Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
Haiti had affected not merely the world of European diplomacy, but the vast underworld of sailors, slaves, and debtors that made up the Atlantic underclass. Stories of the revolution, violent political ideals, and a commitment to freedom at all costs were spreading like a contagion from person to person—creating an epidemic that the planters of Louisiana could barely begin to understand. To the planters, the Haitian rebels were like rabid dogs. They saw insanity and bloodlust, rather than any political vision or humanistic ideal.
As aristocratic French planters like Jean Noël Destrehan worked to build a new Saint Domingue on the shores of the Mississippi, they did not realize the extent to which they were also creating the conditions that allowed the Haitian revolution to occur. More than any other place in North America, Louisiana was becoming known for its brutal conditions. When slaves across the United States spoke with dread of being “sold south” or “sold down the river,” they were speaking of the slave plantations around New Orleans. Nowhere in America was slavery as exploitative, or were profits as high, as in the cane fields of Louisiana. Slaves worked longer hours, faced more brutal punishments, and lived shorter lives than any other slave society in North America.
But as planters and government officials raked in the profits from this exploitative situation, they could not quiet the revolution the black Haitians had unleashed. Neither the American immigrants who rushed into Louisiana nor the long-settled French planters they met there fully realized the dangers that threatened the new order they hoped to establish. Unbeknownst to them, the slaves who labored on the region’s sugar plantations were preparing to stage the greatest challenge to slave power in the history of North America.
I
n 1803, keenly observant of Napoleon’s preoccupied state, Jefferson sent a representative, Robert Livingston, to negotiate for the acquisition of New Orleans and its environs. Despite his discomfort with purchasing a colony, Jefferson authorized Livingston to pay up to $10 million for the city—believing the acquisition of the port essential to national security. Upon hearing of Livingston’s offer, Napoleon saw a chance to finally get rid of his troublesome American colonies and to make some money to fund his European wars at the same time. He offered to sell the United States all of Louisiana for only $15 million in cash. Without waiting for Jefferson’s approval, after just nineteen days of negotiation, Livingston accepted the offer on behalf of his nation.
It was a massive purchase at a bargain price. The new territory doubled the young republic’s size. Jefferson’s $15 million bought what comprises about a quarter of the current geography of the United States—all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Minnesota, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, and portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. It was a diplomatic coup of gigantic proportions, a significance not lost on Jefferson and his contemporaries. “We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives,” said Livingston. “From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank.”
But what the Americans did not realize was just how foreign Louisiana was—and the host of difficulties they would face in taking control over this strange new land. Colonized by the French and controlled at times by the Spanish, Louisiana was more Caribbean than American—a place more similar to Haiti than to Virginia.
The boom in sugar plantations and the need to administer what had become a real slave colony made Louisiana even more problematic for an American government inexperienced with the problems of empire. Jefferson and his government quickly demonstrated the degree to which they underestimated the difficulties of governing Louisiana. To administer this vast area, Jefferson turned to William C. C. Claiborne, a fellow Virginian and political disciple distinctly lacking in qualifications.
Not even Jefferson thought first of Claiborne as governor. When he acquired Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803, he had first sought out the Marquis de Lafayette and then James Monroe. After both declined, he turned to William Claiborne—a “secondary character” whom Jefferson appointed at first on an interim basis. Claiborne arrived in New Orleans with a force of 350 volunteers and eighteen boats—a “puny force” that his top general described as “a subject for ridicule.”
Claiborne had his work cut out for him. Only about 10 percent of the residents of New Orleans were Anglo-American; the rest were French, Spanish, African, Native American, or Creole (a person of foreign ancestry born in the New World). These residents did not look fondly upon Anglo-American outsiders like Claiborne. “The prejudices of these newly acquired citizens [are] against every thing American,” wrote a correspondent to the
Orleans Gazette for the Country
. Yet American it was, a new national territory devoted to a single, slave-made staple crop.
When the United States took power in 1804, Claiborne spoke and advised the residents of New Orleans to “guide the rising generation in the paths of republican economy and virtue.” He imagined he could transform this land into a new Virginia. He believed the power of the principles of self-government would naturally create a governable republic. But the simplicity of his scheme did not match the complexities of this wild city, with its proud and autonomous French planters, its anarchistic borderlands, and its dark and mysterious underworld of African slaves.
Looking back, such dreams might have seemed ignorant at best and arrogant at worst, but Claiborne’s beliefs fell into neither category. Claiborne was a romantic in love with the ideology of the American Revolution. His father was a veteran of the American Revolution, and Claiborne had early internalized his father’s love of country.
Growing up in Virginia, young Billy Claiborne (as he was known to his family and friends) used to listen raptly as his father spoke in “glowing colours” against the horrors and brutality of the British. Colonel Claiborne would rail about the “do nothings,” the “armful of sulking slackers who cowered on the side-lines and cheered whichever team seemed to be winning.” For the colonel, the foundation of liberty and the creation of the American Republic were the greatest and proudest moments of his life. And he cast constant denunciations on anyone who might dare to “raise a parricidal hand to destroy the fair fabric of American liberty.” Evidence suggests Billy internalized these early lessons. When only eight years old, he turned in a Latin composition that read, “Dear my country, dearer liberty—where liberty is, there is my country.” Young Claiborne did not consider that the massive slave population might feel the same way; his conception of liberty extended only to white males.
Moreover, perhaps ironically, Claiborne believed liberty could be imposed from above. Like Thomas Jefferson, he saw Louisiana as an imperial colony of alien people who needed to be Americanized with a firm hand. Claiborne wanted the new territory of Louisiana to become American, not merely be an American colony with a French culture. Claiborne had little regard for Europe in general, or France in specific. He dismissed the “corrupt governments of Europe” and expressed no interest in learning European languages. He was a son of Virginia and that was where his heart lay. “The very trees that had shaded him from a summer’s heat, were with him objects of veneration,” wrote Claiborne’s brother. He worshipped the “everlasting marble records the names of the first proprietors.” He was, to say the least, an unlikely ambassador to the proud Frenchmen of New Orleans.
In the first decade of American occupation, Claiborne had to form a government, bring order to a wild frontier zone, and confront the dangers of a sugar colony that relied on the forced labor of a slave population. New Orleans was the most diverse, cosmopolitan, and European city of North America, but Claiborne intended to rapidly make it American. Jefferson’s initial plan was to pay for 30,000 Americans to immigrate into the new territory and “amalgamate” with the French residents. “This would not sweeten the pill to the French,” Jefferson wrote, “but in making that acquisition we had some view to our own good as well as theirs.” Governor William Claiborne, who spoke neither French nor Spanish, would be in charge of this grand task, assisted by a top general, the questionably loyal James Wilkinson.
New Orleans society did not look favorably on the newcomer’s attempts to instill American values in a much older and longer-established French society. “All Louisianians are Frenchmen at heart!” wrote one French official. The French Creoles formed an aristocracy of the blood, impenetrable to outsiders and marked by snobbery. Tracing their ancestries back to French nobility, the planters condemned lesser families as
chacas
,
catchoupines
,
catchumas
, and
kaintucks
—referring in order of social status to tradesmen, peasants, people with African blood, and Americans.
The planters were more interested in parties than in the blessings of republican self-government. When Claiborne arrived in January 1804, the French planters informed him that a celebration was absolutely necessary to win their support and ensure American control. Some 196 gallons of Madeira, 144 bottles of Champagne, 100 bottles of “hermitage” wine, 67 bottles of brandy, 81 bottles of porter, 258 bottles of ale, and 11,360 “Spanish Segars” later, an exasperated Claiborne offended the entire French population by publicly declaring that the French planters would never understand what it meant to be American. In a letter to President James Madison, Claiborne wrote that the greatest of the planters’ “mischiefs” was moral depravity. Their love of money, luxury, and debauchery “had nearly acquired the ascendancy over every other passion.”
Destrehan and his social circle soon taught Claiborne the consequences of interfering with their long-established culture. At a dance that same year, a self-righteous Claiborne ordered the assembly to dance an English dance before the French dances began. The French planters began to raise a hullabaloo, shouting and carrying on. General Wilkinson attempted to address the planters in broken French, but that only made matters worse. To drown out the uproar, Claiborne and the American officers with him started singing “Hail Columbia,” but the Creoles responded with “La Réveil du peuple” and shouts of “
Vive la République
.” Tension soon bubbled into open brawls. Fearful of what might happen next, Claiborne and some of his officers beat a hasty retreat out the back door. Claiborne wrote that from the balls “have proceeded the greatest embarrassments which have hitherto attended my administration.”
After this catastrophic event, recriminations flew in the local newspapers. “Does [Claiborne] think he is among Indians or Yahoos?” wrote one newspaper columnist, accusing Claiborne of being an “uncouth and ignorant intruder” into New Orleans society. Another columnist attacked the American governor for his inability to speak French, his unfamiliarity with French dances, for being embarrassed by “the insignificant part he acted in the circle,” and for sneaking home at sunrise after losing at the gambling tables. Claiborne, in turn, believed the French planters were unfit for self-government.
The conflicts in the New Orleans social world soon spilled out into the larger political sphere. In 1805, Jean Noël Destrehan had led a delegation to Washington, D.C., to protest Claiborne’s appointment and the “oppressive and degrading” form of the territorial government. The delegates bemoaned the “calumnies which represent us in a state of degradation, unfit to receive the boon of freedom,” demanding immediate citizenship and statehood. Destrehan deeply resented the Americans’ treatment of the French planter class—and especially Claiborne’s portrayal of the planters as unfit for self-government. “To deprive us of our right of election, we have been represented as too ignorant to exercise it with wisdom, and too turbulent to enjoy it with safety,” he wrote.
Attacking the arrogant officials who sought to govern Louisiana, “who neither associate with us, nor speak our language,” Destrehan and his friends let off a targeted attack on the monolingual Claiborne. Destrehan wrote that the Spanish were “always careful, in the selection of officers, to find men who possessed our own language, and with whom we could personally communicate.” Rather than study French, Claiborne preferred spending time with older women, “to whose conversation and company through life he was most passionately devoted,” as his brother wrote.
Destrehan touted the great abilities and virtues of the planters. He focused, unsurprisingly, on their noble lineage. “We were among the first settlers; and, perhaps, there would be no vanity in asserting that the first establishment of Louisiana might vie with that of any other in America for the respectability and information of those who composed it.” Destrehan saw this as an infallibly good argument.
Destrehan laid out a clear vision for two possible futures: one marked by continuing tensions with the U.S. government and one marked by recognition of the French planters as citizens and as sovereign people capable of self-government. “Annexed to your country by the course of political events, it depends upon you to determine whether we shall pay the cold homage of reluctant subjects, or render the free allegiance of citizens,” Destrehan wrote.
Claiborne and the government in Washington chose not to honor Destrehan’s requests. Expressing deep doubts about the honesty and trustworthiness of the planters, Claiborne encouraged Madison to give them nothing. “The people had been taught to expect greater privileges, and many are disappointed,” he wrote. “I believe, however, as much is given them as they can manage with discretion, or as they ought to be trusted with until the limits of the ceded territory are acknowledged, the national attachments of our new brothers less wavering, and the views and characters of some influential men here better ascertained.” He expressed particular doubt about Destrehan and his friends, and worried that allowing the citizens of Louisiana a representative rather than imperial government would be “a hazardous experiment.” Henry Adams, a prominent historian of the period, wrote, “the lowest Indian tribes had more right of self-government than members of Congress are willing to give the people of lower Louisiana.”
Claiborne complained constantly of New Orleans’s diverse mix of Spaniards, Frenchmen, and African slaves. “Renegadoes from the Atlantic states, who repairing in shoals to New Orleans, more greedy than the locusts of Egypt, expecting and soliciting all the offices in the gift of the new government, and when disappointed, setting up and supporting venal and corrupt presses to vilify and abuse him, and to exhibit in an odious point of view every act of his public life that envy and malice could seize on as the subject of accusation,” Claiborne’s brother, Nathaniel, wrote, describing the hardships that William complained of in his first years.
Claiborne was right to complain of the planters’ printing presses, which they used on many occasions to attack him personally and politically. Perhaps their worst moment of spite came soon after the death of Claiborne’s wife Eliza from yellow fever. In popular newspapers, they portrayed the governor’s social life as a constant attempt to marry up—to find a richer and more socially prominent French woman who would aid him in his quest for power and acceptance. They spread rumors that he wanted a woman who would help him overcome his “pecuniary difficulty.”
A newspaper satirist wrote about a dream in which he was walking through the quiet and dark streets of New Orleans late one evening. But turning a corner, he came upon the governor’s mansion, where he heard music and dancing and saw bright lights from the windows. While gazing up, he caught sight of the ghost of Claiborne’s dead wife gazing up too at her husband’s party. Turning away in agony at the thought of her husband celebrating so soon after her death, she “bent her willing steps towards the graves of Louisiana.” One can only imagine how Claiborne felt upon reading this particular attack—or experiencing the general vitriol of the arrogant Frenchmen he intended to govern. Bursting with high ambitions, Claiborne was highly sensitive to criticism and took great offense at these attacks.