A Wilderness So Immense (55 page)

Hoisting the American Colors,
by Thure de Thulstrup, was painted about
1903
to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. It hangs in the Sala Capitular of the Cabildo in New Orleans, where Claiborne, Wilkinson, and Laussat signed the formal transfer of sovereignty from France to the United States on December 20, 1803. Early in 1804, Americans recreated the symbolism of this dramatic event at three other locations. Captain Amos Stoddard represented both France and the United States at St. Louis, the administrative center for Upper Louisiana. Acting for Laussat, Stoddard accepted Upper Louisiana from the Spanish lieutenant governor, Carlos Dehault Delassus, on March g, 1804. The next day Stoddard lowered the French tricolor and raised the Stars and Stripes as he took formal possession of St. Louis and Upper Louisiana for the United States. A week later, on March 18, Captain Daniel Bissell raised the American flag in a similar ceremony at New Madrid. And, finally, in April 1804 Captain Edward Demaresque Turner raised the American flag over Natchitoches, the oldest European settlement in the Louisiana territory. “I took possession of this post on the 26th,” Turner reported to Claiborne. “The French Flag superseded the Spanish at eleven, and the American the French at 12 o’clock
—
to the seeming satisfaction of everyone.”
(Courtesy Louisiana State Museum)

As the representatives of the two republics stepped onto the main balcony of the Cabildo,

By day’s end Wilkinson met privately with Casa Calvo and the visiting governor of West Florida, Don Vizente Folch, to protest that his secret Spanish pension had fallen $20,000 in arrears. From the Cabildo that evening, where he anticipated his own night “without repose” while Claiborne attended a series of lavish balls that once again lasted far into the morning, Wilkinson dashed off a “hasty Scral” to Secretary of State Madison. Rumors “of an intention to fire the Town” had Wilkinson and one hundred seventy American troops patrolling the city on foot and on horseback. “I apprehend no Danger,” the general wrote, “but the horrors of a sinister attempt, makes it my duty to prevent one.”
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At about one o’clock in the morning, Wilkinson added a postscript to his note. “Every thing in the City is still tranquil,” he wrote, but to ensure “the continuation of this tranquility” he asked Madison to send “a Garrison of 500 Regulars … as soon as possible.” As they had stood on the balcony of the Cabildo that afternoon, Wilkinson and Claiborne had been shocked by the sight of free colored militiamen helping to raise the Stars and Stripes over New Orleans. Of all the potential threats to the new regime in Louisiana, “the formidable aspect of the[se] armed Blacks and Malattoes, officered and organized,” was the one that Wilkinson found most “painful and perplexing.” Although a few weeks later the general could report that the colored militiamen no longer sported the tricolor cockade of the French Revolution and had “universally mounted the Eagle in their Hats and avow[ed] their attachment to the United States,” this patriotic gesture could not diminish the new American administration’s dilemma. Claiborne and Wilkinson knew that their actions were being watched closely in Louisiana and throughout the
country. (As interim governor, Claiborne may also have been aware of Wilkinson’s self-serving opinion that Louisiana needed “a Military executive Magistrate.”)
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“My principal difficulty,” Claiborne wrote, “arises from two large Companies of people of color, who are attached to the Service, and were esteemed a very Serviceable Corps under the Spanish Government.” As in other Spanish Caribbean provinces, Louisiana’s colored militia embodied the political and social elite of the free nonwhite population. The right to bear arms and to wear uniforms distanced them from the slave population, while participation in the militia afforded men of color the opportunity to associate with whites as near equals—a situation virtually unknown elsewhere in the United States.
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Of the many differences between the rest of America and its new polyglot territory, the contrast between the Caribbean three-caste society and the American black-white, slave-free dichotomy was perhaps the most striking. There were, of course, free blacks living in the Atlantic states (especially in antebellum Maryland) but their presence in American society was anomalous compared to the free people of color in Louisiana and the Caribbean. Genteel toleration of cultural and ethnic difference was one thing—New Orleans cuisine was delicious, its music agreeable, its people handsome—but
armed
free people of color were dangerously reminiscent of St. Domingue. Militia companies of free men of color represented a frightening assertion of political demands and social aspirations.

Claiborne described his options in a letter to the secretary of state. If he granted new commissions for the colored militia companies it “might be considered as an outrage on the feelings of a part of the Nation”—slaveholders worried about upholding “principles of Policy which the Safety of the Southern States has necessarily established” (his wordy euphemism for slavery). “On the other hand,” Claiborne lamented, “not to be re-commissioned, would disgust them” and create “an armed enemy in the very heart of the Country.”
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Claiborne accurately characterized his confrontation with diversity as the “principal difficulty” he faced as governor of the new territory. And once again, the events of the Louisiana Purchase were shaped by events and attitudes from the world at large. “The People of Colour are all armed,” Wilkinson wrote, “and it is my Opinion a single envious artful bold incendiary”—a man like Toussaint L’Ouverture—“might produce those Horrible Scenes of Bloodshed and rapine, which have been so frequently noticed in St. Domingo.”
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While Americans and French-speaking whites demanded the suppression
and even banishment of the colored militia officers, fifty-five leading free people of color offered themselves to Claiborne as a corps of volunteers. Proud of their military service under the Spanish and French regimes, they voiced “the fullest confidence in the Justice and Liberality of the [American] Government towards every Class of Citizens.” Hoping that their confidence was warranted, they also petitioned Claiborne for assurances of their own “personal and political freedom” according to Article III of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, which promised inhabitants of the territory “all rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States.”
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Notable among the fifty-five proud men who signed this petition were Pierre Bailly and his son. A decade earlier Governor Carondelet had deported the elder Bailly—then known as Pedro—to Cuba for his “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality” and for “having made remarks against the Spanish government… showing himself to be inclined to the principles of the French rebels.” The Spanish governor of Louisiana had found Bailly guilty of advocating social equality between whites and free men of color. Now Pierre Bailly, his namesake son, and fifty-three other proud free men of color were only asking the new American governor to live up to his nation’s ideals of “Justice and Liberality… toward every Class of Citizens.”
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“Our population consists of people of allmost all nations,” the American-born New Orleans merchant Benjamin Morgan had written after news of the Louisiana Purchase reached the city, but the most vexing question was

On January 16, 1804, when the leaders of Louisiana’s free colored militia petitioned William C. C. Claiborne for justice, the United States formally confronted the profound human consequences of the Louisiana Purchase for the first time. “On this particular Corps,” Claiborne admitted as he asked the administration for guidance, “I have reflected with much anxiety.”
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President Jefferson’s response was telling. At a cabinet meeting on February 18 attended by all four secretaries and his attorney general, Jefferson resolved (mixing precision and cunning in a way that drove his enemies
crazy) “that the militia of Colour shall be confirmed in their posts, and treated favorably, till a better settled state of things shall permit us to let them neglect themselves.” Claiborne was instructed to confirm the colored militiamen in their ranks, provide them with a regimental banner, and buy time. White Louisiana planters, however, were too impatient to wait until Jefferson’s better settled state of things allowed the free blacks and mulattoes time merely to neglect themselves. Having successfully pressured Laussat to reinstitute the restrictive provisions of the Code Noir, they pressed Claiborne in the same direction.
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In June, under the pretense of reorganizing the entire territorial militia, Claiborne put white officers in command of the free men of color—all the while dreading that in time “this quarter of the Union must, I fear, experience in some degree, the Misfortunes of St. Domingo.” The compromise satisfied no one. Within weeks a free black named Stephen betrayed a plot among the city’s slaves and free people of color (a substantial majority of the population). Their plan involved a revolt to free the slaves and overthrow American rule, it was said, and a Spanish invasion force from Florida led by former governor Casa Calvo—the same Casa Calvo who was managing Wilkinson’s secret pension.
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Federalist critics of the Louisiana Purchase called the place “a howling wilderness” and “an immense wilderness.” They damned it as “an untrodden waste for owls to hoot and wolves to howl in,” “the realm of alligators and catamounts,” and “an empire that is boundless, or whose bounds are as yet unexplored.” They scorned the “unmeasured world beyond that river” as a “vast region [of] still wild land.” What frightened Americans most, however, was not the familiar wilderness west of the Mississippi but the alien urban population at its mouth—that
“Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum
of savages and adventurers.”
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On any given day in 1803, New Orleans played host (as well as bartender, croupier, and madam) to a few hundred transient mercantile agents, riverboat men, barge hands, sailors, and naval officers whose antics helped earn the city its notoriety in the American imagination—for there
was
a place in New Orleans called the Rising Sun.
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Of the city’s 8,050 permanent residents in about 1803, however, 92 percent comprised the elements of the three-caste societies of the Caribbean and Latin America: 3,300 French-speaking Creoles, 2,800 slaves, and 1,300 free people of color. The remainder were Spanish officials and troops, enterprising Anglo-Americans, and refugees from St. Domingue (whose numbers would swell to ten thousand by the end of the decade).
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John L. Bóqueta de Woiseri’s 1803
Plan of New Orleans
depicts the walled city of New Orleans on the Mississippi River with fauburg St. Mary upriver (left). Bayou St. John, which flows to Lake Pontchartrain, is at the top of de Woiseri’s map
—
connected to the city by the straight line of the Carondelet Canal and the winding roadway along a natural ridge to the right. Inset images show (top left) the Mississippi River; (top right) the environs of New Orleans; and (bottom left) the Cabildo, St. Louis Cathedral, and Presbytere on the Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square).
(Courtesy Louisiana State Museum)

Two centuries ago, amid a “gabble of tongues” and an array of ivory, café au lait, copper, and ebony complexions in the streets and markets of New Orleans, a nation that habitually and legally regarded people either as black or white began an encounter with ethnic and cultural diversity that has been sustained by subsequent expansion and immigration.
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American fascination with the “unmeasured world” beyond the Mississippi River had long preceded the fortuitous acquisition of the Louisiana territory. Had Andre Michaux and Citizen Genet been more effective in the 1790s, Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society would have sent explorers up the Missouri River ten years before the Corps of Discovery headed west from St. Charles, Missouri, under the command of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on May 21, 1804.
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When they disparaged Louisiana as “an empire … whose bounds are as yet unexplored,” the administration’s Federalist critics were right. “The farther we go northward, the more undecided is the boundary,” the French minister of marine and colonies, Denis Decrès, had written in 1802, for