A Wilderness So Immense (29 page)

On July 15, three full months after Citizen Genet arrived in Philadelphia, Andre Michaux and two companions left Philadelphia bearing Genet’s commission to George Rogers Clark as major general of the “Independent and Revolutionary Legion of the Mississippi” and about $750 toward his expenses. Ever the scientist, Michaux moved slowly, even by eighteenth-century standards.
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Traveling at first “by moonlight” to avoid the summer heat, he took notes and collected botanical specimens as he wandered through the Appalachians and into Kentucky. On August 29, instead of hurrying to Louisville by river with his companions, Michaux rambled overland into the lush rolling countryside of the blue-grass district.
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On September 11 Michaux visited General Benjamin Logan near Harrodsburg, site of the 1774 settlement thirty miles south of Frankfort and Lexington near the Kentucky River. “A large, raw-boned man,” six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Logan was one of Kentucky’s earliest settlers, and his son William the first white male born there. Although he would have been “delighted to take part in the enterprise,” General Logan informed Michaux, his situation had changed. A recent letter from Kentucky senator John Brown affirmed that the United States was opening negotiations with Spain about the Mississippi. An invasion, General Logan calculated, might now spoil the chance of diplomatic success, so he was no longer inclined to join Genet’s expedition.
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Michaux rambled on toward the falls of the Ohio. Overland travel was
slow in the eighteenth century, but his final seventy-mile jaunt through the bluegrass district took Michaux six days. When Genet’s emissary finally reached George Rogers Clark on September 17, 1793, he found that Clark, having heard nothing from Genet during the long months of summer, had also given up on the expedition, at least temporarily. More desperate than General Logan and far more disenchanted with East Coast politicians and international diplomacy, Clark had also come to blows with his brother-in-law, James O’Fallon. Nevertheless, with a major general’s commission from Genet in hand and the prospect of financial support, Clark was ready to resume planning the expedition by himself. Accordingly, Andre Michaux abandoned his trek toward the Pacific for the American Philosophical Society and headed east to bring Genet details of Clark’s plans and his request for money.

During the summer, O’Fallon’s abusive treatment of his wife, Clark’s sister Fanny, drove an angry wedge between the doctor and his in-laws. While O’Fallon was in Lexington tending to his medical practice and political career, Fanny had stayed with her parents, John and Ann Rogers Clark, at Mulberry Hill, just south of Louisville. There she began seeing apparitions, pacing the floor at night, and suffering violent fits. She was “so fearfull that she will not be by hir self,” her father wrote. “Hir mother [is] obliged to lay with hir every night.” At first the Clarks attributed Fanny’s depression or nervous breakdown to the prospect of moving to Lexington, where O’Fallon anticipated a more profitable medical practice. “Hearing you ware to settle in Lexington—I expe[c]t it sunk hir sperets,” her father explained. “She agread you might get more money in Lexington then hear but not Live so happy,” and she said “She had a grate deal Ruther go to hir Grave then to Lexington … [and] much Rither die near hir frends then far off.” As many battered spouses do, Fanny Clark O’Fallon hid the fact of her husband’s abuse from her family and friends, worrying that “she would be Blam[e]d” if she failed to accompany him to Lexington, and saying only that “no one knew what she suf[fere]d.” Fanny had “kept hir Complant in hir own Breast,” her father wrote, but “hir Heart was Brock … [and] it was not in our powr to Releave her.”
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Fanny’s parents discovered the real nature of their daughter’s plight late one night when Fanny was pacing the floor while O’Fallon slept. “Your father coming up stairs, into our room,” O’Fallon recalled in a peculiarly self-serving attempt to coax his wife back, “said, Fanny come away, you shall never sleep with the Rascal again, and so, instantly, turned me out of doors.” O’Fallon denied that he “frequently bit her with his
teeth,” or “so pinched you at times, as to compell you to leave my bed, into which I refused to suffer your return”—but the rumors circulating in the neighborhood could well have originated with family members who saw bruises.
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“Your Brother George,” O’Fallon complained in his peculiar letter to Fanny, “is said by 20 witnesses to have asserted in various places … that I was a Rogue, Rascal and Villain; … that I attempted to poison my son, Johnny; that I would poison … any family if they took my medicines … that the house and bed stunck where I lived or slept… and that I had murdered my former wife.”
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O’Fallon’s list of Clark’s accusations also reflects the rivalries of frontier leaders in the young republic. Clark, O’Fallon believed, was telling people that the doctor had “forged Gen [eral Anthony] Wayne’s letters” inviting him to serve as physician on an Indian campaign north of the Ohio River. Wayne’s 1794 defeat of a confederation of Delaware, Miami, Shawnee, and Wyandotte tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (near present-day Toledo) led to the Treaty of Fort Greenville (northwest of modern Dayton) in 1795, which opened the present state of Ohio to American settlement.
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The final episode in this domestic drama, an angry brawl between George Rogers Clark and James O’Fallon, had an international audience. General Clark “provoked me without cause,” O’Fallon complained to his estranged wife, “and he suffered for it.” “He attempted to strike me,” the defiant Irishman bragged, “but before his blow could reach, he lay sprawling on the floor, from blows which heavily reached him.” From Natchez, where he was monitoring developments in Kentucky as best he could, Governor Manuel Gayoso passed along a different version of the fight in a letter to Governor Carondelet in New Orleans. “O’Fallon has parted from his wife,” Gayoso reported, “who has withdrawn to the house of Clark, her brother, and he, in resentment of this offense has maltreated O’Fallon, even going so far as to break his stick over his head, inflicting injuries from which he had not yet recovered.”
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Hard times may have been forced upon George Rogers Clark, but he was a Virginian, an officer, and a gentleman—and O’Fallon was “a Rogue, Rascal and Villain,” and an Irishman to boot. Gentlemen settled their differences on the field of honor, but a caning—a thorough beating about the head and shoulders with a stout hickory stick often resulting in serious injury and utter humiliation—was the way gentlemen chastised men of inferior status. James O’Fallon was dead at forty-five within months of his encounter with the cane of George Rogers Clark.
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What damage, Gayoso and Carondelet must have wondered, might Clark be capable of
inflicting if he donned a tricolor cockade and marched thousands of men against Louisiana?

Throughout the United States, forty Democratic-Republican societies loosely modeled on the Jacobin clubs of France were clamoring for “the free and undisturbed use and navigation of the Mississippi River [a]s the natural right of the inhabitants of the countries bordering on the waters communicating with the river.” Such was the language of an October 1793 resolution written in Lexington, Kentucky, and endorsed by Democratic-Republican clubs from Vermont to South Carolina.
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The moment was ripe for George Rogers Clark to mount a successful expedition against New Orleans in the autumn of 1793, and his military preparations put real teeth behind the Democratic-Republican societies’ angry rhetoric.

“The feeble attempts which have been made by the executive under the present government, and the total silence of Congress on this important subject” infuriated the influential Democratic-Republican Society of Lexington. Presidential inaction and congressional silence were “strong proofs that most of our brethren in the eastern part of America, are totally regardless whether this our just right is kept from us or not.” Near Pittsburgh, the Democratic-Republican club of Washington County, Pennsylvania, warned that “patriotism, like every other thing, has its bounds,” and that “attachments] to governments cease to be natural, when they cease to be mutual.” Free navigation of the Mississippi was “a right which must be obtained,” the Washington County society declared. “If the general government will not procure it for us, we shall hold ourselves not answerable for any consequences that may result from our own procurement of it.” Frontier Americans “are strong enough to obtain that right by force,” the Lexington club warned, although “we hope … we shall not be driven to use those means to effect it with which we have been furnished by the God of nature.”
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Clark’s main obstacle was money. Genet had sent him only $750, and his personal finances were a mess. But with Michaux en route to Philadelphia with Clark’s request for funds, neighbors and supporters of the Conqueror of the West could make a few things happen. “This kind of Warefare is my Ellement,” Clark assured Genet in October, and “had you fortunately have got my Letter in time … I could have before this time in all probability Executed my first Project that of getting compleat Possession of the Mississippi… but at present the season being far advanced and I find an impossibility of keeping it a secret I of course shall
in some Instance deviate from my first plan and act agreeable to Circumstance.” Preparing for an attack in the spring of 1794, Clark’s associates at Louisville assembled two boats, five hundred pounds of powder, and a ton of cannonballs. More boats were being built at Cincinnati, and Kentucky’s Democratic-Republican clubs at Georgetown, Lexington, and Paris were gathering food, military equipment, boats, ammunition, and “all the encouragement in their power.”
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In the middle of all this activity, with Clark’s urgent pleas for money tucked into his baggage along with seeds and bark samples, Andre Michaux spent the last week of September and the entire month of October visiting prominent Kentuckians and collecting botanical notes and specimens. By November 10 Michaux had only reached Danville, eighty miles east of Clark’s home, were he began in earnest the seven-hundred-fifty-mile trek toward Philadelphia by way of the Cumberland Gap and Wilderness Road. This southern route through Tennessee and Virginia was only forty miles longer than Michaux’s alternative through Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania. With winter approaching it was the wiser choice, and for once Michaux traveled at the pace of a courier rather than botanist. Averaging nearly twenty-five miles a day, he reached Philadelphia on December 12, reported to Genet on the 13th, and met with Jefferson and David Rittenhouse, president of the American Philosophical Society, on the 14th.
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George Rogers Clark’s best opportunity to attack Louisiana had already slipped away in the accumulated delays on the part of Genet and Michaux, and the failures were political, not military. The French minister not only lacked money for Clark, but on December 5 President Washington had informed Congress that he had asked France to recall Citizen Genet. Washington and his cabinet had made the decision in August, and Secretary of State Jefferson had scarcely finished his lengthy letter to the American minister in Paris chronicling Genet’s “gross usurpations and outrages of the laws and authority of our country,” when he had opened an urgent message from the Spanish commissioners in Philadelphia.
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In their letter, Josef Ignacio de Viar and Josef de Jaudenes, Diego de Gardoqui’s successors, informed Jefferson that since mid-July they had been investigating rumors of an expedition against Louisiana and had “managed to get our hands on one of the printed circulars,” which they enclosed. Not surprisingly, since there are three additional copies in his papers, Jefferson recognized the pamphlet as Genet’s address to the citizens of Louisiana, printed in Philadelphia as
Les Français Libres à leurs
frères de la LOUISIANE.
The Spanish consuls were especially troubled by the passage “in which the author promises that the inhabitants of the western part of these States will assist and protect the people of Louisiana whenever they start the revolution.” The author, they felt, was guilty “of plotting, fomenting, and printing in a country that is both neutral and a friend of Spain, projects that quite openly have as their object the stirring up of one of her possessions and separating it from the [Spanish] government.” They asked Jefferson “to tell us whether such an offer has been made with the knowledge of your government.” If not, they hoped the American “government will properly take measures to punish the daring of the man who has proposed, without any authority, to involve the United States” in events that could lead to war. That autumn, Governor Carondelet sent a translation of the printed circular back to Spain, vowing to prevent its dissemination in Louisiana, “since its diffusion in this province, inhabited in great part by French settlers, might have the most fatal consequences not only here but also in the old, inland provinces of the kingdom of New Spain.”
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Viar and Jaudenes also warned Governor Carondelet, in New Orleans, that Genet was “engaged in secretly seducing and recruiting … to form an expedition against Louisiana,” supported by “two ships of seventy-four [guns], and six or eight frigates” from a French fleet that had carried refugees from St. Domingue to the United States. The fleet, they thought, correctly, “will meet with endless obstacles.” Its sailors were on the verge of mutiny and insisted on returning to France, as they eventually did. The danger, Viar and Jaudenes warned Carondelet, was attack by land, “since the perversity of the French, scattered through the whole continent, gives much ground for apprehension.”
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Jefferson’s immediate response, on August 29, signaled a change in attitude toward Genet and Clark that would eclipse the military expedition and open the way for a diplomatic resolution in Pinckney’s Treaty. Jefferson, of course, knew much more than he let on when he promised the Spanish consuls that “the President will use all the powers with which he is invested to prevent any enterprize of the kind proposed.” He also informed them that he was forwarding the printed circular to the governor of Kentucky—the same Isaac Shelby to whom “Mr. Jeff.” had recommended Genet’s emissary, Andre Michaux, only two months earlier—“with instructions to pay strict attention to any endeavors … among the citizens of that state to excite them to join in the enterprize therein proposed or any other, and to use all the means in his power to prevent it.” Just how much authority the president or the governor actually had, remained an open question, and surely “Mr. Jeff.” knew that.
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