A Wilderness So Immense (28 page)

At this delicate juncture, despite Jefferson’s initial friendship and best
efforts to help the young French minister achieve his goals, the worst effects of Edmond Charles Genet’s temperament began to show. “Never in my opinion was so calamitous an appointment made,” Jefferson complained privately to Madison in July 1793,

As secretary of state, Jefferson knew that the conflict with the Washington administration over French privateering was likely to bring about Genet’s recall, as it eventually did. Privately, Jefferson also knew that France and its minister were engaged in western intrigues, although he withheld much of this information from the cabinet.
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Weeks before Genet arrived in Philadelphia, Jefferson (with Washington’s tacit concurrence) had advised his protégé William Short, who was then stationed in Madrid, “that France means to send a strong force early this spring to offer independence to the Spanish American colonies, beginning with those of the Mississippi.” Hence, in any negotiations with Spain, Short “should keep ourselves free to act in this case according to circumstances, and … should not, by any clause of treaty, bind us to guarantee any of the Spanish colonies against their own independence.” Jefferson, as Sir Guy Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, observed, “has a degree of finesse about him, which at first is not discernable.”
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“I am arming the Canadians to throw off the yoke of England,” Genet had reported home in June. “I am arming the Kentuckians, and I am preparing an expedition by sea to support their descent on New Orleans.” On July 5, Genet had met secretly with Jefferson to inform him, off the record, of these plans. “He communicated these things to me,” the Virginian confided to his diary with discernable finesse, “not as Secy, of state, but as Mr. Jeff.” Genet had drafted proclamations encouraging insurrection by the French inhabitants of Louisiana and Canada, Jefferson noted, and “he speaks of two generals at Kentucky”—Revolutionary War heroes George Rogers Clark and Benjamin Logan
(although Jefferson finessed their names, too)—“who have proposed to … take N[ew] Orleans if he will furnish the expedition] about £3,000 sterling].”
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Their private conversation left no misunderstandings about the nature of Genet’s project. “Officers shall be commissioned by [Genet] in Kentuckey and Louisiana, [and] they shall rendezvous
out of the territories of the US”
(Jefferson’s emphasis). After gathering “a battalion … of inhabitants of Louisiana and Kentuckey and getting what Ind[ia]ns they could,” Jefferson wrote, Genet planned “to undertake the expedition against N[ew] Orleans, and then Louisiana [was] to be established into an independent state connected in commerce with France and the US.”

Innocent of Lord Dorchester’s insight into the character of “Mr. Jeff.” and impatient about such technicalities anyway, Citizen Genet was blind to the secretary of state’s emphasis on the convenient presumption that Clark would rendezvous his forces outside American territory. Nor did he much care for Jefferson’s warning that by “enticing officers and souldiers from Kentuckey to go against Spain, [he] was really putting a halter about their necks, for … they would assuredly be hung, if they comm[ence]d hostilities against a nation at peace with the US.” More to Genet’s liking was Jefferson’s remark “that leaving out that article I did not care what insurrections should be excited in Louisiana.”
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The ostensible purpose of Genet’s off-the-record conversation with his friend “Mr. Jeff.” was to ask for a slight revision in a letter of introduction that the secretary of state had written to the governor of Kentucky for the French botanist Andre Michaux. Jefferson agreed to add a seemingly innocuous reference to Genet and his “esteem for” and “good opinion of” Michaux—phrases intended to support Michaux’s covert assignment as the agent carrying Genet’s commission and instructions to George Rogers Clark.

Formerly employed by Louis XVI to gather botanical specimens for the royal Jardín des Plantes, Michaux had traveled extensively throughout the American west since 1786 and had sent home some sixty thousand trees. Now he was headed west on a scientific mission endorsed by Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society “to explore the interior country of North America from the Mississippi along the Missouri, and Westwardly to the Pacific ocean.” Upon his return Michaux was “to communicate to the said society the information he shall have acquired of the geography of the said country, its inhabitants, soil, climate, animals, vegetables, minerals and other circumstances of note.” In its combination of overt scientific objectives and covert geopolitical goals, Michaux’s mission was a precursor of the Lewis and Clark expedition a decade later. “Mr.
Jeff.” was playing with fire, and the secretary of state knew it. Still, the combined lure of western scientific and geographic exploration—coupled with the possibility of an insurrection in Spanish Louisiana and an expedition led by an old boyhood friend from Albemarle County—was tempting.
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By reputation, forty-one-year-old George Rogers Clark was the “Conqueror of the West” who had pushed the British out of the Ohio River Valley during the American Revolution. “I don’t suppose,” he once admitted, “there is a person living that knows the Geography and Natural History of the back Cuntrey better if so well as I do myself. … It has been my study for many years.” Born in King and Queen County, near the York River in tidewater Virginia, Clark had moved with his family to Albemarle County, about a mile from Jefferson’s Monticello, and then to Caroline County before his father settled near Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio, as the American Revolution ended.
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The legendary Conqueror of the West with whom Genet was dealing, however, was a profoundly bitter man, unfairly hounded by creditors, prone to drink, and shabbily treated by the governments he had served. For six years during the American Revolution, Clark had signed countless drafts (the eighteenth-century equivalent of checks) for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he had also extended his personal credit to provide his frontier forces with food, clothing, and other supplies. Clark had never paused to ask for reimbursement (or for his own military pay) until the spring of 1781, when he traveled east to confer with Governor Jefferson about attacking the British at Detroit. Clark’s timing was ill-fated. Along with other paperwork then in the hands of the state auditors’ office, Clark’s expense vouchers were lost on January 5, 1782, when a British fleet dashed up the James River and unleashed the turncoat Brigadier General Benedict Arnold and eight hundred troops in a surprise raid on Richmond.
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Soon thereafter, when George Rogers Clark presented the auditors with expenses totaling $20,500—for which they now had no original documentation—the bean counters in Richmond began dragging their feet. Virginia owed Clark about $3,500 a year for capturing and defending the Ohio River Valley—about a penny per square mile—but Arnold’s raid had destroyed the paperwork. The auditors quibbled for a few years about the prices Clark had paid in wartime on the frontier for goods that were now several times cheaper in peacetime on the East Coast. Then they ducked responsibility altogether on the grounds that when Virginia
ceded its western lands to Congress in 1784, Clark’s reimbursement became a national matter, too.

At the end of the Revolution, Congress had greeted Clark with a standing ovation. “Young man,” Benjamin Franklin declared, “you have given an empire to the Republic.” Yet governments and institutions often turn stingy and forgetful when proper gratitude demands more than rhetoric. In 1792 the Commonwealth of Virginia rejected Clark’s accounts. In lieu of his reimbursement and back pay, Jefferson did help secure Clark a tract of Indiana land, but by then, fearful that assets held in his own name would only be seized by creditors, the Conqueror of the West was signing property over to his younger brothers. “I have rode for Bro. Geo in the course of this past year upwards of 3000 miles,” William Clark (who would later explore the continent with Meriwether Lewis) wrote his brother Edmund, “attempting to save him” from his “disagreeable situation [and] three or four heavy suits pending.”
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Surrounded by Kentuckians talking of separation and clamoring for decisive action to open the Mississippi River for the export of their produce, George Rogers Clark was desperate and disgusted when he learned in November 1792 of Virginia’s refusal to reimburse his expenses for supplies purchased during the Revolutionary War. While French authorities were preparing to send Citizen Genet as minister to the United States with instructions to move against Louisiana, Clark and his feisty Irish-born brother-in-law, Dr. James O’Fallon, were developing a parallel plan in Kentucky. Shortly before Christmas, Clark wrote to the French consul at Philadelphia offering to mount an expedition of fifteen hundred men to attack New Orleans and capture Spanish Louisiana. O’Fallon, a former associate of James Wilkinson, friend of Thomas Paine, and agent for one of the Yazoo land companies seeking title to thousands of acres on the Georgia frontier, wrote a similar letter to Paine, then in Paris as a member of the National Convention. Between November 1792 and February 1793 these two plans—concocted independently on either side of the Atlantic—came together.
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Early in the new year, an executive council of the French republic had “the General’s offers and propositions” under consideration. Paine was confident that “every, or the greater part of [Clark’s] terms will be complied with” as soon as France declared war on Spain. “You may, therefore,” he told O’Fallon, “expect very soon to hear of the General’s nomination to the post and command solicited by him.” Clark’s military prowess had been confirmed by “Mr. Jefferson’s private sentiments respecting him” (an off-the-record recommendation that Jefferson
apparently whispered to the French consul in Philadelphia). Paine also informed O’Fallon that “the principal characters among the French inhabitants of Louisiana, have already petitioned this convention, for the reduction of that country from the vile servitude under which it actually groans.” Prospects for the invasion were bright. “All we fear,” Paine wrote, was “that the intrigues of certain personages in the American cabinet, who are the friends of Britain and votaries of Kings, may obstruct the General, in his plans of raising men, and procuring officers.”
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Because the letters written by Clark and O’Fallon late in 1792 have been lost, we cannot be certain that they reached Paris in time for Citizen Genet to see them. Three bits of evidence strongly suggest, however, that Genet knew about General Clark’s proposal before he sailed for America on February 20, 1793. First, in his reply to O’Fallon, Paine described Genet as “my sincere friend” and assured O’Fallon that “your name is already made known to him by me.” Second, Paine and Genet clearly were in close contact in the months between Genet’s appointment and his departure, for in December Paine had introduced Genet to the American minister to France, the patrician Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who despised them both. Finally, there is a curious ambiguity in the wording of Paine’s comment that Genet “is to set out for America speedily.”

Genet had left Paris on January 21, but Paine’s reply to O’Fallon was dated February 13, seven days before Genet’s ship sailed from Rochefort, two hundred fifty miles southwest of Paris. Either Paine wrote his letter earlier than he dated and sealed it, or he knew that Genet had been delayed in the harbor. Either way, it seems likely that Clark’s and O’Fallon’s proposals reached the French minister before his ship left port.

Talk of attacking Louisiana was an open secret on both sides of the Atlantic. Details of the French plan to attack Louisiana reached Jefferson in February 1793, and Paine’s letter suggests that Jefferson had prior knowledge of Clark’s intentions as well. In light of these circumstances, Genet’s apparent failure to contact Clark immediately upon his arrival in America remains puzzling.
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Regardless of what the new minister may have known when he left France, however, Paine’s letter to O’Fallon prompted Clark to begin planning his expedition while Genet made his way across the ocean to Philadelphia. First he would overrun the forty-man Spanish garrison at New Madrid with a swarm of Kentucky frontiersmen and a few brass cannon. Then he would carry its cannon downriver and capture Nogales, near modern Vicksburg. From there Clark could move against Natchez,
where the garrison of fifty Spanish soldiers was completely surrounded by American settlers. Finally, with a French fleet blockading the Mississippi to prevent reinforcement by sea, he would capture New Orleans.
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In the spring of 1793, all George Rogers Clark really needed was a green light and about £3,000. “The possession of New Orleans will secure to France the whole Fur, Tobacco and Flour trade of this western world,” Clark assured Genet in February, “and a great consumption of her manufactures…. All we immediately want is money to procure provisions and ammunition for the conquest.”
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To avoid entangling the United States in a war with Spain, Clark wrote, “we must first expatriate our selves, and become French citizens. This is our intention. My country has proved notoriously ungrateful, for my Services.” Had Citizen Genet sent immediate encouragement to Clark when he arrived in Charleston on April 8, 1793, or even when he reached Philadelphia on May 16, Spain might well have lost Louisiana ten years earlier, by conquest.
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