A Wilderness So Immense (41 page)

Livingston’s premature retirement from national politics ended abruptly with Jefferson’s election as president in 1800. “It is essential,” the Virginian wrote him in December, “to assemble at the outset persons
to compose our administration, whose talents integrity and revolutionary name and principles may inspire the nation at once, with unbounded confidence.” Although Livingston declined Jefferson’s first proffered nomination as secretary of the navy, just seven days after the House of Representatives confirmed Jefferson as president on its thirty-sixth ballot,
Livingston accepted the post of ambassador to France. “No one,” wrote the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón, “could receive this mission with qualities more apt to maintain and increase the good understanding which has just been re-established so happily between the two nations.”
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In addition to his role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York financed Robert Fulton’s experiments with the steamboat. Named for Livingston’s estate on the Hudson River, Fulton’s
Clermont
led to a new age of navigation on the Mississippi River. After his return from France, Livingston devoted the last years of his life to scientific agriculture. The title page of his
Essay on Sheep,
published in 1809, proudly listed its author’s laurels as president of the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts, member of the American Philosophical Society, president of the American Society of the Fine Arts, and corresponding member of the Agricultural Society of the Seine. Livingston died at Clermont on February
25, 1813. (Collection of the author)

Delaying his departure in accord with the president’s wish to secure formal ratifications of the Convention of 1800 that ended the naval Quasi-War with France, Chancellor Livingston had ample time to explore every conceivable option in detail with Jefferson and Madison. Livingston knew the president’s goals as well as anyone could when he sailed for Paris in October aboard the frigate
Boston.
Traveling with him were his wife, Mary Stevens Livingston, “a polite, sensible, well-bred woman,” and their daughters Elizabeth Stevens Livingston and Margaret Maria Livingston, twenty and eighteen. Accompanying his immediate family were the girls’ husbands (both of whom were distant nephews of the Chancellor), the secretary of legation, Thomas Sumter, a full complement of household servants, a mountain of trunks and suitcases, and a gaggle of livestock. “Poultry, hogs, sheep, and a cow and a calf,” a sailor was told, “and they say that’s not half.” Lashed to the quarterdeck was Chancellor Livingston’s carriage, its passenger compartment designated as a makeshift parlor for the ladies. Tucked safely among his papers were the usual credentials, but his most important diplomatic instructions—the result of several months’ consultation with Jefferson and Madison—were entrusted solely to Chancellor Livingston’s memory.
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Chancellor Livingston and his entourage arrived in Paris early in December and were greeted by the marquis de Lafayette, a frequent visitor to Clermont during the Revolutionary War, and François Barbé-Marbois, former charge d’affaires to the United States and now Bonaparte’s minister of finance. Livingston met with Talleyrand on the 5th, and was formally presented to the first consul on the 6th. Bonaparte asked Livingston whether he had visited Europe before. Livingston answered that he had not. “You have come,” replied the first consul, “to a very corrupt world.”
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Against a backdrop of routine consular business, including American claims for ships and property seized during the Quasi-War, Livingston became a full player in the American guessing game about Bonaparte’s plans. There were three questions: Whether France had accepted Louisiana from Spain (which Talleyrand resolutely denied). Whether the Floridas were included in the cession that Talleyrand denied. And whether Bonaparte was sending troops beyond St. Domingue to secure New Orleans. Gathering intelligence about these matters, however, was
incidental to Livingston’s basic objective. Depending on how far things had gone with Spain, Jefferson wanted Livingston to persuade France to forgo the retrocession. Or, if it was too late for that, he wanted Livingston to persuade France “to make over to the United States the Floridas … or at least West Florida.” Or finally, if the retrocession had not included the Floridas, he wanted France to persuade Spain to cede them to the United States. In short, Livingston’s chief task was to press the American case against Bonaparte’s ambitions in the Caribbean and Louisiana.
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As events unfolded between December 1802 and the spring of 1803, Jefferson, Madison, Livingston, Du Pont, and Monroe all would contribute to the American acquisition of Louisiana, with important support from Rufus King in London. Throughout the long and complicated process of diplomacy, however, it was Livingston who did the heavy lifting. With so many uncertainties in play, his written instructions had been perfunctory from the beginning. Jefferson had explained his goals in broad terms. He and Madison kept Livingston abreast of their reactions to changing situations, but they counted on Livingston to size things up in Paris and exercise broad discretionary powers if necessary. Livingston, in turn, kept them candidly informed of both obstacles and opportunities—and his constant communication with Rufus King prevented either Britain or France from sowing confusion in the American camp.

Affable in temperament, Livingston was also hard of hearing—a potential disadvantage in his dealings with the witty and inscrutably subtle Talleyrand. But the French minister’s legendary knack for discovering and exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses was nearly worthless in the face of Livingston’s unusual self-confidence. Despite his firm attachment to republican values that Bonaparte regarded as dangerously Jacobin, Livingston was a Hudson Valley squire to the manor born, unruffled by the hauteur of the former bishop of Autun.

Talleyrand tried to keep the American minister at arm’s length with trifling ploys—pretending all the while that France had no claim to Louisiana. Soon after arriving in Paris, Livingston suggested that France offer Louisiana in settlement of the nation’s debts to American merchants. “None but spendthrifts satisfy their debts by selling their lands,” Talleyrand objected. Then he added, after a short pause, “but it is not ours to give.” Livingston found ways to work around him.
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No Frenchman was willing to admit that Spain’s retrocession was in the works, so Livingston prepared a forceful memorandum addressing the question, “Whether it will be advantageous to France to take possession
of Louisiana?” He had twenty copies of his memorandum privately printed. He sent one to Madison, and he sent copies to Talleyrand and Bonaparte. The rest he carefully distributed to influential men around the first consul. The genius of Livingston’s pamphlet lay not in its obvious conclusion but in its careful demolition of Bonaparte’s mercantilist vision of Louisiana as a breadbasket for the sugar islands. France “is no longer a republic,” he advised Madison, “it is the government of one man whose will is law.” In one respect Bonaparte’s secrecy about Louisiana made Livingston’s diplomatic task easier: if the retrocession had not been concluded, then his question was safely hypothetical.
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Since France, “like every other country, possesses a limited capital” for investment, “the sole object of inquiry should be, where can this capital best be placed? At home? In the islands? At Cayenne? In the East Indies? Or in Louisiana?” The question was
not
whether France should have “any colonies” but whether she needed Louisiana.

In arguments that fill fourteen printed pages and that echo Jefferson’s suggestions, Livingston demonstrated that France did not need Louisiana in order to reap the benefits of St. Domingue. In peacetime the sugar islands could readily buy food, manufactured goods, cloth, wood, and other commodities on the open market. In time of war, however, “the mouth of the Mississippi will be blocked up and the planters of the French Colony [will] be reduced to the utmost distress.”
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Nor could France expect to benefit by exporting its manufactured goods up the Mississippi into the western states. “Nothing could give birth to this idea,” Livingston wrote, “but the most perfect ignorance of the navigation of the river; and of the wants of the inhabitants.” French wines found no favor with “the palates or purses of the inhabitants,” who preferred “their own liquors, cider, beer, whisky, and peach brandy; the last of which, with age, is superior to the best brandy of France.” Glass, tableware, hardware, and dry goods all reached the west through Baltimore or Philadelphia “on cheap and easy terms,” never by “the slow and expensive passage up the river against the current.”
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“In a commercial view, the settlement of Louisiana shall not be advantageous to France, but, on the contrary really injurious,” Livingston concluded.
“In a political one, it will be found still more inconsistent with her interests.” Here, too, Livingston put forward arguments that he had discussed with President Jefferson, taking care neither to “leave unsaid what truth requires to be spoken” nor to “give umbrage by freedom which haughty spirits may construe into menace.” The United States and France “are so happily placed with respect to each other, as to have no point of collision,” Livingston wrote, in yet another echo of his conversations with Jefferson:

“If there is a situation in the world,” Livingston warned, again echoing Jefferson, “that would lead to these melancholy consequences, it would be that of France in possession of New Orleans.”
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In his cover letter to Madison, Livingston explained the purpose of his memorandum. “I have had several conferences on the subject of Louisiana,” he reported, “but can get nothing more from them than I have already communicated,” so “I have thought it best by conversation and by writing to pave the way … till I know better to what object to point.” Talleyrand promised to give his memorandum “an attentive perusal after which … I will come forward with some proposition.” As Du Pont had recognized, setting the right price was tricky, and Livingston hoped Madison could offer “some directions on this head and not leave the responsibility of offering too much or too little entirely at my door.” Weighed against the costs of “guards and garrisons, the risk of war, the value of duties and [the revenue that] may be raised by the sale of lands,” he ventured that the Floridas and New Orleans might be “a cheap purchase at twenty millions of dollars.”
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The summer passed with few developments, for as Livingston told Rufus King in August, “every body of fashion is now out of town.” By October, however, Livingston had opened a new channel around Talleyrand when he gave a copy of his printed memorandum to Joseph Bonaparte, the first consul’s elder brother. “My brother is his own counsellor,” Joseph confided to Livingston, “but we are good brothers … and as I have access to him at all times, I have an opportunity of turning his attention to a particular subject that might otherwise be passed over.” At their next encounter, Joseph Bonaparte told Livingston that both he and
the first consul had read Livingston’s memorandum “with attention,” and that Napoleon had told him “that he had nothing more at heart than to be on the best terms with the United States.”
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While waiting for guidance from Jefferson or Madison about how much he might offer for New Orleans or Florida, in December 1802 Livingston concocted a scheme that required no money at all. In a series of conversations with Napoleon’s elder brother, Livingston suggested that although Louisiana would be a ruinous burden for the French nation, it offered a lucrative haven for the Bonaparte family in the event of Napoleon’s death. Napoleon could transfer sovereignty over Louisiana to the United States and transfer the ownership of its lands to his own family. Then the United States could buy half the land from the Bonapartes for, say, $2 million.
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Livingston’s scheme was useful, and it was actually less bizarre than it may seem. Family interests, after all, had prompted Carlos IV to exchange Louisiana for the throne of Etruria for his queen’s nephew—a deal that had been brokered by Napoleon’s brother Lucien. The Bonapartes were not yet an imperial family, but they were beginning to act like one. “There are duties which a man owes to himself and his family,” Livingston advised, “which ought not to be overlooked when they can be performed without the smallest injury to the public.” Why not barter Louisiana to the United States to underwrite “the present splendour of your family,” he asked Joseph Bonaparte, and “secure to your posterity a property [in America] which nothing attainable in France would in any degree equal.”
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