A Wilderness So Immense (16 page)

B
Y CONJURING UP
visions of maritime prosperity for the merchants and fisherman of the eastern states, Gardoqui had led Rufus King and his New England friends to the brink of separatism during the summer of 1786. Once the question of revoking Jay’s instruction reached the floor of Congress, however, Gardoqui knew that the real prospect of a treaty was over—and that Spain’s best interests required him to act as though everything were still possible. He quietly probed for southern congressmen who might be amenable to persuasion, or cash, and he continued to entice Rufus King and the New Englanders with details about Spanish commercial regulations. Gardoqui did all he could to bolster their conviction that “a Treaty with Spain is at this time a desirable Event,” and to pump up their dream that it would “not be long delayed.”
²

While the August 29 revocation of the Mississippi clause in Jay’s instructions was a victory for the eastern states, the Virginia delegation contested it immediately on the grounds that the Articles of Confederation required the vote of
nine
states to ratify any treaty. On this procedural question the Virginians were outvoted again, seven to five, but the matter quickly became a moot point. As long as the Congress remained in a seven-to-five deadlock, no treaty could hope to win the required support of nine states. Gardoqui really had squeezed the last drop from this
orange, leaving Congress bitterly divided over the future of the Mississippi River and the west.

Antagonism bred by the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations festered in Congress for two full years. The Spanish treaty was dead in the water, but both sides were on their guard just in case. An air of suspicion permeated national politics. Distrust made routine business more difficult, aborted a promising congressional reform movement to strengthen the union, and inflamed regional friction both in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and in the state conventions that ratified the new federal Constitution. Eventually, on September 16, 1788, three weeks before adjourning for the last time, the Confederation Congress resolved “that no further progress be made in the negotiations with Spain … but that the subject to which they related be referred to the federal government which is to assemble in March next.”
³
The underlying issues of national and regional self-interest were not about to disappear. The Jay-Gardoqui negotiations revealed attitudes toward the Mississippi River and the west that shaped the events of the next decade and the subsequent history of North America—jealous hostility from New England, competitive neglect from the middle states, expansive hopes from the south, and impatient frustration in Kentucky and the Ohio Country.
⁴

The empire founded by the Castilian sponsors of Christopher Columbus had never been larger than it was in 1786. The New World dominions of His Most Catholic Majesty Carlos III embraced all of Mexico, Central America, and South America except the Guianas and Brazil. Of the major Caribbean islands, he held Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Trinidad. Of the territory that now comprises the United States, he ruled Florida, coastal Alabama and Mississippi, the east bank of the Mississippi River from Natchez to the Gulf of Mexico, and virtually everything west of the river and south of Canada.

The vast Spanish empire looked formidable on a world map, but more precarious in ledgers of the royal treasury. Silver production at Zacatecas in the province of New Spain, with its capital at Mexico City, had doubled under the Spanish Bourbons. By 1786 Mexican bullion comprised 49.5 percent of the annual export trade of the entire Spanish empire. Carlos III and his chief minister, José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, were keenly aware that this wealth comprised about a third of the royal income, and that it was essential to the survival of the Spanish economy and government.
⁵

With half the wealth of its world empire at stake, Spain’s imperial
objective was to maintain the watershed of the Mississippi River as a protective barrier against its nearest and most aggressive rival. For this reason—after opening the river during the American Revolution as a covert slap at Great Britain—Floridablanca had slammed the door on American traders in 1784. That official policy did not drastically change until Carlos III joined his beloved queen, Maria Amalia of Saxony in the royal crypts of El Escorial. Diego de Gardoqui reflected this sentiment in a private conversation with James Madison, when he “betrayed strongly the anxiety of Spain to retard the population of the Western Country; observing that when ever a sufficient [American] force should arise therein, it w[oul]d be impossible for it to be controuled.”
⁶

During the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786 and the ongoing debate into 1788, two distinct groups of Americans—New Englanders and middle state advocates of rival streams—favored closing the Mississippi River to American trade for twenty or thirty years. “Every Citizen of the Atlantic States, who emigrates to the westward of the Allegany is a total Loss to our confederacy,” Rufus King and his friends believed. “Nature has severed the two countries by a vast and extensive chain of mountains” and “interest will keep them separate,” King wrote.

Boston merchant Nathaniel Gorham, president of Congress, was blunt: “Mr. Ghorum avowed his opinion that… shutting the Mississippi would be advantageous to the Atlantic States, and wished to see it shut.” In a private fit of exasperation, John Jay was even more blunt. “Would that the world had no Mississippi!” he exclaimed during a frustrating moment of his negotiations with Diego de Gardoqui.
⁷

The “rage for emigrating to our western country” astounded Jay. “Thousands have already fixed their habitations in that wilderness,” he wrote a friend, “and the seeds of a great people are daily planting beyond the mountains.” Would they be friend or foe? “That western country will one day give us trouble,” Jay feared. “To govern them will not be easy, and whether after two or three generations they will be fit to govern themselves is a question that merits consideration.”
⁸

When John Jay worried that the United States was already too big for a single republic, his opinion was bolstered by the best of eighteenth-century political science. On this point, Americans looked to Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws,
a book of applied political theory published in 1748, widely translated and reprinted, and highly regarded by statesmen of the revolutionary generation. Montesquieu’s book was ideally suited to men of a practical American temperament: its short chapters and numbered paragraphs were filled with pithy maxims about monarchies, aristocracies, and republics—an eighteenth-century
Cliffs Notes on Classical Government.
Educated men read Montesquieu firsthand (skimming lightly over familiar citations to Aristotle and Plato, Plutarch and Livy, Cicero and the rest), and they repeated his basic ideas in newspaper essays, pamphlets, and political oratory. Montesquieu’s writings readily explained the fall of the Roman republic, the inequities of the Stamp Act, and the recent decline of the Confederation Congress.
⁹

With nods to “the great Montesquieu” and “the experience of all ages,” James Monroe’s neighbor and law partner, John Dawson, proclaimed “that no government, formed on the principles of freedom, can pervade all North America.” The very idea of a single republic “one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws,” wrote the former librarian of Harvard College, James Winthrop, in the
Massachusetts Gazette,
“is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.”
¹⁰

For several months in 1786, as we have seen, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and their friends in New England had drawn a parallel lesson from Montesquieu as they flirted with separatism. Having reconsidered the merits of “their connection with the Southern States” and convinced themselves that “even the appearance of a union cannot … long be preserved,” men like Rufus King and Theodore Sedgwick had conspired to “contract… the limits of the confederacy to such as are
natural
and
reasonable.”
In the smaller northern republic of their dreams, the needs of merchants and fishermen and the value of a commercial treaty with Spain would be obvious, understood, and beyond the reach of savage frontiersmen and slaveholding “Southern Nabobs [who] behave as though they viewed themselves a Superior order of animals when Compared with those of the other end of the Confederacy”
¹¹

Chilling news from the western counties of Massachusetts rapidly cooled the impulse toward New England separatism in the autumn of 1786.
Squeezed by postwar recession, overextended credit, and outrageously high taxes payable only in hard currency, the farmers of western Massachusetts rose up against the courts, lawyers, creditors, and tax collectors who threatened to foreclose on their farms and imprison them for debt. In August and September 1786, armed groups of farmers forced the closing of courts in five Massachusetts counties.

By Christmas the movement found its nominal leader in Captain Daniel Shays, an impoverished Revolutionary War veteran from the Connecticut River Valley town of Pelham, Massachusetts, thirty miles north of the government arsenal at Springfield. Late in January, eleven hundred angry men and boys attacked the arsenal and were repulsed by a single volley of cannon fire. By spring Shays’s Rebellion was over. Four men had died in skirmishes (three rebels and a militiamen), four were wounded, two rebel leaders were hanged, and the rest fined, whipped, or briefly imprisoned. Daniel Shays himself faded into obscurity, drink, and poverty, dying in 1825 at the age of eighty-four.
¹²

When the first news of frontier unrest reached New York City late in August 1786, the Massachusetts delegation was, simultaneously, working to win Congress more authority for the proper regulation of American trade while also flirting with ideas of separation or a commercial sub-confederation. Despite the apparent contradiction, either path might move New England toward prosperity, and what other options did they have? The status quo was hopeless. Congress needed a transfusion of energy and money for the union to survive, but the plan of a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation seemed dangerous—a cure worse than the disease, and all the more suspicious because it was so popular among the wealthy planters of Virginia and Maryland. Massachusetts chose not to be represented at the Annapolis convention, a meeting that Theodore Sedgwick believed masked “an intention of defeating the enlargement of the powers of Congress.”
¹³
How could slaveholding planters and southern nabobs sympathize with the real problems of commerce? “The proposition for the Annapolis convention, which originated in the Assembly of Virginia,” warned Rufus King, “did not come from the persons favorable to a commercial System common to all the states.” The Chesapeake grandees pushing for a convention seemed just hapless tools of Philadelphia financier Robert Morris and his ilk. Surely their intended convention would summon “thro out the Union an Exertion of the Friends of an Aristocracy” and degenerate into “a plan of foederal Government essentially different from the republican Form now administered.”
¹⁴

Coupled with the rejection of measures to strengthen the Confederation Congress, the grim news from the frontier counties of Massachusetts undermined all the political calculations of Rufus King, Nathaniel Gorham, Theodore Sedgwick, and their friends. Compared to Daniel Shays and the angry plowboys of Massachusetts, those superior animals, the southern nabobs, and their proposed convention looked better than it had. Agrarian unrest at home made a stronger alliance with men of property increasingly attractive, even if their property included slaves.

“The affair of the Mississippi hangs at present in suspence,” William Grayson reported with relief in November 1786 to James Monroe, who was heading home after three years in Congress, and to his successor, James Madison. “The Massachusetts] Bay delegation have been more on the conciliatory plan, since the late insurrections in that State,” Grayson added. “They of course depend greatly on the foederal aid,” Grayson reminded Madison, and were now wishing “not only for a continuance of the confederation, but that it may be made more adequate to the purposes of government.” For the past year Grayson and Monroe had seen the New Englanders in their more provincial and selfish moments—but Shays had changed their mood. “The Massachusetts delegation have been much more friendly … since the late insurrection in their State,” Grayson smiled to Monroe, and now “they look upon the foederal assistance as a matter of the greatest importance [and] of course they wish for a continuance of the Confederation.”
¹⁵
Of course.

The Massachusetts delegation of 1786 couldn’t have cared less about America’s future claim to the Mississippi River, but many politicians and merchants from the middle Atlantic states (and several prominent Virginians) quietly agreed with John Jay about a
temporary
closing of navigation on the river. These were men who assumed (along with other southerners and westerners) “that all North America must at length be annexed to us,” but who were committed to other rivers as trade routes into Kentucky and the west.
¹⁶
If fate kept the Mississippi closed for a few years, they were not averse to developing a variety of dreams and schemes for waterways and canals connecting their favored streams to the lands beyond the Appalachians.