breakaway schemes like Franklin in 1784 had shown the extent of the fragility at the edges of the nation. Also unsettling were the ongoing hostilities with the Native Americans, which Secretary of War Henry Knox blamed on the “desires of too many frontier white people, to seize, by force or fraud upon the neighboring Indian lands.” Knox found the settlers’ treatment of Native Americans worrying, saying, “Our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”36 Yet Spain and the United States were on the brink of a land deal that would overshadow the 1795 agreement and transform the fortunes of both nations.

  By 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte had consolidated power in France and turned to his still rebelling colony, Saint-Domingue, eager to return it to being the wealthy, sugar-producing, slave-owning “pearl of the Antilles.” Bonaparte now redoubled his efforts, which included reinstating slavery in 1802 and sending his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, with ten thousand troops to take back the colony. Almost the entire expedition was killed, if not by the renewed and invigorated effort against the French led by former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines, then by yellow fever. Leclerc succumbed to the disease and was replaced by Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau, a general whose father had led French troops during the American Revolution. Rochambeau and his men were no match for the former slaves. He capitulated in 1803. The toll on France was high; an estimated fifty thousand soldiers died over the course of the conflict.

  Bonaparte had also run up a great deal of debt fighting in that war and in Europe. While the conflict in Saint-Domingue was in its final throes, Bonaparte and Spain opened negotiations over Louisiana. Spanish ministers thought returning Louisiana to France could help them better protect the much more valuable New Spain.37 They were growing increasingly concerned that the United States would push through Louisiana into Texas, and then to their silver mines. The French, on the other hand, would be far less likely to pursue this course of action and could help keep U.S. settlers out of the west. Bonaparte, however, had something else in mind when he signed the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800. The deal returned control of Louisiana to France under the requirement that it not be sold to a third party, a stipulation Bonaparte quickly ignored. He sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 for $15 million (about $250–$300 million today), a bargain that would double the size of the young nation.

  When the negotiations began, Jefferson and his ministers harbored the more modest hope of obtaining New Orleans and West Florida, though this soon grew to include lands that extended to the Río Grande.38 By 1803 Republicans and Federalists were questioning the wisdom of the much larger deal now on offer, both feeling that such an extensive acquisition came with many risks.39 Jefferson also had to do a delicate political dance around the fact that this purchase was not in line with the Constitution. The negotiators had not been authorized to buy so much land, and Jefferson’s own interpretation of the government’s powers within the Constitution prohibited such a purchase as well, meaning the government would need an amendment in order to have the power to acquire such an enormous addition.40 Its passage could take months and there simply was not time to wait for Congress, so Jefferson went ahead, realizing that the opportunity was too good to let slip through his fingers.41 As he later wrote to Madison: “The less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana, the better.”42 Although Jefferson signed the deal, he did not receive everything he had hoped for: Florida remained Spain’s. Spanish minister Pedro Cevallos wrote to the Louisiana governor Marqués de Casa Calvo, who had been given the task of overseeing the transition, that the United States had Florida in its sights, wrongly believing it should be part of the Louisiana deal. Louisiana was ceded to Spain, argued Cevallos, but Florida was “founded on the right of conquest.”43

  The Spanish were outraged by Bonaparte’s double-dealing and tried to nullify the purchase, while attempting to claw back parts of Arkansas and Missouri using some of their maps as evidence; this too failed, however. They continued to fear for New Spain, knowing that Jefferson had become inquisitive about it. He solicited information from the visiting naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had traveled to New Spain and who was well positioned to answer the president’s questions on the extent of “ore production … especially [in] those [territories] to be ceded in the event that the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte [Río Grande] becomes the boundary of Louisiana.”44 During the boundary negotiations with Spain, Jefferson continued to argue that the territory ceded by France stretched all the way to the Río Grande to the west and into much of West Florida to the east, a claim Spain dismissed.45 In 1804, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to survey the Louisiana territory, and they began their epic march west. The spy James Wilkinson reappeared at this juncture to tip off the Spanish and try to goad them into intercepting Lewis, but holding back the mission of the U.S. explorers would only have delayed what was clearly becoming the inevitable.46

  Chapter 8

  Sabine River, ca. 1804–23

  THE SABINE RIVER flows down a narrow basin from its headwaters in northeast Texas, to where three creeks converge east of Dallas, stretching southeast before turning due south, covering around three hundred miles. Its name is thought to come from a Spanish word, sabina, after the cypress trees that line its banks. Today the southern part of the river meanders past the heavy machinery, tankers, and cranes of the Texas oil industry as it makes its way to Sabine Lake, near Port Arthur, before draining into the Gulf. It is not the most majestic waterway, but it has a cartographic importance: it is part of, at the thirty-second parallel, the state line between modern Texas and Louisiana, and in the early nineteenth century it was supposed to divide the United States from New Spain.

  After the Louisiana Purchase, the area around the river was intended to serve as a “neutral strip” to buffer disputes between Spain and the United States over the latter’s claims to land as far west as the Río Grande. The Sabine River formed the western boundary of this zone, while the eastern limits were marked by two waterways: the Arroyo Hondo (or Río Hondo) near Natchitoches to the north; and the Calcasieu River to the south, running for about two hundred miles through bayous an
d into Lake Charles, going from there into the Gulf of Mexico. The Caddo people had long lived in the area, but this agreement transformed it into a legal buffer zone, attracting thieves, slave-smugglers, and other outlaws into its swampy hiding places.1

  This western hinterland was the ideal setting for perhaps the most infamous land scheme of its time. It, once again, involved the duplicitous James Wilkinson. By 1804 he and the former vice president Aaron Burr had discussed occupying the territory between the United States and New Spain. Burr, who had served under Jefferson during the latter’s first term in office (1801–5), was soon tangled up in this Anglo-Spanish intrigue. The plotters wanted a military operation, but Wilkinson was still in the army and so could not have his fingerprints on any such plan. At the same time, Wilkinson was negotiating with Spain on behalf of the U.S. government to come to a diplomatic arrangement over the Sabine boundary.

  Rumors soon swelled into a storm of misinformation. The plans involved—depending on who was explaining them—raising an army of volunteers, claiming a part of the Spanish territory and separating it from the United States with New Orleans as the capital, and then using this new colony as a springboard for attacks on New Spain. For good measure, some said the whole scheme was intended to undermine the unity of the United States. The plot reached the point where men were at the ready, including volunteers from the Tennessee militia, but the Spanish caught wind of this and prepared their troops.2 Before bullets could fly, Wilkinson instead double-crossed Burr and told Jefferson about his involvement in the scheme; this led to Burr’s arrest and subsequent trial. At once Wilkinson tried to make himself look like a hero to both sides; indeed he even tried—and failed—to exact a special payment from the viceroy of New Spain for stopping the chaos that he himself had created.3

  The U.S. government struggled to control plotters and schemers like Wilkinson, and these adventurers were becoming a growing problem.4 Similar activity was taking place as well in West Florida, where the Kemper brothers tried to use the abutting boundaries to their advantage. In 1804, the three men, Reuben, Samuel, and Nathan, declared a “West Florida Republic,” with the aim of securing U.S. intervention and annexation. The strategy involved making raids between U.S. and Spanish territory, which had the counterproductive effect of irritating other Anglos, and causing the Kempers to lose what little support they had. Spain’s West Florida troops were able to stifle them and restore order.5 Some in Washington thought these sorts of disturbances would end if the United States simply controlled these territories, and in March 1806, Congress gave Secretary of State James Madison permission to spend up to $5 million on an offer to Spain for Florida and Texas, though nothing came of it.6

  Instead, Spanish Florida was dealt a blow in 1807 with Jefferson’s Embargo Act, a controversial piece of legislation aimed at Britain and France—who were again at war and both of whom wanted exclusive trading rights with the United States. The act prevented any foreign vessels—including Spain’s—from entering U.S. ports. Spanish officials were quick to demand an exemption, a request Madison denied. At the same time, U.S. ships sailed into Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, effectively placing the West Florida territory under a blockade. The U.S. policy backfired, however, as merchants began smuggling goods throughout the Mississippi valley and along the coast of Spanish East Florida. By late 1808, the act was repealed.7

  TRADE DISPUTES WITH the United States would soon fade into the background, however, as Spain faced its biggest challenge yet, this time from Napoleon Bonaparte. By May 1808, Carlos IV had abdicated and his heir, Fernando VII, had been persuaded to go into exile in France by Bonaparte, who had his troops in Spain at the ready. Bonaparte then put his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. The outrage in Spain was immediate, and the uprisings that started in Madrid spread throughout the country and crossed the ocean.

  Initially, the public in Spanish America expressed loyalty to Fernando VII, in part because the colonies were considered—and they considered themselves—to be constituent kingdoms of Spain, and so this was seen as a shared problem.8 Without Fernando VII at the helm, sovereignty would have to reside temporarily with the people, an idea rooted in medieval Spanish political tradition.9 In order to put this into practice, the initial step in Spain and the Americas involved setting up a number of provincial councils, or juntas, around which national sovereignty and resistance to France could be organized.10 In Spain, the smaller regional juntas answered to a central junta, or junta suprema central, first based in Aranjuez, a town about thirty-five miles south of Madrid and home to one of the royal palaces. The central junta was soon pushed south by the fighting, to Seville and finally Cádiz, where British ships aided Spain by patrolling the coast.

  In the Americas juntas began to appear, and, as in Spain, they articulated a fierce loyalty to Fernando VII, though it was also clear that the opportunity now presented itself to air some long-standing grievances. At the heart of the complaints throughout the Americas was the fact that many of the reforms enacted under Carlos III had caused friction between the local-born creoles and the peninsular Spaniards (peninsulares, or gachupines in New Spain) who had been sent to the colonies to govern. The majority of governors, viceroys, judges, bishops, and other officials were from Spain, yet by this point across Spanish America there was a large, established, and often wealthy population of creoles, many of whom were increasingly irritated by their place in colonial society. Here, too, an “American” identity was forming and drawing from both its European and its indigenous antecedents, a “creole patriotism” that had grown hostile to Spanish administrators.11

  Creoles across the empire called for more political power, economic opportunity, and autonomy at a local level, but not independence—at least not yet. The local and regional nature of the complaints across such a vast and diverse geography made it practically impossible for the kingdoms of Spanish America to come to any larger agreement, barring their shared loyalty to Fernando VII. It was a situation quite distinct from that of the thirteen British colonies, whose anger was directed at the king and which had a clearer sense of common goals. In Spanish America, tensions were not between the monarch and his subjects but between the monarch’s administrators and the people they were meant to oversee in his name.

  In such circumstances, the old order could not hold. In New Spain, the viceroy at the time, José de Iturrigaray, favored a creole junta with temporary autonomy that would function with him in charge while serving the interests of wealthy creole land- and mine owners. However, a group of Spaniards mounted a coup d’état in 1808 and he was replaced by Pedro de Garibay, who represented the sovereignty of the central junta in Spain.12 This move was not popular with the wider public, who now felt that these gachupines had little basis for their authority.

  Meanwhile, in Spain, the central junta in 1809 issued a decree for the American territories to elect delegates to join it. Despite their belief that they were equal parts of the crown, the kingdoms of the Americas would now see the true imbalance of power. They considered their juntas equal to those in Spain, but when they were invited to send delegates, only one person was allotted from each of the four viceroyalties and five others were chosen from the independent captaincies-general, a total of nine seats to Spain’s thirty-six.13*

  Before that process could go very far, another call was issued after the central junta merged with the Regency Council, which was acting on behalf of Fernando VII, to send representatives to a national assembly, the Cortes, which was to be held in Cádiz. It would have its first session in September 1810, and this issue of proportion reappeared as delegates were being organized. In terms of population—10.5 million in Spain against some 13 million to 15 million in Spanish America—as well as wealth, the colonies had more, yet the Spanish took more seats in the Cortes.14 People in Spain were fearful of being outvoted by the overseas delegates, though, at the same time, they extended the invitation to send representatives beyond the viceroyalties and independent captaincies-gener
al. Because of the difficulties in actually getting to Spain, many of the deputies for the Americas ended up being chosen from creoles who happened to be in Cádiz at the time, a procedure people in the colonies branded illegitimate and unrepresentative. A group of 177 electors from the Americas met to choose these proxy—and in theory, temporary—delegates, known as suplentes. Just one delegate from the Americas made it over before the opening: Puerto Rico’s Ramón Power.15 When the Cortes finally convened on September 24, 1810, there were 104 deputies, with 27 representing the Americas and 2 for the Philippines, all of whom, barring Power, were suplentes. The others had yet to arrive, and in the end, of the 300 deputies there, some 65 represented Spanish America.16