Read A Wilderness So Immense Online
Authors: Jon Kukla
After the war, Thomas Pinckney served two terms as governor of South Carolina in 1787 and 1788 while his brother and cousin safeguarded their state’s interests in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, defending both slavery and the slave trade and insisting that treaties be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. Thomas Pinckney presided over the state convention that ratified the Constitution. In the politics of the new republic, the brothers offered firm but temperate support for Alexander Hamilton’s economic and commercial policies (while their cousin Charles’s suspicion of northern partisanship inclined him toward Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans). Eventually the Federalist party advanced both brothers as candidates for vice president,
Thomas in 1796 and Charles Cotesworth in 1800, but in the meantime President Washington employed both men on diplomatic missions, Thomas as ambassador to Great Britain in 1791 (and from there to Madrid in 1795) and Charles Cotesworth as minister to France in 1796. If Spain demanded a man of “character, splendor, and carriage,” America had few candidates more eligible than a wealthy Pinckney from Charleston, South Carolina.
President Washington’s choice of Thomas Pinckney as the new minister to Madrid was a devastating disappointment to William Short. “I have been long enough in public service,” he lamented in a private letter to friends, and “I have had all the thorns—others have gathered the roses.” By 1795 the young man now recognized as America’s first professional diplomat had “experienced this in two instances”—Gouverneur Morris’s appointment as ambassador to France and Pinckney’s appointment to Madrid. “It shall be my fault if I experience it in a third.” In a gracious letter to the secretary of state, however, Short declared that his personal disappointment “will in no degree diminish my earnest wishes for the success of Mr. Pinckney’s Mission (which you will see from my late letters is already insured) nor my best efforts to serve him.”
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Despite Short’s personal disappointment, he and Pinckney worked well together in Spain, in part because the gentleman from South Carolina was sensitive to the parallel between Short’s feelings and his own reaction to Washington’s decision to send John Jay to London. “If I were to say I had no unpleasant feelings” about Jay’s appointment, Pinckney admitted to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, “I should not be sincere; but the sincerity with which I make this declaration will, I trust, entitle me to credit, when I add, that I am convinced of the expediency of adopting any honorable measures which may tend to avert the calamities of war,” and “that I consider Mr. Jay’s … diplomatic experience and general talents, as the most probable method of effecting this purpose.” “Under these circumstances,” he assured Randolph, “I will cheerfully embrace every opportunity of promoting the objects of Mr. Jay’s mission and of rendering his residence here [in London] agreeable.”
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Had he known as much about Spain’s situation as William Short did, Thomas Pinckney probably would have rushed to Madrid as soon as his credentials reached him in London on February 23, 1795—though in fairness to Pinckney and Jay in London, and to Randolph and Washington in Philadelphia, we must remember that Josef de Jaudenes’s mishandling of Godoy’s proposal had so completely obscured its important
message that none of them recognized the urgency of the moment. True to his word, Pinckney lingered in London until Jay completed his negotiations (and even waited a few more weeks to see whether the Senate might ratify it quickly), then left for Madrid on May 15. Traveling by way of the Netherlands and France, Pinckney stopped briefly in Paris to confer with James Monroe, who had succeeded Gouverneur Morris as ambassador to France—a post “which the public good requires to be filled by a Republican”—before arriving in Madrid at what proved to be the absolutely perfect moment on June 28, 1795.
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Godoy was ready to negotiate. At first he assumed that Pinckney’s appointment was a direct response to the offer of alliance, trade, western boundaries, and Mississippi navigation that he thought Jaudenes had communicated to Washington. More significantly, he knew that his representatives in Basle were secretly concluding a treaty with France that would not only break Spain’s alliance with Great Britain but lead, he hoped, to a French alliance. Peace was essential, for French armies had moved south of the Pyrenees, but Godoy feared it would prompt a military retaliation from Britain. These fears were compounded by the possibility that Jay’s Treaty (the terms of which remained unknown to Godoy)
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would create an Anglo-American alliance to the detriment of Spanish interests in the Americas and on the seas.
Despite the worries that plagued Godoy, nothing in the wider world, not even a French invasion force, deterred the Spanish court from its seasonal migrations, which dated back to the reign of Philip II. Spring meant Aranjuez, that oasis of Baroque gardens and orchards in the dusty plains south of Madrid. Summer meant the slopes of the Guadarrama Mountains, the magnificent palace at La Granja de San Ildefonso, and the adjacent hunting park at Riofrío, where the smallest of Carlos IV’s “cottages” was built in Italianate style with about two acres under its roof.
Pinckney saw all these royal residences. Arriving in Madrid on June 28 while the court was still at Aranjuez, he hastened south just in time to follow Their Catholic Majesties and the queen’s paramour back to Madrid for ten days and then on July 10 to San Ildefonso. During the interval in Madrid, Pinckney was able to present himself and his credentials to Carlos IV, meet twice with Godoy, and spend days in consultation with William Short. Happily for both nations (and for the clarity of our story), Short had recently received from Randolph a verbatim copy of Jaudenes’s garbled version of the proposal that the Spanish Council of State had outlined a full twelve months earlier. Godoy was astonished at all that had gone wrong, but in resolving their mutual confusion over this comedy of errors, Pinckney’s negotiations were off to a good start.
As negotiations resumed at the summer palace of San Ildefonso, Godoy set aside his hope for a treaty of alliance and commerce (which was beyond Pinckney’s authority) and focused on the boundary lines and the Mississippi navigation that Pinckney
was
authorized to negotiate. Progress came slowly until a courier arrived with the Treaty of Basle between France and Spain. Signed on July 22 and ratified in Paris on the 29th, it reached Carlos IV on August 3 and he signed it immediately. On August 7 the peace was joyously announced in Madrid, and the pace of Godoy’s negotiations with Pinckney quickened. Worried about the prospect of British retaliation and the possibility of an alliance between the United States and Britain based on the still unknown terms of Jay’s Treaty, the Spanish Council of State authorized the acceptance of a boundary with the United States at 31 degrees north latitude and the concession of American navigation on the Mississippi River, confident that Spain retained “in those and other parts of America … possessions, peoples and rights of great importance and sufficient for our commerce and navigation.”
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Pinckney’s negotiations with Godoy, who had been elevated to the title of Prince of the Peace in recognition of his success at Basle, now entered their final stage. As the two men exchanged drafts and counter-drafts for the final treaty, the last sticking point was American access to the port of New Orleans. Unless the treaty gave American traders a place to unload their flatboats and bateaux near the port of New Orleans so they could transfer their cargoes to oceangoing vessels, Pinckney asserted, the abstract right of Mississippi navigation was “illusory, without utility, and without effect.” Securing this “right of deposit,” Pinckney told Godoy, was “one of the principal objects of his mission.” Godoy responded with a series of vague assurances about a place of deposit near the mouth of the river, but Pinckney stood firm. Their standoff persisted well into October, while the Spanish royal court moved from its summer palace at San Ildefonso to spend the autumn at San Lorenzo, where Carlos IV’s imperial predecessors rested in the marble vault beneath El Escorial.
At this critical moment in the negotiation, the Americans discovered that their two heads—a resident minister long familiar with the ways of the Spanish court and the temporary “envoy extraordinary and sole commissioner plenipotentiary” assigned to close the deal—were better than Godoy’s one. Pinckney and Short agreed that the Spanish “government will certainly give as little as they can” and that only a dramatic “ultimatum” would force Godoy to make good on his verbal “promise as to the depot at N[ew] Orleans.”
The moment had arrived when someone had to blink. The Americans had everything going for them, including the all-important freedom to fail. They knew that President Washington and their colleagues at home had no real hope for the success for the mission beyond “cast[ing] upon Spain the odium of the miscarriage of the negotiation, if at length it should miscarry”—and they sensed that the terms under discussion were the best they could get and the most that Spain could expect. With the prospect of British retaliation looming in Godoy’s mind and the possibility of an Anglo-American alliance haunting his dreams, the Americans sensed that Manuel Godoy, Prince of the Peace, and His Most Catholic Majesty Carlos IV needed (or thought they needed, which amounts to the same thing) a friendly treaty with the United States. Final success required only some kind of jolt to make the Spanish recognize that the terms under discussion were the best that they could ever expect.
When the Spanish had asked for a special ambassador of “character, splendor, and carriage,” they had inadvertently dealt to the visiting Thomas Pinckney a powerful trump card that could not have been played by the resident William Short. President Washington and his cabinet expected little from his mission (which had actually made more progress than anyone else had in the past dozen years), and Short was on hand in case anything useful developed in the months ahead, so on Saturday, October 24, 1795, the aristocratic South Carolinian requested his passport and began packing for home.
Pinckney’s intended departure was no ruse, no ploy, no stratagem—and for that very reason it was supremely effective. Threatening to quit never works unless one is actually ready to go, but Pinckney was dead serious about leaving, and Godoy knew it. Equally important, the royal Council of State knew it, too, which eliminated future grounds for carping about yielding to Pinckney everything the council had agreed to accept back in August.
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On Sunday, October 25, instead of his passport, Manuel Godoy offered Pinckney a right of deposit at New Orleans. That evening, Pinckney reported on the day’s turn of events to William Short, who was then in Madrid. “You were right in your conjecture, my dear Sir,” Pinckney wrote.
The negotiation has been again brought forward and is newly determined—the two points on which we before divided were the facilities of navigation and the spoliations [claimed by neutral Americans for capture by Spanish warships]. On the first we have agreed upon N[ew] Orleans for 3 years paying only storage, but this permission to
be continued unless an equal establishment is assigned elsewhere on die Mississippi. The principle of [Jay’s] British Treaty [which Pinckney had suggested to Godoy] … is agreed upon for the spoliations. We only wait for the wording of this article to be agreed on all points.
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On Tuesday, October 27, 1795, Thomas Pinckney and Manuel Godoy affixed their signatures to the final Treaty of San Lorenzo, as Pinckney’s Treaty is also known.
A few days later, Pinckney and Short traveled together to Paris, leaving Pinckney’s secretary, Charles Rutledge, son of South Carolina’s chief justice, John Rutledge, as temporary deputy of the American legation in Madrid. Short retired to private life in Paris, where he resumed his earlier liaison with the now widowed duchesse de La Rochefoucauld before eventually returning to America at Jefferson’s behest in 1802. Pinckney carried his treaty on to London and promptly home in triumph. The treaty that bears his name—“one of the greatest successes in American diplomacy,” according to the great diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, with “almost immeasurable consequences for the future territorial expansion of the United States”—was ratified by a unanimous vote of the Senate on March 7, 1796, and proclaimed in force on August 2.
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In addition to fixing the American boundary with Spanish Florida and Louisiana at the thirty-first parallel, the Mississippi River was at last open to American trade, with a permanent right of deposit either at New Orleans, for the first three years, or “an equivalent establishment.” When news of Pinckney’s Treaty reached Kentucky, the public reaction was nearly universal jubilation. “The general joy of all ranks and descriptions of citizens,” proclaimed the
Kentucky Gazette
on March 26, 1796, “was never so conspicuous … of which, the firing of artillery, tolling of bells, bonfires etc. etc. were evident testimonies.”
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The science of the engineer and the artillerist can be learned from books, almost like geometry, but the knowledge of the heroic facts of war can only be acquired by study of the history of wars, the battles of great captains, and by experience.
—Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena, 1815—1821
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The art of putting people in their places is foremost in the science of government, but the art of finding a place for the malcontent is certainly the most difficult. [Colonies in] far-off places with landscapes equal to their dreams and desires … [are] one good solution for this social difficulty.
—Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, December 26, 1797
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T
HOMAS JEFFERSON
was not the only man contemplating the future of the world from a book-strewn study in Paris in the 1780s. In his room at the Ecole Militaire at the Champ de Mars (now overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower) on the Left Bank of the Seine, about a mile distant as the
corneille
flies, a brilliant Corsican gentleman-cadet was also contemplating the destinies of nations. Born into a struggling gentry family from Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15, 1769, Nabolione was the second child of Carlo Maria di Buonaparte, a lawyer and Corsican patriot, and Letizia Ramolino Buonaparte. His father served as a prosecutor and judge during the French occupation of Corsica, and was eventually elevated to the lower aristocracy as a count. Through his influence, Napoleon Bonaparte (as his name was translated into French) accepted a scholarship from Louis XVI to study at the royal military college at Brienne and then at the Ecole Militaire. He was graduated on September 28, 1785, at the age of sixteen, and joined the army as a second lieutenant.
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