A Wilderness So Immense (31 page)

The ultimate failure of George Rogers Clark’s expedition was not the work of his adversaries but of his patron. Citizen Genet’s deteriorating relationship with Washington’s administration, exacerbated by the months of dawdling for which Genet and Michaux were solely responsible,
gave Spanish Louisiana the “accidents” and “measures” for which Carondelet and Gayoso had desperately hoped.
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In the decade ahead, the fate of Louisiana would not be decided by George Rogers Clark and an army of Kentucky frontiersmen. After 1794 the destiny of the Mississippi River and its watershed would be determined by American statesmen, by European armies and diplomats, by rebellious Caribbean slaves, and by ordinary American farmers and merchants.

“Causes unforeseen had put a stop to the march of two thousand brave Kentuckians, who were about to go and put an end to the Spanish despotism on the Mississippi,” the French agent August Lachaise lamented to the Democratic-Republican Society of Lexington in May 1794, “where Frenchmen and Kentuckians, united under the banners of France, might have made one nation, the happiest in the world—so perfect was their sympathy.” Perhaps. But the perspective of Governor Isaac Shelby was closer to the mark: “My letter of the 13th January, 1794,” Shelby recalled,

Responding to the pressure created by George Rogers Clark’s expedition and Governor Isaac Shelby’s ultimatum, on November 24, 1794, the Senate of the United States confirmed Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina, as President Washington’s envoy to Madrid, where he was charged to negotiate a commercial treaty in which “our right to the free use of the Mississippi River shall be most unequivocally acknowledged and established, on principles never hereafter to be drawn into contestation.”
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Goethe’s new era of world history was dawning over the American frontier.

O
N MONDAY
, July 7, 1794, Carlos IV and his court were in Madrid, moving from the spring gardens of Aranjuez to La Granja de San Ildefonso, the summer palace in the mountains near Segovia, about forty miles northwest of the capital. The king and his chief minister, Manuel Godoy, now duke of Alcudia, had convened a meeting of their Council of State for a sweeping reconsideration of Spain’s diplomatic situation in Europe and the Americas. The war against France was not going well. In fact, at that moment a French army was advancing across the Pyrenees, despite reports of turmoil in Paris where
sans culottes
were rioting in the streets again over food shortages and the rising price of bread. In three weeks, more drastic news would arrive from Paris when the sinister Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s future head of secret police, and a coalition of Maximilien Robespierre’s political enemies brought the arch-Jacobin and the radical party’s leaders to the guillotine at the Place de la Revolution on the evening of July 28—the eleventh day of Thermidor by the revolutionary calendar.

Across the Atlantic, the deposed French minister to the United States, Edmond Charles Genet, having declined a return trip to Paris and a probable date with the guillotine, was heading for the Arcadian bliss of a three-hundred-twenty-five-acre farm near Jamaica, Long Island, and the loving arms of the New York belle Cornelia Tappan Clinton, daughter of the state’s ardently republican governor. In the Mississippi Valley, George Rogers Clark was establishing himself in St. Louis, on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, to escape creditors hounding him with bills for provisions, boats, and arms assembled for the aborted expedition against Louisiana.

In New Orleans, Governor François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, was tallying up the cost of his defenses against Clark—about $294,562, including $12,000 in bribes to General James Wilkinson and $8,640 in reimbursements for Wilkinson’s expenses “to retard, disjoint and defeat the mediated irruption of General Clark in L[ouisian]a.”
The governor was also writing to Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the British lieutenant governor for Upper Canada, to suggest a joint campaign of Canadian troops and “warlike Indian tribes” against the American frontier settlements.

While Governor Carondelet dreamt of employing Spain’s current alliance with Britain in the defense of Louisiana against the Americans, Godoy, however, was preparing to abandon that alliance in order to end Spain’s disastrous war with France. With this impending turnabout in mind, Godoy was troubled by the news from London of the arrival on June 8, 1794, of United States chief justice John Jay, dispatched as a special envoy by President Washington to negotiate a treaty that maintained American neutrality and averted a war over British affronts on the high seas and in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. Caught once again in a monumental clash between Britain and France, both the Americans and the Spanish were negotiating from weakness.
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Godoy advised the Council of State that “if the United States should succeed in reaching a reconciliation with England,” Spain’s “situation in respect to the States [would become] even more critical.” Great Britain, he feared, “was already acting as if she intended to declare war on [Spain] on some pretext or another … [and] establish her sovereignty over all the seas.”

For the past five years, since Diego de Gardoqui’s departure from New York in October 1789, Spain and the United States had made scant progress in the negotiations begun by John Jay and Gardoqui in 1785. As instructed, Gardoqui’s successors in New York and Philadelphia, Josef Ignacio de Viar and Josef de Jaudenes, had done little—while their American counterparts in Spain, the ailing William Carmichael and Jefferson’s trusted protégé William Short, had been shunted back and forth between Godoy and Gardoqui in a transparent game of deliberate procrastination.
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Part of the problem, Short explained, was the Americans’ status as diplomats of the third rank—ordinary charges d’affaires. By the diplomatic etiquette of the Spanish court, Carmichael and Short had “no opportunity of speaking with the Minister until [their foreign rivals] of the first and second order have finished their audience.” By then, Short groaned, Godoy “has had his head already saturated with their communications and is on tip-toe generally with his watch in his hand to be precisely at the hour assigned with the King or elsewhere.”
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As long as it had suited their purposes, Godoy and Gardoqui had impatiently glanced at their watches, hurried to other appointments, and generally put off the Americans with one excuse after another—but all
that was about to change. Now it was time, Godoy told Gardoqui and the other members of his council of state, “to take the precautions which prudence and necessity” required. “One of these was to procure friends” among those nations “who could help us most and who as enemies could most harm us,” Godoy announced, and “such precisely were the United States.”
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“In addition to insuring our possessions on that continent,” Godoy advocated friendship toward the United States as a means of “depriving the English of the great assistance which they got from those provinces in the war before the last”—the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War. Carried away by his rhetoric, Godoy even voiced the unlikely thought that a friendly overture to the United States might “enable us to count them for our own defense, and for offense against the enemy.” Then he promptly focused again on the real situation. “The time had come,” Godoy believed, when negotiations with the United States

At this point in this pivotal meeting, Godoy asked the council “to weigh and combine the different matters, points and circumstances.” Then he sat down to hear their suggestions.

For Godoy, more than the fate of the Mississippi River was at stake. In a meeting of the council just three months earlier, with Carlos IV present, the veteran minister Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, count of Aranda, had attacked not only Godoy’s handling of the war with France but his capacity for high office as well. Godoy had responded tolerably well (depending on whose account of the incident one trusts), but it was Aranda who lost the encounter when the king took offense at a sarcastic zinger aimed at the royal favorite. “With my father you were stubborn and insolent,” Carlos IV interrupted, “but you never went so far as to insult him in council.” Within two hours the count of Aranda was locked in a carriage heading south to Granada, where he spent the next year in confinement at the palace of the Alhambra.

Manuel Godoy was twenty-seven years old, “conscious of the paucity of his years and experience,” and acutely aware of the dangers he faced. The court was buzzing about the three-month-old Princess Francisco de Paula—born to Queen Maria Luisa in March—whose striking resemblance to Godoy, at least in the eyes of those who doubted the king’s
paternity, revived old gossip with a new Jacobin spin: “Godoy,” taunted a verse circulated by a republican conspirator,

Aranda’s criticisms also had the sting of truth. The year-old war with France was not going well. Royal troops who had advanced gloriously against the republican enemy last year were being pushed back across the Pyrenees. Their British ally had demonstrated more enthusiasm for destroying the French fleet than for helping Spain on the ground. Carondelet’s and Gayoso’s reports from Louisiana about Clark’s impending attack were consistently bleak, and the separatist plots of Wilkinson and others had come to nothing. Spain faced serious choices.

As Godoy sat down, Diego de Gardoqui took the floor. “In corroboration of what the Duke of Alcudia explained,” the crown’s resident American expert began, “the greatest evil that could happen to Spain was that that new power [the United States] should succeed in uniting with England to work in common accord against this monarchy.” Gardoqui then produced a three-year-old memorandum he had written to Floridablanca advocating a settlement of the question of Mississippi navigation. He went on to describe his negotiations with John Jay, their tentative agreement in 1786, and “the failure of Congress to accept the same.” Brandishing a map of North America to illustrate his arguments, Gardoqui described a “strong pro-British party in America, particularly in the northern states,” and warned that these commercial interests “might succeed in dominating the whole country if Spain did not take advantage of their irritation” over English “spoliations” against the rights of neutral shipping on the high seas.
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Gardoqui’s views were seconded by the veteran councilor Pedro Rodriguez, count of Campomanes, who advocated securing the friendship of the United States by “granting] them some extension of lands as they desired.” If a generous settlement of the boundaries won American friendship, Campomanes argued, “the sacrifice of between thirty and fifty leagues … was not of so much importance” compared to the risk of “losing all.” As for the Mississippi, Campomanes conceded that England had had no authority to grant the right of navigation to the United States
in 1783. Nevertheless, when “he observed the ardor which those States had for it, and the efforts which they were making to get it,” Campomanes reminded the council “that the free navigation of a river through the territories of different princes was no new thing.” Godoy and Gardoqui had offered “powerful reasons … for gaining the friendship of the [United] States,” Campomanes concluded, and “he was of the opinion that the free navigation of the Mississippi might be considered in terms … most useful to Spain.”
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