A Wilderness So Immense (44 page)

“Good!” Joseph shouted in a rage. “I tell you, General, that you, I, and all of us, if you do what you threaten, may prepare ourselves soon to go and join the poor innocent devils whom you … have transported to Sinnamary,” site of the infamous prison colony near Cayenne in French Guiana.

“You are insolent!” Napoleon thundered as he fell back into the tub, dousing Joseph and Lucien with a torrent of rose-scented water.

Soaked to the skin, Lucien Bonaparte had the presence of mind to invoke the words of Neptune from Virgil’s
Aeneid,

As Napoleon’s valet fainted and fell to the floor, the three brothers regained their composure.
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After Joseph left to change his clothes, Lucien and Napoleon continued the argument. “Do you want me to tell you the truth?” Napoleon asked. “I am today more sorry than I like to confess for the expedition to St. Domingue.” His decision to sell Louisiana stemmed from his realization that the dream of reviving the French empire in the Caribbean had indeed died with their brother-in-law General Leclerc. “Our national glory,” Napoleon told Lucien, “will never come from our marine.”
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The exact date of this conversation among the Bonaparte brothers is uncertain, and the incident itself may well be apocryphal. Nevertheless, by April 10, 1803, Napoleon had resolved to offer Louisiana to the Americans—and he would not be dissuaded. His timing was exquisite. Chancellor Livingston had put everything in order, and James Monroe had landed at Le Havre. He would arrive in Paris on April 12.

After mass on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1803, Bonaparte summoned Denis Decrès, minister of marine and colonies, and François Barbé-Marbois, minister of finance, to his palace at St. Cloud. A well-educated nobleman from the province of Champagne, Decrès had served with Admiral de Grasse in the West Indies and breached the British blockade at Malta during Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. Gruff and authoritarian in his manner, hardworking and unswervingly loyal to the first consul, forty-two-year-old Rear Admiral Decrès was one of the few sailors to whom Bonaparte presented a sword of honor. For the previous two years he had been coordinating, with mixed success, preparations for the intended expeditions against St. Domingue, Louisiana, and now perhaps England.
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At fifty-eight, Barbé-Marbois was a career diplomat and administrator with a literary and scientific bent and proven affection for the United States. Serving in the 1780s as secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia and later as charge d’affaires, he had worked with Livingston, Monroe, Jay, and many other American leaders. Barbé-Marbois
had compiled the twenty-two questions circulated to the thirteen American states that inspired Thomas Jefferson to compose his
Notes on the State of Virginia
in answer to his queries. In 1784 he had married Elizabeth Moore, daughter of the president of Pennsylvania’s executive council. Although he had never seen Louisiana, Barbé-Marbois had traveled north to the Mohawk River in upstate New York. He had also served four years as Louis XVI’s last intendant in St. Domingue, where “the ability and the virtue he practices in both public and private life” earned him “a host of enemies in the colony”
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During the final negotiations of the Louisiana Purchase in April
1803,
Napoleon Bonaparte conferred with his principal negotiator, François Barbé-Marbois, on long walks in the gardens at St. Cloud, a few miles west of Paris. The palace was destroyed in
1870
during the Franco-Prussian War. Two miles northwest stands the seventeenth-century Chateau de Malmaison, Bonaparte’s gift to Josephine in 1799.
(Collection of the author)

A moderate in the French Revolution, Barbé-Marbois was exiled during the Terror and then imprisoned by the Directory for twenty-six months at Sinnamari and Cayenne, in French Guiana. Returning to France after the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, Barbé-Marbois
took charge of the public treasury in February 1801. Recognized as “a man of talents and integrity,” Barbé-Marbois worked closely with Bonaparte for the next five years, amazed by the first consul’s “capacity for comprehending everything, [and] the quickness and depth of his reflections.”
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“I know the full value of Louisiana,” Bonaparte told Decrès and Barbé-Marbois, “and I have been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763.” Nevertheless, he continued, effective French control of Louisiana would be threatened by the British navy in the event of war, so “I must expect to lose it.” The British had twenty ships in the Gulf of Mexico, Bonaparte said, “whilst our affairs in St. Domingue have been growing worse every day since the death of Leclerc.” Rather than letting the British capture Louisiana, the first consul announced, “I think of ceding it to the United States.”
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“They only ask of me one town in Louisiana,” Bonaparte said, echoing the arguments that Jefferson had advanced through Livingston, “but I already consider the colony as entirely lost.” Once again echoing the arguments he had read in Livingston’s printed memorandum, Bonaparte concluded “that in the hands of this growing power, [Louisiana] will be more useful to the policy and even to the commerce of France, than if it should attempt to keep it.”
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“We should not hesitate to make a sacrifice of that which is … slipping from us,” Barbé-Marbois replied.

The expense would drain French resources, Barbé-Marbois continued, again echoing Livingston’s arguments, giving Britain “a secret joy in seeing you exhaust yourself in efforts of which she alone will derive the profit.” Louisiana has been settled for one hundred years, the finance minister observed, borrowing yet another argument from Livingston, “and in spite of efforts and sacrifices of every kind the last accounts of its population attest its weakness.”
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Admiral Decrès disagreed. “We are still at peace with England,” he said, and “the colony has just been ceded to us.” If peace continued, the sale of Louisiana would be seen as a “premature act of ill-founded apprehension,” contrary to the honor of France. “There does not exist on the
globe,” the minister of marine and colonies asserted, “a single city susceptible of becoming as important as New Orleans.” Its proximity to the American west already made it one of the most commercial ports in the world, Decrès asserted. “The Mississippi does not reach there till it has received twenty other rivers, most of which surpass in size the finest rivers of Europe.” Gazing a century into the future, Admiral Decrès imagined the construction “at the isthmus of Panama [of] a simple canal… to connect one ocean with the other.” Louisiana, he said, “will be on this new route, and it will then be … of inestimable value.” If France were forced to abandon St. Domingue, he concluded, “Louisiana will take its place.”
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Having heard the candid advice of his ministers, Bonaparte ended the conversation and the three men retired to their rooms.

Early Monday morning, April 11, Bonaparte sent for Barbé-Marbois. “Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,” he declared.

“I direct you to negotiate this affair with the envoys of the United States,” the first consul said. “Do not even await the arrival of Mr. Monroe: have an interview this very day with Mr. Livingston.” The conflict with Great Britain was about to resume. “I want fifty millions” for Louisiana, Bonaparte said, “and for less than that sum I will not treat. … I require money to make war on the richest nation of the world.”
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Now it was the first consul’s turn to gaze far into the future. “In two or three centuries,” he observed, “the Americans may be found too powerful for Europe … but my foresight does not embrace such remote fears. … It is to prevent the danger, to which the colossal power of England exposes use, that I would provide a remedy.”
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Barbé-Marbois listened carefully as Bonaparte outlined his strategy for the negotiation. “Mr. Monroe is on the point of arriving,” and was surely carrying secret instructions from President Jefferson about how much money to offer for New Orleans. The first consul anticipated that neither Livingston nor Monroe was “prepared for a decision which goes infinitely beyond any thing that they are about to ask of us.” Therefore, he instructed Barbé-Marbois:

The treaty talks that culminated in the Louisiana Purchase commenced that evening, while James Monroe’s carriage was still rolling toward Paris.
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T
HE FIRST NEWS
of Juan Ventura Morales’s proclamation closing the Mississippi to American trade reached President Jefferson on Thursday, November 25, 1802, two weeks before he was slated to present his State of the Union address. Despite the angry reactions of the press and public, Jefferson sidestepped the news from New Orleans in what Alexander Hamilton called his
“lullaby
message” to Congress on December 8. Retired from public office but not from politics, the great New York Federalist was not shy about offering martial advice in the newspapers over pen names like Titus Manlius and Pericles.
²

The crisis in Louisiana threatened “the early dismemberment of a large portion of the country,” Hamilton warned his countrymen, using the pen name Pericles, and “more immediately the safety of all the Southern States.” In the long run it threatened “the independence of the whole union.” Of America’s two options, the choice was clear to a statesman who regarded Julius Caesar as the greatest man who ever lived. Hamilton sneered at the first option: “to negocíate and endeavour to purchase,
and if this fails to go to war.” He favored the second: “to seize at once on the Floridas and New-Orleans, and then negocíate.”
³

If President Jefferson called ten thousand men to arms and embraced these “decisive measures,” Hamilton wrote,

“But for this, alas!” the American Caesar frowned, “Jefferson is not destined!”
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Firmly and quietly, the president had already initiated negotiations through Pierre Du Pont and Robert Livingston for possession of New Orleans and the Floridas. Now, facing “the agitation of the public mind on occasion of the late suspension of our right of deposit at N[ew] Orleans,” something more dramatic was needed. “The measures we have been pursuing being invisible,” Jefferson admitted, “do not satisfy”
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Among those invisible measures was Jefferson’s plan for a scientific expedition up the Missouri River and across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. Soon after taking office, Jefferson had invited Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis to serve as his private secretary—citing his “knolege of the Western country” as a valuable attribute for the position. With Lewis close at hand, planning for the mission began in earnest, building upon the instructions he had drawn up for Andre Michaux in 1793. The project was cloaked in secrecy, but
not
for diplomatic reasons—indeed Jefferson consulted secretly the Spanish, French, and British representatives about his plans for “a small caravan” to explore the Missouri River, and he secured foreign passports for its commanders.
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