A Wilderness So Immense (18 page)

Washington’s enthusiasm for the Potomac and Jefferson’s verdict in its favor as Nature’s preferred artery to the west occasionally blinded both men to the inconvenient fact that water runs downhill. Not so the intrepid Pennsylvania democrat William Maclay. “During all the time of the high price of wheat, flour, etc. in the Atlantic states,” Maclay asked, has “a single boat been loaded with these articles at Fort Pitt, and
ascended
the Monongohela or any other stream, so that these same articles reached the mouth of the Potowmack? The answer must be, no.”
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Would not the farmers of the west rather “take their chance of the Mississippi market at 2000 miles distance? the answer must be yes.” To clear a profit, Maclay knew, boats laden with country produce

“Thus it is plain,” Maclay concluded, “that the Atlantic rivers never can supply any town on their banks with provisions or any heavy articles, but those which are produced on their own lands.”
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Despite William Maclay’s affection for the Susquehanna, his critique of the Potomac applied equally to the Pennsylvania river. For impatient western families
and clear-eyed southerners, it was the Mississippi that ultimately mattered. Until their countrymen got over their regional infatuations with lesser streams on the Atlantic Coast, however, American sentiment remained divided—and that division gave Spain room for diplomatic manuevering and frontier intrigue.

A
SIDE FROM THE OLD
Ursuline Convent and a few other structures that survived the disastrous fire of 1788, the oldest buildings in New Orleans stand near Bayou St. John. Along Moss Street the West Indian rooflines and pencil-post columns of plantation-style houses built in the second half of the eighteenth century compete for the soul of the neighborhood with nineteenth-century shotgun doubles and spacious 1930s bungalows. Formerly navigable to Lake Pontchartrain, Bayou St. John was the preferred gateway to Spanish New Orleans. By entering Lake Pontchartrain through Lake Borgne and the straits of the Rigolets, thirty miles east of the city, Spanish sailing vessels avoided the shoals near the crow’s-foot delta of the Mississippi and the slow drudgery of tacking and jibing against the current through ninety miles of winding river. Bayou St. John is now severed from the lake by the modern city’s protective levees, but a small bronze plaque outside the West Indian plantation-style house at 1300 Moss Street, built about 1784, marks Grand Route St. John. Then a simple dirt road, despite its magnificent name, Grand Route St. John followed an old Indian path along a slight ridge between
the river and the bayou that connected Spanish New Orleans with its international port of entry. It was here that the royal packet boat from Havana moored late on Friday afternoon, April 3, 1789.

That morning at their regular weekly meeting Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró and members of the Cabildo had honored their retiring colleague, Intendant Martín Navarro, who was returning to Spain. Now the Havana packet boat was discharging an unwelcome messenger. As the afternoon sun cast shadows of moss-laden oaks across tile roofs and stucco walls, a royal courier rushed along Grand Route St. John toward the city with sealed proclamations announcing “the death of our King and Lord Don Carlos III (may he have Heavenly Glory)” and the accession of his eldest son, the former Prince of Asturias, now Carlos IV.
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As soon as the information reached him, Governor Miró sent messengers to summon the members of the Cabildo to meet in “extraordinary session” early Saturday morning. Gathering at nine o’clock in the “chambers of the Capitol” (the provincial government house that served as Miró’s residence and office near the river on St. Louis Street), they learned of “the grievous occurrence … of the death of our King and Lord Don Carlos III… at 15 minutes to one on the 14th of December.” Miró outlined the funeral rites that would be conducted “in accordance with the Royal orders of His Majesty the actual King” and “with the greatest possible solemnity and propriety in the small church of the Hospital, which was not destroyed by the flames of the late disastrous fire.”
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On Monday, two members of the Cabildo, “wearing mourning, and preceded by the two mace-bearers of the City with their maces, also in mourning,” would announce the king’s death to the populace of the city. At nine o’clock on Tuesday, April 22, the mace-bearers, once again “dressed in strict mourning, and accompanied by the officers of the Military Corps,” would lead Governor Miró, the members of the Cabildo, and other dignitaries in a solemn procession “from the government buildings (which serve for the meetings of the Cabildo, due to the burning of the casa capitular in the fire of the 21st of March last year) to the Church at Charity Hospital” on Rampart between Toulouse and St. Peter Streets “(instead of the parochial church which was likewise destroyed in the said fire).”
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In the center of the church stood a “majestic sepulchral bier.” At the top were the ceremonial funeral urn covered with a royal mantle in bright red velvet and “a scepter and gilt crown with bright beautiful enamel, which resembled precious stones” resting on a red velvet pillow decorated with gold braid—all of it sheltered beneath “a beautiful canopy which … descended in four arched festoons” bearing insignias of
the king and medallions of the royal orders. Sixty royal coats of arms graced the altar, the pulpit, and the walls of the chapel, “all illuminated by a large number of torches and candles … giving splendor to the mournful display.” As the city gathered in “a spectacle equally respectful and demonstrative” of their veneration for the late Carlos III, the Reverend Father Antonio de Sedella, a Capuchin friar known also as Père Antoine, offered an eloquent eulogy. Tears and prayers for absolution were punctuated by a volley of artillery fired in salute to the passing of one of Spain’s greatest monarchs. Finally, about midday, the governor and members of the Cabildo “returned in the same order … to the Government Buildings where courteous leave-taking took place among those present, and all retired to their respective homes.”
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A great monarch was dead and his able intendant, Martín Navarro, was leaving New Orleans. For twenty-five years, Carlos III had been willing to subsidize Louisiana as a borderland barrier protecting the silver mines of Mexico from foreigners. More recently, his intendant had advocated free trade and population growth as a better means to the same end. Without these two men guiding Spanish policy in Madrid and New Orleans, however, their successors wavered in the face of American westward expansion. The death of Carlos III and the ineptitude of his Bourbon cousins in France and of his son Carlos IV set in motion a sequence of world events that enabled the United States to pluck territories from Spain more aggressively (and in much larger pieces) than Thomas Jefferson had anticipated while Carlos III was still alive.

Conflict between governors and intendants, each of whom answered independently to a different set of imperial officials, was commonplace throughout the Spanish empire. When Esteban Rodríguez Miró and Martín Navarro responded so promptly and cooperatively to the great fire of 1788, that moment may well have marked the pinnacle of executive efficiency for the Spanish regime in Louisiana. The able partnership of able men was rooted in their shared perception of the colony’s needs, and in their shared commitment to the benefits of free trade and increased immigration. Devastating as it had been, Louisiana had survived the fire of 1788. New Orleans would rebuild (as it would rebuild yet again after another major fire in 1794), but the province would never recover from the death of Carlos III or the retirement of Martín Navarro. Their departures made the year 1788 an unmarked turning point for the future of North America.

For all his enthusiasm about free trade and his emulation of Anglo-American
entrepreneurial values, Martín Navarro had never lost sight of the strategic importance that Carlos III attached to Louisiana. The king and his intendant agreed that colony was, first and foremost, a buffer zone to keep foreigners away from the silver mines of New Spain. Englishmen had once been the main threat, but the situation had changed after the American Revolution. The English still held Canada, but in his
Political Reflections on the Present Conditions of the Province of Louisiana,
Navarro had warned that American settlements in the Ohio and Illinois Country now gave Spanish statesmen “motive to reflect very seriously.” He minced no words. American frontiersmen were “new enemies who are regarding our situation and happiness with too great jealousy.” With this formidable threat in mind, Navarro had recommended that Carlos III ease restrictions on Louisiana trade to encourage “a numerous population in this province … [as] a barrier for the kingdom of Nueva España” capable of “opposing] any attempt of the Americans already settled on the upper part of the river.”
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As Navarro and his partners demonstrated before the intendant retired with a fortune of 3.7 million pesos, expanding the trade of New Orleans was easy. The great river channeled commodities and money past Spanish officials who controlled the port of New Orleans. Regulating immigration and defending a border that stretched sixteen hundred miles from St. Augustine west to Natchez and north along the Mississippi past modern Rock Island, Illinois, was far more complicated. Navarro had warned that the American presence in the upper reaches of the Mississippi Valley was cause for Spanish statesmen “to reflect very seriously.” With the accession of forty-year-old Carlos IV, however, the crowned head of the Spanish empire was no longer capable of thoughtful reflections upon policy—indeed the new king was incapable of distinguishing between a serious statesman and a sycophant who was sleeping with his queen.

The new king inherited his father’s passion for shooting, but little of his father’s energy or self-discipline. Trim and athletic, Carlos III had loved to stalk wolves through the countryside, matching his wits against a wily predator that threatened his subjects’ livestock. His sluggish son preferred blasting away from a platform as retainers drove captive deer and wild boar into range for the slaughter, or on one occasion, according to a dyspeptic Englishman, firing six small cannon into a herd of “two thousand deer cooped up in an enclosure.” Carlos III promoted the applied sciences by founding the Royal Clock-Making School in 1771 and a royal
clock factory in 1788. His successor collected thousands of pocket watches and hundreds of mantel clocks and spent the better part of rainy days repairing them, tinkering with carpentry and plumbing, or wrestling with stable hands. On evenings when Carlos IV indulged his love of music by playing with a string quartet, a successful concert depended on the other players’ ability to anticipate the erratic tempo of the royal violinist. One musician who pointed out that their sheet music called for three bars of rest was informed that “Kings never wait.” More frequently Carlos IV closed his day with a huge evening meal and “a game of cards in which he invariably fell asleep.”
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All too aware of his father’s disappointment in him, and cursed with “just enough intelligence to realize his mediocrity,” according to biographer Sir Charles Petrie, Carlos IV sought “refuge in a state of mental inactivity.” Personal tranquillity became his sole objective, “and anyone who would relieve him of the necessity of taking a decision was his friend.” In exchange for his repose, Carlos IV eventually sacrificed “his authority as a prince, his dignity as a husband, the interests of his country, and, finally, his crown.”
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Maria Luisa of Parma, the new queen of Spain, had been beautiful as a girl and was always decisive if not headstrong. Married to her first cousin on her fourteenth birthday in December 1765, the young Princess of Asturias at first impressed the French ambassador as a girl of “courtesy, wit, and graces … [who] spends her whole time in her suite of rooms, her only pleasures being conversation and music.” Soon enough, however, her father-in-law and the Spanish court learned that a third pleasure frequented Maria Luisa’s suite of rooms. The princess was “a woman of excessive temperament,” wrote one courtier, “whose appetites were not satisfied by her lovers, and whose ardor was not slaked by the passage of years.” She was born “with special aptitudes and robust appetites, which marriage aroused but could not satisfy because … her veins demanded more than the conjugal duty of a gentle husband.”
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While her father-in-law was still alive, a pattern developed in Maria Luisa’s dalliances with aristocrats and courtiers. Her first lover was a marquis who, when discovered, found himself appointed by Carlos III to a post in the Canary Islands and ordered to leave Madrid within twenty-four hours. Her second, the count of Lancaster, was also sent to the Canaries. Next came the count Pignatelli, promptly dispatched to the Spanish legation in Paris, and then a courtier named Ortiz, who was banished to a far corner of Spain. Maria Luisa’s husband remained oblivious to it all. On one occasion he astonished his father by observing that princes were more fortunate than other men because their wives would
never be unfaithful with a man of lower rank. “Carlos, Carlos,” replied the king wearily, “¡qué tonto tú eres!”—How foolish you are!
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