A Wilderness So Immense (45 page)

The secrecy answered domestic political considerations: Jefferson did not believe that the Constitution authorized the outfitting of a scientific and “literary” expedition at public expense. Nevertheless, “the President has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative, and a lover of glory,” the Spanish envoy reported to his superiors, and he was eager

To indulge his scientific curiosity and advance the good of the country, Jefferson emphasized the commercial significance of the expedition in his secret message to Congress on January 18, 1803. “While other civilized nations have encountered great expense to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge by undertaking voyages of discovery,” Jefferson asked for only $2,500 and only for a constitutional purpose. “The interests of commerce place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress,” he wrote. “That it should incidentally advance the geographical knowledge of our own continent,” the president cagily admitted, “can not but be an additional gratification.” Congress approved the money, and planning was well under way before Robert Livingston and James Monroe bought Louisiana. Their diplomatic coup transformed the expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark into a great national adventure—and both opportunities forced the apostle of strict construction to stretch the Constitution beyond what he regarded as the limits of its expressly delegated powers.
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Federalist critics condemned Jefferson’s response to the Mississippi crisis as “in every respect the weakest measure that ever disgraced the administration of any country.” The French charge d’affaires saw things differently. “However timid Mr. Jefferson may be,” Louis André Pichón advised Talleyrand, in words that would bolster the American bargaining position in Paris, “I cannot help seeing that there is a tendency toward adopting an irrevocably hostile system [toward France]. This circumstance will be decisive for Mr. Jefferson. If he acts feebly, he is lost.”
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On Monday, January 10, President Jefferson dispatched an urgent note to James Monroe, who had completed his second term as governor of Virginia at noon on Christmas Eve. “I have but a moment to inform you,” the president wrote, “that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at N[ew] Orleans … threatens to overbear our peace.” The note arrived in Richmond as Monroe and his family were packing for New York. Elizabeth Kortright Monroe and the girls planned to visit her parents while her husband joined Kentucky senator John Breckinridge on a jaunt to inspect his landholdings in the west. After twenty years in public office, Monroe was looking forward to opening a law practice in Richmond, settling his debts, and making some money
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Instead, Jefferson’s letter presented him with a fait accompli, the “temporary sacrifice” of a new public assignment. “I shall tomorrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France,” the president wrote, “and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline.”

The capital was busy on Tuesday, January 11. While the Senate considered Monroe’s appointment as special envoy to France and Spain to secure “our rights and interests in the river Mississippi and in the territories eastward thereof,” the House gathered in secret session to appropriate $2 million for “any expenses which may be incurred in relation to the intercourse between the United States and foreign nations.” This bland legislative language veiled the intended object of purchasing New Orleans and the Floridas.
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By a strict party-line vote, the Senate confirmed Monroe’s appointment on Tuesday afternoon. Congress authorized the money on Wednesday, and Jefferson’s allies quickly sent word to their constituents. On January 12, for example, Republican congressman David Holmes, of Harrisonburg, Virginia, put the administration’s spin on recent events in a letter to his neighbor James Allen (the early national politician’s equivalent to a sound bite for the evening news). Holmes knew he could count on Allen, a state senator who was then in Richmond for the legislative session, to spread the administration’s perspective among his colleagues, who in turn would inform wider circles of friends and constituents.

“The proceedings of congress have been uninteresting except upon one Subject,” Holmes wrote, summarizing the talking points about Jefferson’s public policy toward Louisiana.

Holmes, who was later elected the first governor of Mississippi, hoped that “the impatience of the Western People will not drive them to any improper acts, before Peacefull measures Can be Tried.”
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As promised, on Thursday, January 13, Jefferson informed Monroe of his confirmation by the Senate. Regardless of whether his talents were actually necessary in Europe, where Chancellor Livingston and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney were ably representing American interests in Paris and Madrid, Monroe’s political appeal at home was irresistible. In private friendship and in politics, no man except James Madison was more closely identified with the president. Monroe’s reputation as a stalwart defender of western interests in the Mississippi Valley dated to the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786 and the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. He owned land in the west and had many friends there. He also knew the salons and officials of Paris from his days as President Washington’s minister, and he had friends among the French republicans, although fewer among the members of Bonaparte’s court.

The two minor liabilities that Monroe brought to the assignment stemmed from his tenure as minister to France in the 1790s. First, many of his French political friends were out of favor with Bonaparte. Second, Monroe was a proud man—a “man of the sword” ready to defend his reputation on the field of honor. His sensitivity to French public opinion had been heightened by the embarrassment of being recalled by President Washington in 1796. The inconvenient friends were easily managed. Monroe gave his Parisian butler a list of names “with instruction [that] should any of them call, not to admit them, always giving some excuse which should not be offensive.” Although his vanity never interfered with the work at hand, Monroe’s interest in gauging the warmth of his welcome was almost obsessive, and it did incline him to undervalue Livingston’s accomplishments in the months prior to his arrival.
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The announcement of Monroe’s appointment was a master stroke in domestic politics. “The measure has already silenced the Federalists here,” President Jefferson wrote, “and the country will become calm as fast as the information extends over it.” For the moment, all Monroe needed to do was show up. In the longer view, however, both men knew they were gambling Monroe’s (and the administration’s) political reputation and future. “All eyes, all hopes, are now fixed on you,” Jefferson advised his friend.

James Monroe, in an engraving from the 1816 portrait by John Vanderlyn. When Monroe abandoned his new law office in Richmond and accepted the appointment as special minister to France in 1803, his decision proved a turning point both for his political career and his personal finances. After returning from Europe, Monroe served in James Madison’s cabinet and then as the last president of the Virginia dynasty. With each year of public service after 1803, Monroe slid further into debt until his death in New York City on July 4, 1831. The Barings Bank of London had made millions financing the Louisiana Purchase. Only the bank’s forbearance on a substantial personal loan and a last-minute congressional appropriation of $30,000 saved the remnants of Monroe’s estate from his creditors.
(Collection of the author)

Were you to decline, the chagrin would be universal… for on the event of this mission depends the future destinies of this republic. If we cannot by a purchase of the country insure to ourselves a course of perpetual peace and friendship with all nations … war cannot be distant.

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The domestic implications of the Mississippi crisis were paramount in Jefferson’s decision to send a second and highly visible emissary to France. The president also had other compelling arguments for sending someone, and for choosing Monroe.

Based on his own diplomatic experience, Jefferson knew that written instructions, no matter how carefully composed, were cumbersome and chronically out of date by the time they crossed the Atlantic. Much had happened in the fifteen months since Chancellor Livingston had sailed for Europe. In 1802 the president’s eloquence had been equal to the task of revising American policy toward France after the discovery of the retrocession of Louisiana: “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Now, however, because he
was
a skillful writer and because so many things had changed, Jefferson knew that the complexities of diplomacy involving Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—with two of the four on the verge of sweeping them all into war—required something more supple than ink on paper. (As writers, perhaps Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt were in Jefferson’s league, but in time of crisis they also had the telegraph.)
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Jefferson’s goal had not changed. He wanted possession of New Orleans and the Floridas so that America controlled the rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. Neither had his diplomatic methods. Come what may, the president had to have reliable spokesmen in Paris who knew what he wanted and who possessed authority sufficient to attain it. As Jefferson had recently advised an ally in Congress, the crux of effective statesmanship was “doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.”
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As he had with Chancellor Livingston (and informally with Pierre Du Pont), Jefferson offered Monroe “full and frequent oral communications” in preparation for the French mission. The negotiations toward “our object of purchasing N[ew] Orleans and the Floridas,” Jefferson recognized, are “liable to assume so many shapes, that no [written] instructions could be squared to fit them.” The president wanted his new emissary to be “well impressed with all our views and therefore qualified to meet and modify… every form of proposition which could come from the other party.” Monroe was a perfect choice because he “possess [ed] the unlimited confidence of the administration and of the western people; and generally of the republicans everywhere.”

“Were you to refuse to go,” Jefferson cautioned, “no other man can be found who does this.” Not surprisingly, when Jefferson’s letters of January 10 and 13 reached him in Richmond, the former governor canceled
his trip to New York and the west, put the new law office on hold, and began packing his bags for Paris.

By Sunday, March 6, 1803, Jefferson’s minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary and his family had their baggage aboard the
Richmond,
a vessel of about four hundred tons, as they wrapped up their visit with Elizabeth Kortright Monroe’s family. Clearing the port of New York in a snowstorm on Tuesday, the
Richmond
made an uneventful crossing in thirty-one days. At Le Havre a salute from the battery protecting the mouth of the Seine welcomed the ship into the harbor on Friday, April 8, 1803. Stepping onto French soil at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the returning minister and his family were escorted to their hotel by an honor guard of fifty French soldiers.
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Conveniently, one of the other passengers from the
Richmond
was heading immediately for Paris. Monroe entrusted him with a note informing Livingston of his safe arrival and his intention to rest for a day and then travel to the capital. Soon thereafter, however, municipal officials told Monroe that news of his arrival had already reached Bonaparte—a hundred miles away in Paris—by semaphore telegraph. Devised by engineer Claude Chappe and adopted by the French legislative assembly in 1792, this “optical telegraph” was based on a semaphore with three arms that could be placed in a combination of ninety-two discrete positions. Chappe’s system made it possible—using a coded vocabulary of ninety-two words on each of ninety-two pages for a total of nearly eighty-five hundred words—to relay messages by semaphore from one signal tower to the next. For the first time in history, information moved faster than a horse could carry a dispatch rider. News of Monroe’s arrival reached Paris in hours rather than days.
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