A Wilderness So Immense (12 page)

As the representative of the court of Versailles, Louis-Guillaume Otto was no republican. Still, as a man of the Enlightenment he knew his Montesquieu as well as any of the Americans, for whom the great Frenchman and John Locke were demigods of republicanism. “It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist,” wrote Montesquieu:

Sprawling from Maine to Georgia, the United States was “already of too great extent,” the New Englanders contended, “and … their territory
ought to be reduced rather than augmented beyond all proportion.” Hence it was necessary “to recall the ultimatum which proposed the opening of the Mississippi as a condition sine qua non” for a commercial treaty with Spain.

“Mr. Gardoqui,” Otto continued, “affects the greatest indifference about these negotiations…. He has often said to me that… it would be impossible to prevent contraband trade and other disorders which the Americans would not fail to cause.” Carlos Ill’s main objective was simply to discourage “establishments on the Mississippi which might one day become neighbors so much the more dangerous for the Spanish possessions.”

Montesquieu’s maxim was accepted wisdom in the age of the Enlightenment. Classical history proved that republics were naturally suited to small territories. Sparta had endured by maintaining the “same extent of territory after all her wars,” while Athens and Rome demonstrated the dangers of imperial expansion: decadence, despotism, and eventual collapse. Even as they invoked his theory about the dangers of an extensive republic, however, American congressmen were engaged in exactly the kind of self-interested politics Montesquieu had warned about, when “the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views.”

The depth of sectional division did not escape Louis-Guillaume Otto’s notice, either. “I have had the honor thus far of explaining to you merely the ostensible arguments of the two parties,” Otto reported to Louis XVI and his ministers, “but a long acquaintance with the affairs of this country authorizes me, perhaps, to divine the secret motives of the heat with which each state supports its opinion.” The southern states were “not in earnest” when they contended that closing the Mississippi would force the western frontiersmen to “seek an outlet by way of the [Great] lakes, and … throw themselves into the arms of England.” American patriotism, born of the Revolution, ran deeper in Kentucky than the New Englanders knew. And the rivers that lead to Canada looked more inviting to easterners studying their maps than to farmers loading heavy barrels of flour, salt pork, beef, and other bulky commodities aboard makeshift rafts that floated better downstream than up.

“The true motive” of the vigorous contention between the northern and southern states, Otto believed, was rooted in calculations of sectional political and economic self-interest within a union that was at best only a dozen years old (counting from the First Continental Congress of 1774). The northern states, Otto knew, were “eager to incline the balance toward their side,” while the southern states “neglect no opportunity of increasing the population and importance of the western territory, and of
drawing thither by degrees the inhabitants of New England, whose ungrateful soil only too much favors emigration.” This westward movement of population was a two-fisted blow to New England, Otto observed,

Otto’s analysis did not miss much. Southerners insisted upon access to the Mississippi and New Orleans for the good of themselves and “their establishments in the West.” A treaty containing “only stipulations in favor of the northern fisheries” threatened to increase the prosperity, commerce, and “preponderance of the northern states” in national politics. The French diplomat did not expect the congressmen from either region to give ground, and he knew that Gardoqui would stand firm. Grateful that this diplomatic mess was not in his portfolio, Otto noted that “the conduct of this thorny negotiation is in the hands of Mr. Jay.”

As far as it went, the French diplomat’s assessment of the regional conflict over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations was accurate. But neither Otto nor the American populace knew just how close the nation came to fragmentation. Between January and August 1786, very few men in and around Congress witnessed the full progress of the secret Massachusetts separatist movement. One who did was the attentive and sensible James Monroe.

The nation’s first separatist movement occurred on Monroe’s watch. It began quietly in November 1785, festered for nine months, and then erupted in August. With his ear cocked to the diplomatic stalemate over the Mississippi River, Monroe caught the first hints of the New Engenders’ scheme in January, and witnessed its development during subsequent months. When their talk turned to action, a secret ploy to surrender the Mississippi to Spain, it was James Monroe who sounded the alarm—first in May and then in August 1786.

Soon after John Jay and Diego de Gardoqui began their conversations, Congress had directed Jay “particularly to stipulate the right of the United States to … free Navigation of the Mississippi, from the source to the Ocean.” On this point, Gardoqui had his own explicit instructions
to deny the Americans use of the Mississippi where Spain controlled both banks of the river. Jay and Gardoqui quickly recognized their dilemma and reported the impasse to their superiors. Jay spoke informally with Monroe and other influential members of Congress and Gardoqui sent written reports to Spain. There could be no progress on the Mississippi question (or much else) unless either Congress or Carlos III gave ground, but in the meantime Jay and Gardoqui met weekly and talked cordially.

Whether directly from Jay or perhaps in whispered conversations with New York merchants or New England congressmen, Gardoqui discovered that many influential Americans thought that closing the Mississippi River was just fine. By January, his discussions with Jay were focused on what seemed an attractive compromise. In exchange for guaranteeing fishing rights off Newfoundland and trade privileges in Spanish ports (the equivalent of most favored nation status), Spain asked the United States to surrender navigation of the Mississippi for a period of twenty-five or thirty years. While Gardoqui waited for further guidance from Spain, Jay tested the waters with selected members of Congress. He even spoke to Monroe, who “was appriz’d [of Jay’s thinking] upon my first arrival here in the winter”—around Christmas 1785—but probably not in great detail. The conversation put Monroe on alert for any threats to the Mississippi, and he monitored what he came to regard as “all the previous arrangements [that] those in fav[o]r of [relaxing Jay’s instructions] found necessary to make, to prepare for its reception” in Congress.
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Nevertheless, until early summer, Monroe found no reason to link John Jay with the talk he was hearing from Massachusetts congressmen about creating a separate New England confederacy.

The next development in the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations occurred during the last week of May. On May 25, 1786, bolstered with fresh advice from Carlos III and his ministers, Gardoqui increased the pressure on Jay with a letter explaining not only that his king regarded the navigation of the Mississippi River as nonnegotiable, but that Spain claimed the territory east of the Mississippi as theirs by conquest. As instructed, Gardoqui urged the United States to concede these rights.

Four days later, on May 29, Jay reported to Congress that difficulties had arisen in his negotiations with Gardoqui—and then he dropped the other shoe. Jay asked Congress to appoint a special secret committee with full authority to direct and control his negotiations with Gardoqui. The ploy was clever enough: a secret committee could quietly rescind the insistence upon American rights to navigate the Mississippi River. If negotiations led to an attractive treaty, everyone might be happy. If not,
no harm was done. And if a controversy arose, those responsible for the reversal could hide behind parliamentary procedure. The only hitch was James Monroe, who “immediately perciev’d that the object was to relieve [Jay] from the instruction respecting the Mississippi and to get a committee to cover the measure.”
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Rufus King greeted Jay’s letter about the Spanish negotiations with a long smoke-and-mirrors speech, but his rhetorical diversion failed. The Virginians pegged him as “associated in this business” with Jay, but the votes simply were not there—for either side.
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For reasons that soon became fully apparent to Monroe (and that will soon be clear to the reader, too), Jay’s ploy to create a secret committee could work only if the measure slipped quickly and quietly through Congress. Jay’s friends did not have the votes to reverse his instructions, but if the southerners who cared about the Mississippi had been looking the other way, the trick might have worked.

Three years of careful attention to business, however, had taught Monroe a few tricks of his own. He had learned that few things were easier than to persuade Congress to duck an issue by consigning it to further study. Instead of appointing the committee Jay wanted—one with power to direct his negotiations and alter his instructions—Congress appointed three men to consider Jay’s request and report back later. They met the next day, came to an immediate and permanent deadlock, and two months later recommended that Congress summon Jay to the floor and take up the issue in a full congressional debate. And so it happened that in August 1786 the fate of the Mississippi River forced Congress into the most divisive sectional conflict of the Confederation period while the New England separatists tried one last time to make their scheme work.

T
HERE ARE OBJECTIONS
to New York,” a lawyer visiting the seat of Congress with his wife admitted in the summer of 1786. “The water for Example is execrable. There are more flies than in most places; nor is there a scarcity of muskettoes.” Manhattan’s “houses are ill constructed; the rooms often very small. They have not an inch of garden, nay, hardly of yard. In most parts of Town, the Streets in general are very narrow—illy paved, and crooked. Their Butter and Meats are far inferior to Phil[adelphi]a.” Despite these and other shortcomings, however, the
rising Virginia jurist St. George Tucker liked New York. “Under all these Circumstances,” he admitted, “if my fortune would permit it I would live on the Island of New York in preference to any spot I have ever seen”
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—a sentiment that countless other visitors mixing business and pleasure in Manhattan have echoed through the decades.

His extended family’s legal affairs had brought Tucker to New York from Virginia, where today his restored house stands a few doors from the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. He also hoped the northern excursion might help his wife recover from the miscarriage of what would have been her ninth child. Frances Bland Randolph Tucker was regarded “as a woman not only of superior personal attractions, but [one] who excelled all others of her day in strength of intellect.” Married in 1778, the Tuckers had five young children together, but his chatty diary of their trip to New York was something that St. George Tucker intended for the benefit and amusement of his three teenage stepsons. Jack, the youngest of the Randolph boys, would serve in Congress almost thirty years into the next century—the brilliant and eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke
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—but by ancestry and upbringing all the boys in the household were destined for careers in politics and public life.

While the Tuckers visited New York City in August 1786, the members of Congress with whom they dined and partied were engaged—entirely in secret—in the most divisive arguments about the future of the country since the Declaration of Independence ten years earlier. Their debates were so cloaked in official secrecy that even as astute and well placed a visitor as St. George Tucker, writing entirely for the private edification of three aspiring young politicians, heard nothing about schemes that many participants (and their descendants and biographers) preferred to forget.

The deliberations of Congress were secret. A dozen years earlier, at its first meetings in 1774, Congress had resolved that its doors “be kept shut during the debates And that every Member be obligd under the strongest obligation of Honor to keep secret the proceedings of the Congress until they shall be ordered to be publishd”—a fact that delegates quickly learned to explain to their friends. “I am obliged to be very reserved,” a typical congressman wrote, “by the Injunction of Secrecy laid on all the Members of the Congress, and tho I am aware of the Confidence I might repose in your Prudence, I must nevertheless submit to the Controul of Honour.”
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