A Wilderness So Immense (20 page)

Either from the fort at Natchez or from the upper windows of his residence and office on St. Louis Street near the levee, Governor Miró and his colleagues watched with increasing resignation as the ceaseless current of the Mississippi River carried Kentucky flatboats and country produce into the heart of their capital city. Officially, by an order from imperial authorities in Havana in 1784, the river had been declared
closed to English and American commerce. On March 18, 1785, however, Miró reported the arrival in Natchez of a flatboat laden with flour from Pittsburgh owned by one Benet Truly and several prospective settlers, and asked what he should do. Five weeks later, the captain-general in Havana waffled. “As regards the first matter,” he replied, “there is the insurmountable objection on our part that to allow these people … to settle there would be to multiply the enemies within our territory”—so he advised Miró to write “directly to the ministry [in Spain] in order that [a] decision may be handed down by His Majesty.” As to the flour, the captain-general was equally unhelpful, advising Miró to let Intendant Martín Navarro (an advocate of open trading on the river) “determine what he considers most conformable to the instructions of the King.”
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The final disposition of Benet Truly’s cargo and company are unknown, but when Thomas Ormis (or Amis) appeared with two flat-boats and a pirogue laden with ninety barrels of flour and other country produce in June 1786, Navarro confiscated the flour for the garrison at Natchez. The intendant sold the remaining goods at auction in New Orleans on August 3, while Ormis escaped upriver, denouncing the Spaniards to anyone who would listen.

When Ormis’s complaints came to the attention of George Rogers Clark, who was leading a Kentucky expedition against the Wabash Indians, Clark responded by capturing three Spanish traders at Vincennes and confiscating their goods—a cautionary show of force that sent a clear message to officials in New Orleans. Thereafter, so long as Americans kept a civil tongue and a generous hand in their dealings with minor Spanish officials, many flatboats and their cargoes slid past the official restrictions with ease. Between February and July 1790, for example, 41 flatboats brought 4,904 barrels of flour, 916 hogsheads of tobacco, 261 barrels and 34,000 pounds of meat, 47 barrels and 100 gallons of whiskey, 35 barrels and 500 pounds of butter, 11 tons of iron, and 7 tons of hemp to New Orleans.
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Smuggling and corruption had become rampant. Estimates vary, but Spanish officials may have neglected to record between one quarter and two thirds of the American produce that came downriver between 1785 and 1803. Merchant Phineas Bond declared, for example, that in 1786 Philadelphia’s contraband trade with the Spanish colonies was worth $500,000, while Governor Miró estimated that the illegal exports of gold and silver to pay for these goods totaled 400,000 pesos annually.
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From Fort Harmar, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers near Marietta, General Henry Knox monitored the traffic downriver
between 1786 and 1789. According to Knox, 598 wagons and 1,109 boats came down from Pittsburgh and Wheeling carrying 18,761 people, 8,487 horses, 2,199 cattle, and 1,833 sheep—but only 33 hogs.
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Pigs usually traveled the Ohio and Mississippi in barrels, as did those arriving in Natchez on April 11, 1790: 44 barrels of meat, 1,100 pounds of pork, 280 pounds of lard, 3 barrels of tallow, and 40 pounds of candles—along with 101 hogsheads of tobacco on three flatboats from Kentucky.
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“The river is at present defenseless,” Governor Miró reported in January 1788. Then, with self-assurance born of desperation, he justified opening New Orleans to American trade as a defensive measure. “It is very easy,” he reminded his superiors in Havana, for the American settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains “to form an expedition against this province without our being able to notify [anyone] in time.” In the event of an invasion, Miró wrote, it was most probable that the Americans “will inform us by starting hostilities.” As Miró and Intendent Navarro had “informed the court, a long time ago,” the Americans were aggressive because they “had no other means of shipping their produce than the navigation of the Mississippi,” and “because they would be obliged by any other way to cross the summits of the [Appalachian] Mountains,” in which case “the cost of transportation would absorb the value of [their produce].”
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“Who can tell if this day they may be in Tennessee,” Miró warned,

Twenty months later, living confirmation of Governor Miró’s warning strolled into his office in New Orleans.

“There has just arrived from Quebec,” Miró exclaimed on October 30, 1789, “Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Sergeant-Major of the British Infantry Regiment,” bearing a passport from Guy Carleton. Knighted after successfully defending Canada from the American invasion of 1775–1776, Sir Guy Carleton was now Lord Dorchester, governor-general of
Canada.
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One can only imagine his amusement as he signed the papers to indulge a high-spirited young nobleman’s impulse for a joyride up the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Twenty-year-old Fitzgerald impressed Miró with “the education and manners of his rank” (not his military rank but his social position as brother of the duke of Leinster and nephew of the duke of Richmond). “His object does not seem to be anything but the noble ambition to see new countries and obtain knowledge,” Miró wrote, hoping that it was true. “With this praiseworthy object… he undertook the journey in a birchbark canoe,” departing from Quebec on April 27 with Lieutenant Thomas Brisbane and six “oarsmen.” Fitzgerald and his party canoed from Quebec up the Great Lakes and either followed the familiar waterways of the
coureurs de bois
across Wisconsin or paddled through Lake Superior and down the Mississippi through Minnesota. Miró was unclear about the northernmost details of their route, but he knew they had paddled downstream to New Orleans as fast as any messenger could carry a warning from the Spanish outposts they passed en route.

Miró was in shock. Fitzgerald arrived “without my being aware of this until he, in person, brought me the news as soon as he landed in this city.” The young sergeant major’s ramble from Quebec demonstrated the vulnerability of the entire colony of Louisiana. “This example,” Miró lamented, “shows how this province is exposed.” Utterly without warning, Louisiana could be overrun from the north at any moment. If it happened, Miró shuddered, the invaders themselves would “give us the first news with their presence.”
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Miró faced a military crisis of profound historic dimensions. For centuries Spain had relied on a flexible network of religious missions and small garrisons, or presidios, as a distant early warning line that wandered across North America from St. Augustine to San Francisco. Some were permanent outposts, others were temporary responses to immediate threats. Together they defined the northernmost defensive salient of the Spanish borderlands—the sparsely settled zone protecting the riches of Mexico. Seen from an imperial perspective, these borderlands were ultimately expandable.
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Deep down, as Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró prepared to return to Spain in December 1791, he knew that his successors faced one of the most difficult of all military assignments: an orderly retreat.

“A new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection [were] advancing and multiplying,” Governor Miró’s successor wrote in 1794, “with a
prodigious rapidity.” Sweeping the Indians aside as they moved west, Miró’s successor continued, the Americans were

François-Louis Hector, fourteenth baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, brought a military career and two years of administrative experience to the post of governor of Louisiana in December 1791. Under Carlos IV, family patronage connections were allowed a greater role in Carondelet’s appointment than had been apparent during the previous reign. Carondelet’s modest achievements in New Orleans, his canal linking the city with Bayou St. John and the introduction of oil-burning streetlights, were overshadowed by serious failures. His vacillations toward planters, slaves, Indians, and free people of color, for example, contributed to the abortive Pointe Coupée slave uprising of
1795.
The creation of the Natchez district in 1789, with Manuel Gayoso de Lemos as governor, put Louisiana’s frontier affairs into the hands of an abler man. By
1797
Gayoso had so demonstrated his superior diplomatic skills that Carondelet was dispatched to Quito, Ecuador, where he died in 1807, while Gayoso moved to New Orleans and became governor-general of Louisiana.
(Courtesy Library of Virginia)

As governor of Louisiana, Miró’s successor, François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, enjoyed a reputation based as much on a stylish French surname and facile pen as his actual administrative skills.

Born in 1747 in Cambrai, on the Schelde River near Flanders in the north of France, Carondelet was a captain of the Walloon Royal Guards at fifteen and subsequently joined the Spanish army. After recovering from severe wounds received in the invasion of Algiers in 1775, he fought valiantly in the 1781 siege of Pensacola and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After two years as governor of San Salvador, then a part of Guatemala, Carondelet succeeded Miró on December 30, 1791. The new governor was energetic but quick-tempered, gullible, and inclined to rash decisions based on inadequate information. “He has always shown a great predilection for new projects, formations of thousands of militiamen, and other variations,” an official in the ministry of war sneered, “without ever thinking of the funds or expenditures that such Projects naturally will cost.”
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He was perhaps an odd choice to govern Louisiana at such a critical moment—but he wrote well, he had married well, and perhaps he looked good on paper to Manuel Godoy.

Carondelet knew that the “writings, public papers, and speeches” of the frontiersmen “all have as their object the navigation to the Gulf… and the rich fur trade of the Missouri.” In time, he warned, “they will demand the possession of the rich mines of the interior provinces of the very kingdom of Mexico,” and “their method of spreading themselves and their policy are [as] much to be feared by Spain as are their arms.”

If these Americans and their log cabins “succeed in occupying the shores of the Mississippi or of the Missouri,” Carondelet warned, “there is, beyond doubt, nothing that can prevent them from crossing those rivers and penetrating into our provinces.”
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The danger was clear: “A general revolution,” Carondelet concluded, “threatens Spain in America, unless it applies a powerful and speedy
remedy.” His plan of defense—one of several eloquent proposals he offered Godoy—involved building and improving twenty-two Spanish forts all over North America, as far north as Minnesota, at a cost of 607,000 pesos. All this despite the fact that Carondelet could count on only 840 troops in his garrison at New Orleans (one sixth of whom were sick in hospital) and 5,440 militiamen spread from Illinois to Mobile and capable of sending “3000 men to a point on the Mississippi in 15 days when necessary.” Far too little, far too late—as the joy ride of Sergeant-Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald demonstrated—in the event of a surprise attack from the north.
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Carondelet’s deficiencies as governor of Louisiana were offset, during the last years of Miró’s administration, by the creation at Natchez of a new administrative district in the borderlands with an able new governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos. In effect, upon Miró’s retirement, Carlos III sent two men to replace him and gave the forward position to the more capable man.

“This officer served four years with me in the Lisbon Regiment from 1773,” Miró wrote proudly, “and even then he had distinguished himself through his talent, knowledge of various languages, and excellent conduct.” Gayoso was exactly Carondelet’s age, and in every respect the better man. Any doubt on that score can be settled by comparing Gayoso’s clearheaded 1792 report on the “Political Condition of the Province of Louisiana” with Carondelet’s visionary 1794 “Military Report on Louisiana and West Florida.”
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