A Wilderness So Immense (39 page)

Yellow fever finally claimed the life of Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc on November 2, 1802. That same day—at Archahaye, about fifteen miles north of Port-au-Prince on the western coast—Jean-Jacques Dessalines assumed overall command of Haiti’s war for independence.
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Only the arrival of ten thousand reinforcements enabled Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, to prolong the conflict for another year. Rochambeau’s father had fought for liberty with Washington at the battle of Yorktown. The son was a vicious racist committed to a war of extermination against blacks and mulattoes. “To regain St. Domingue,” he wrote, France

Rochambeau combined techniques of mass murder from the Reign of Terror with the grotesque individual tortures of the island’s slave regime. Sixteen of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s former officers were chained to a rock at the harbor of Cap Français. Death claimed the last of them seventeen days later. General Maurepas, who had fought with Toussaint since the beginning, was tied to a mast and forced to watch the drowning of his wife and children while sailors nailed his epaulettes to his bare shoulders. Blacks were chained together and drowned by the boatload, torn to shreds by dogs, and hanged by the score. With greater dispatch and somewhat less depravity, Dessalines and his forces butchered French soldiers and white planters in similar numbers.
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Some three hundred fifty thousand Haitians of all colors died in the decade of carnage on Hispaniola along with as many as sixty thousand French soldiers. Napoleon’s dream of a revived colonial empire in the Caribbean died with them. On November 28, 1803, Dessalines drove Rochambeau and the tattered remnants of the French expedition off the island and into the custody of a British fleet. A month later, on January 1, 1804, the Haitian republic established its independence.
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In March 1801 American diplomats began sending reports of the intended retrocession of Louisiana to Secretary of State James Madison. Since the fall of Robespierre and the collapse of Citizen Genet’s western intrigues in 1793, rumors of a possible transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France had surfaced from time to time in the United States and in foreign capitals. As the new century opened, however, the military successes of Napoleon and his armies made the prospect of French intervention in North America more likely and more dangerous. The secrecy that cloaked Bonaparte’s negotiations and preparations only increased American anxieties about the fate of New Orleans and the Mississippi.

The first hint of the intended retrocession came from Madrid, where the American minister David Humphreys reported a conversation with Lucien Bonaparte on the day after Napoleon’s brother signed an agreement to create the kingdom of Etruria for Maria Luisa’s nephew and son-in-law, Louis of Parma.
“To me,”
Humphreys correctly inferred,
“it affords an additional reason for believing the cession of Louisiana to
France.”
A few days later Rufus King sent a similar message from the Court of St. James’s, where he was monitoring developments on both sides of the Channel in the absence of a permanent American envoy in the French capital. “The opinion which at this time prevails both at Paris and London,” King reported, was “that Spain has … actually ceded Louisiana and the Floridas to France.” King also reported “that it is the opinion of certain influential Persons in France that nature has marked a line of Separation between the People of the United States living upon the two sides of the range of Mountains which divides their Territory”—an attitude that he and John Jay had expressed during the negotiations with Gardoqui in 1785 and 1786. Finally, taking note of a recently published French pamphlet advocating possession of Louisiana as a means to gain
“an influence over the United States,”
King worried “that this cession is intended to have, and may actually produce, Effects injurious to the Union and consequent happiness of the People of the United States.” His sources indicated, in accord with Talleyrand’s idea of using colonies as a safety valve for restless souls and malcontents, that Bonaparte was thinking of peopling Louisiana with veterans from his armies.
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By the end of May—as Robert Livingston arrived in Washington to confer with the president and secretary of state about his appointment as minister to France—Madison was describing “the Cession of Louisiana by Spain to the French Republic … as an event believed to have taken place.” Owing to the secrecy that surrounded Napoleon’s negotiations with Spain, however, no one could be certain about the retrocession or its terms. By November Rufus King had been able to obtain an unauthorized copy of the Convention of Aranjuez, which confirmed the cession of Louisiana. (He probably got it from the British, who were being asked by the French to acquiesce in the creation of the kingdom of Etruria.) Nevertheless, he was still trying to obtain a reliable copy of the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, which “would enable us to determine whether [the cession] includes New Orleans and the Floridas.”
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While Rufus King was carefully monitoring the French diplomacy from his station in London, his conversations with Robert Banks Jenkinson, Baron Hawkesbury, also eliminated any chance for conflict between the United States and Great Britain over Louisiana. On May 29, 1801, the foreign secretary invited King to visit him in Downing Street, where Hawkesbury “very unreservedly expressed” his nation’s aversion to seeing Louisiana “pass under the dominion of France.” Hawkesbury regarded the retrocession of Louisiana as nothing less than a reversal of the outcome of the Seven Years’ War. “The acquisition might enable France to
extend her influence and perhaps her Dominion up the Mississippi and through the [Great] Lakes even to Canada,” while also threatening the security of British islands in the West Indies. Pleasantly surprised by Hawkesbury’s candor, King responded by expressing his view of America’s interests,

“The purport of what I said,” King reported to Madison, “was, that we are content that the Floridas remain in the hands of Spain but should be unwilling to see them transferred except to ourselves.” The result of this solid understanding between Rufus King and Baron Hawkesbury was Great Britain’s quiet support for the American effort to acquire Louisiana.
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As they grew increasingly certain, despite French denials, that a retrocession of Louisiana
was
in the works, Americans quickly perceived the danger inherent in Bonaparte’s preparations for the Leclerc expedition against St. Domingue. These American suspicions were more accurate than they knew. As soon as Leclerc could spare them, Bonaparte envisaged sending several thousand French troops ahead to Louisiana. That bright day never came, of course. The Haitian debacle swallowed up men and provisions originally intended for New Orleans. It also delayed, and ultimately aborted, a separate Louisiana expedition under the command of General Claude Perrin Victor.

Advance planning for the Louisiana expedition began in April 1801, and military and naval preparations commenced along the Dutch coast in the following spring. Bonaparte’s instructions to his talented minister of marine, Denis Decrès, on June 4, 1802, outlined the essence of his plan. “My intention,” the first consul wrote,

More ominously, Bonaparte directed Decrès to plan “for the fortifications and batteries we should have to construct there in order to have a harbor and some men-of-war sheltered from superior forces.” Equally revealing of the first consul’s ambitions was his request that Decrès “have made for me a map of the coast from St. Augustine Florida to Mexico.”
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By the end of summer, Bonaparte had chosen thirty-seven-year-old Lieutenant General Claude Perrin Victor, whose talents he had first noticed at the siege of Toulon in 1793, to command the expedition. Forty-five-year-old Pierre Clement Laussat, an attorney and minor bureaucrat who had avidly supported Napoleon’s coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, was given the subordinate post of civilian governor, or colonial prefect, for Louisiana. In September the ships and material assembled at Dunkerque for the expedition were moved to Hellevoetsluis, near the mouth of the Rhine in the Batavian republic (the French puppet state imposed upon the Netherlands in 1795).
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On October 25 the long-awaited royal order signed by Carlos IV authorizing the transfer of Louisiana arrived in Paris. At the end of November, General Victor left Paris with all the necessary maps, cash in the amount of 881,631 francs, and secret instructions concerning the boundaries and defenses of the colony. “The French government wishes peace,” Victor was told, “but… if war should come, Louisiana would certainly become the theater of hostilities.” The first consul was counting on Victor and three thousand troops “to give Louisiana a degree of strength which will permit him to abandon it without fear in time of war, so that its enemies may be forced to the greatest sacrifices merely in attempting an attack on it.”
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Now came the first of many delays. Vessels and men assigned to the Louisiana expedition had been redirected to St. Domingue. Victor’s departure was postponed to December 22. When more problems arose, Decrès and Bonaparte rescheduled Victor’s military expedition for February and decided to send Laussat ahead “to make all necessary preparations.” From the port of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast north of Bordeaux, Laussat and his family sailed for New Orleans aboard the thirty-two-gun brig-of-war
Surveillant
on January 10, 1803. The talented military engineer Joseph Antoine Vinache accompanied Laussat, but the rest of General Victor’s expedition stayed behind as freezing weather closed the port of Hellevoetsluis through January and February. By mid-March, when the ice melted, a British fleet appeared along the Dutch coast, and April brought a storm that damaged several ships. These final delays proved fortuitous. Early in May, as the repairs to the fleet were nearly complete and the expedition once again made ready to sail, a
courier riding hard from Paris brought a letter from Denis Decrès dated May 3, 1803, informing General Victor that his expedition had been canceled. Bonaparte had sold Louisiana, given up on St. Domingue, and was about to renew his war with Great Britain.
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From his post in London, Rufus King was the first American to alert the Jefferson administration to the preparations for the Leclerc and Victor expeditions. “It is confidently believed,” he wrote on October 31, 1801, “that a considerable Expedition composed of land and Sea forces, is preparing in france, and will soon proceed to St. Domingo, and perhaps to the mississippi.” This development, King thought, underscored the importance of reestablishing America’s diplomatic presence in Paris.
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America had been without an ambassador in Paris since the departure of James Monroe in 1796. The French Directory had not only refused to receive Monroe’s designated replacement, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. It had expelled the South Carolinian while simultaneously unleashing French privateers against American commercial shipping in the naval Quasi-War that persisted from 1797 to 1800. In the last months of his presidency (and the first weeks of Bonaparte’s consulship), John Adams had negotiated a peace settlement in a selfless act of statesmanship that split the Federalist party and doomed his own hopes for a second term. As a result of the Convention of 1800 between the United States and France, when Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office on March 4, 1801, he could pledge his country to “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
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Despite his early admiration for the French Revolution, his fondness for Paris, and his taste for French cuisine and culture, Jefferson knew that his “countrymen have divided themselves by such strong affections, to the French and the English, that nothing will secure us internally but a divorce from both nations; and this must be the object of every real American.” Jefferson and his countrymen were comfortable with their Spanish neighbors. Regardless of French denials, evasions, and secrecy, the new administration and its diplomats continued the guessing game about the retrocession of Louisiana and the goals of the Leclerc and Victor expeditions while President Jefferson weighed his options in light of changing circumstances and reports from abroad.
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Throughout the first year of his presidency, Jefferson prepared himself for the worst. Conversations with his French friend Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, who had fled Paris under the Directory and helped establish the family’s gunpowder factory in Wilmington, Delaware,
helped the president clarify his thoughts about the problem of Louisiana. The occasion of Du Pont’s return to France in the spring of 1802 gave Jefferson a back-channel opportunity to warn Bonaparte of his new policies. “The inevitable consequences of their taking possession of Louisiana,” he advised Du Pont, “will cost France, and perhaps not very long hence, a war which will annihilate her on the ocean.” Europeans were prone to think that they alone had “any right in the affairs of nations,” Jefferson cautioned.