Read A Wilderness So Immense Online
Authors: Jon Kukla
But this little event, of France’s possessing herself of Louisiana … this speck which now appears as an almost invisible point in the horizon, is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides of the Atlantic and involve in its effect their highest destinies…. Peace and abstinence from European interference are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.
“That [war] may yet be avoided is my sincere prayer,” Jefferson declared to Du Pont, “and if you can be the means of informing the wisdom of Buonaparte of all its consequences, you will have deserved well of both countries.” Jefferson knew the ways of diplomacy, and he was counting on Pierre Du Pont to convey a virtual ultimatum to Bonaparte—an ultimatum disguised as a private letter of advice to a friend. “You know too how much I value peace,” Jefferson reminded Du Pont, “and how unwillingly I should see any event take place which would render war a necessary resource.” When things really mattered, Jefferson’s words must be read as carefully as they were written: he would go to war unwillingly to keep France from taking Louisiana, but he was not unwilling to go to war.
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Lest there be any doubt of the back-channel diplomatic character of Jefferson’s letter, it is important to recognize that Du Pont was in Washington at the time, and that the president entrusted his ultimatum directly to Du Pont along with a letter he wanted him to deliver in person to Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, the American ambassador in Paris. Jefferson’s instructions were explicit and detailed.
You will perceive the unlimited confidence I repose in your good faith … when you observe that I leave the letter for Chancellor Livingston open for your perusal. The first page respects a cypher, as do the loose sheets folded with the letter. They are interesting to him and myself only, and therefore are not for your perusal. It is the 2d 3d and
4th pages which I wish you to read … completely and then seal the letter with wafers stuck under the flying seal that it may be seen by no body else if any accident should happen to you. I wish you to be possessed of the subject, because you maybe able to impress on the government of France the inevitable consequences of their taking possession of Louisiana.
Jefferson closed his letter with “one more request, that you deliver the letter to Chancellor Livingston with your own hands, and moreover that you charge Mad[am]e Dupont, if any accident happens to you, that she deliver the letter with her own hands. If it passes thro’ only hers and yours, I shall have perfect confidence in its safety.” When Du Pont sailed for France aboard the
Virginia Packet,
he would be carrying a message of the utmost importance.
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“The cession of Louisiana,” Jefferson advised Livingston, “completely reverses all the political relations of the United States, and will form a new epoch in our political course.” Of the world’s major nations, Jefferson had regarded France as the one that shared America’s common interests, “our natural friend … with which we never could have an occasion of difference.” That had utterly changed. “There is on the globe one single spot,” he wrote,
the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants. France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of defiance.
Spain could have retained Louisiana “quietly for years,” Jefferson told Livingston. In Spain’s “feeble state,” he thought “her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us.” In due time (as he had advised Archibald Stuart from Paris sixteen years earlier) events were certain to force the Spanish to trade Louisiana to the United States as “the price of something of more worth to her.” But “not so … in the hands of France.”
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In French hands, Louisiana would become “a point of eternal friction with us.” The retrocession of Louisiana
render[ed] it impossible that France and the United States can continue long friends…. They, as well as we, must be blind if they do not
see this; and we must be very improvident if we do not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis.
The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. It seals the union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation … and having formed and connected together a power which may render reinforcement of her settlements here impossible to France, make the first cannon which shall be fired in Europe the signal for the tearing up any settlement she may have made, and for holding the two continents of America in sequestration for the common purposes of the United British and American nations.
Jefferson reminded Livingston, as he reminded Du Pont, that he was not eager for war: “This is not a state of things we seek or desire,” he wrote, but “it is one which this measure, if adopted by France, forces on us.” Nor did he fear the might of Bonaparte’s armies, “for however greater her force is than ours, compared in the abstract, it is nothing in comparison of ours, when to be exerted on our soil.”
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No one expected the Treaty of Amiens to last forever. If Bonaparte took possession of Louisiana, Jefferson warned, the United States would “necessarily” ally itself with Great Britain “as a belligerent power in the first war of Europe. In that case, France will have held possession of New Orleans during the interval of a peace, long or short, at the end of which it will be wrested from her.”
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Bonaparte, Jefferson suggested, should ponder the meager benefits that he could expect from a “few years’ possession of New Orleans.” In time of peace, France did not need Louisiana, for American merchants stood ready to supply her islands in the West Indies with all the provisions they required—and in time of war, French shipping “would be so easily intercepted.” He encouraged Livingston to bring these considerations to the attention of the French government “in proper form,” not as a threat but merely “as consequences not controllable by us, but inevitable from the course of things.” France, he hoped, would “look forward and … prevent them for our common interest.”
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There was only one compromise that Jefferson was willing to entertain. If France insisted on taking possession of the western watershed of the Mississippi, he ventured, “she might perhaps be willing to look about for arrangements which might reconcile it to our interests. If anything could do this, it would be the ceding to us the island of New Orleans and
the Floridas.” Only that could “relieve us from the necessity of taking immediate measures for countervailing such an operation by arrangements in another quarter”—a military alliance with Great Britain.
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From all reports, Jefferson knew “that the troops sent to St. Domingo, were to proceed to Louisiana after finishing their work in that island,” and he knew, better than did Bonaparte, that “the conquest of St. Domingo will not be a short work. It will take considerable time, and wear down a great number of soldiers”—and this reality bought valuable time for negotiation. “Every eye in the United States is now fixed on the affairs of Louisiana. Perhaps nothing since the revolutionary war, has produced more uneasy sensations through the body of the nation.” France has still enjoyed “a strong hold on the affections of our citizens generally,” Jefferson admitted. If Bonaparte came to his senses, peace and friendship might continue. If not, then war was “inevitable from the course of things.”
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Jefferson again took pains to emphasize, as he had done with Du Pont, that his warnings were more candid and personal than Livingston’s official correspondence with Secretary of State Madison. “I have thought it not amiss, by way of supplement to the letters of the Secretary of State,” he said, “to write you this private one, to impress you with the importance we affix to this transaction.” In closing he asked Livingston “to cherish Dupont. He has the best disposition for the continuance of friendship between the two nations, and perhaps you may be able to make a good use of him.”
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The wily president was making good use of both men, for without mentioning the idea anywhere in his letter to Livingston, Jefferson was entrusting Du Pont with a tentative idea that the president was not yet ready to commit to paper, even in a private letter to his ambassador: perhaps the United States could buy New Orleans. As Du Pont saw it, the only way Jefferson could persuade “France to a friendly surrendering of her property” was through a “payment of money.” Calculate the cost of a war, Du Pont advised.
Consider what the most fortunate war with France and Spain would cost you. And contract for a part—a half, let us say. The two countries will have made a good bargain. You will have Louisiana … for the least possible expense; and this conquest will be neither [animated] by hatred nor sullied by human blood.
“It is my earnest advice that you place a good estimate on [New Orleans],” Du Pont urged, “even a liberal and generous one … calculated
to impress a court.” Once a price had been settled, arranging “the manner of payment… is a minor matter which would straighten itself out.”
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When Pierre Du Pont sailed for Paris in May 1802, he carried Jefferson’s private letter to Chancellor Livingston about the strategic importance of New Orleans as well as the president’s secret thoughts about
buying
New Orleans. “Agreement as to the price is the main thing,” Du Pont had assured Jefferson, “the rest of your instructions are easy to follow and will be followed exactly.” Through the summer of 1802 Livingston and Du Pont, respectively, worked the official diplomatic channels of diplomacy and the informal networks around Bonaparte. By October they had a price in view: $6 million for “New Orleans and the two Floridas,” with France reserving “for herself absolutely all other territory … situated on the right bank of the Mississippi.” The negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase at last were under way.
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The cession of Louisiana is an excellent thing for France. It is like selling us a ship after she is surrounded by the British fleet. It puts into safe keeping what [France] could not keep herself for England could take Louisiana in the first moment of war, without the loss of a man. France could neither settle it nor protect it: she is therefore rid of an incumbrance that wounded her pride, [while France] receives money and regains the friendship of our populace.
—George Cabot to Rufus King, July 1, 1803
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The century which has recently expired… began with war, and it terminated with war. Hence arises a melancholy reflection, that a practice which, it might be supposed, could only exist in the absence of civilization, has been found to prevail in an age of refinement.
—“Thoughts on the Opening of the Nineteenth Century,” 1804
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P
ERHAPS IT WAS
the family’s Scots heritage that made Robert an especially popular first name among the wealthy Livingstons of colonial New York. The colony’s first Robert Livingston, an immigrant from the Scottish border county of Roxburgh, had established himself as a frontier merchant at Albany in the 1670s and married into the patrician Van Rensselaer family. By his death in 1728 this great-grandfather of Jefferson’s envoy to Napoleon was lord of the quasi-feudal Manor of Livingston, with one hundred sixty thousand acres stretching from the banks of the Hudson River east to Massachusetts. Landed wealth and tenants gave the Livingstons and their peers—De Lanceys, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers—preeminence in the society and politics of colonial New York.
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The ambassador’s grandfather, also named Robert, built his estate on the Hudson at Clermont, in Dutchess County, where in 1718 he christened his son, the ambassador’s father and namesake, Robert Robert Livingston. The repetition was intended to distinguish “The Judge,” as the envoy’s father came to be known, from several cousins and uncles. Born in New York City on November 27, 1746, the younger Robert Robert Livingston, Jefferson’s ambassador, was named for his father and known as “The Chancellor.” He grew up in the city but spent his holidays at Clermont, where he was “very fond of country life, of shooting, and taking solitary walks with his gun.” At King’s College, now Columbia University, the future diplomat developed a close friendship with John Jay, who was a year ahead of him. Graduating in a class of eight in May 1765, Livingston presented a commencement address titled “In Praise of Liberty” at Trinity Church that won accolades from the
New York Gazette
for its “sublimity” and “graceful propriety.” John Jay contrasted his friend’s vivacity, self-confidence, and natural intuition about men and women with his own bashfulness and pride. Livingston, Jay thought, was “formed for a citizen of the world … [with] talents and inclination for intrigue.”
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Admitted to the bar in 1770, Livingston practiced law in partnership with Jay and represented New York in Congress from 1775 through 1785, where he served with Jefferson on the committee appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence. In 1781 Livingston was chosen as America’s first secretary of foreign affairs, where he worked closely with his old friend during Jay’s diplomatic mission to Spain. A staunch supporter of the Constitution during New York’s ratification contest, Livingston had the honor of administering the oath of office to President George Washington in 1789 by virtue of his position as chancellor of New York. Passed over for appointment by the Washington administration, however, Livingston soon aligned himself and his family with the Jeffersonian Republicans. He opposed Alexander Hamilton’s funding program, “openly declaring] against these measures of the federal government which tend to introduce a moneyed aristocracy and to annihilate the State governments.” Political differences also ended his friendship with Jay. Writing as “Aristides” in response to a nasty newspaper attack mistakenly attributed to his boyhood friend, Livingston denounced Jay as a man whose “cold heart, gradated like a thermometer, finds the freezing point nearest the bulb.” The Chancellor fought vigorously against the Jay Treaty of 1795, and he ran unsuccessfully against Jay for the governorship of New York that same year.
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