A Wilderness So Immense (46 page)

On Sunday, Monroe’s note reached Robert Livingston, confirming the nearly instantaneous news via Chappe’s semaphore telegraph. At that moment, only five other people in the world—Talleyrand, Barbé-Marbois, Decrès, and possibly Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte—were aware of the drastic shift in Napoleon’s attitude toward Louisiana. Chancellor Livingston was not yet among them. Nor could he know that within days the first consul would be echoing his own arguments as justification for selling the province.

Excited perhaps as much by the telegraph as by his curiosity about events in America, Livingston dashed off a quick, genial, and fateful note of self-deprecating welcome to his old friend and new colleague. “Dear Sir,” Livingston wrote,

Forever after, ignoring Livingston’s phrase about paving his way, Monroe regarded this polite and hastily written note as proof, as the Virginian wrote in his autobiography, that “Mr. Livingston gave a very discouraging prospect of the success of his mission.” Surely the surprising turn of events that awaited them in Paris owed principally to the triumphant return of James Monroe, minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary.
¹⁹

The arrival of Jefferson’s new emissary, regardless of his identity, signaled that the Americans meant business. But so did the arrival in Paris on April 8 of copies of the
New York Chronicle
bearing the entire text of Pennsylvania senator James Ross’s militant resolutions asserting America’s “indisputable right to the free navigation of the river Mississippi.” As a resident of the west, former college Latin teacher, and unsuccessful candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Ross, a forty-one-year-old Pittsburgh lawyer, was the Federalists’ point man in the Mississippi crisis. He introduced the heart of their war plan on February 16, 1803. Ross proposed an appropriation of $5 million and authorization to call up as many as fifty thousand militia—from South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and the Mississippi Territory, “together with the naval and military force of the union.” With these resources, the president was “to take immediate possession of… a convenient deposit for [American] produce and merchandize in the island of New Orleans … or the adjacent territories.”
²⁰

The Republican alternative came in the form of substitute resolutions introduced by Kentucky senator John Breckinridge, Monroe’s personal friend and Jefferson’s political ally. Breckinridge’s resolutions authorized the president to direct the state governors “to organize, arm and equip” as many as eighty thousand militia and “hold [them] in readiness to march at a moment’s warning.” This Republican alternative gave the president more room for diplomacy and was more respectful of state prerogatives. Either way, however, the senators’ message to France and Spain—and to the American westerners—was firm and clear.
²¹

“Upon what then do we really differ?” Senator Ross asked his colleagues. “Upon nothing but the time of acting—Whether we shall take measures for immediate restoration and security” as Alexander Hamilton’s Pericles essays advocated, “or whether we shall abstain from all military preparation, and wait the [result] of negociation,” as Jefferson was doing. “There is no disagreement but on this point,” Ross accurately concluded, “for if negociation fails, every man who has spoken has pledged himself to declare war.”
²²

On February 25 the United States Senate had substituted Breckinridge’s resolutions for Ross’s by a strict party-line vote of fifteen to eleven—and then promptly passed the measure by a unanimous vote of all the senators present. Bonaparte was a strategic genius, but when Robert Livingston sent Talleyrand a copy of the
New York Chronicle
on April 8, 1803, it did not require genius to read the implications of James Ross’s resolutions. Had the wording of Breckinridge’s substitutes been known, the French reaction would have been the same. Both sets of resolutions sent the same message to foreign powers, as Senator Ross himself admitted, “except that one set of resolutions puts greater power into the hands of the President than the other.”
²³

One more bit of news that reached Talleyrand and Bonaparte in the first week of April—completely unknown to Monroe or Livingston—was pivotal to the success of the American negotiations in Paris. Congress had authorized Monroe as a minister to France and, if necessary, Spain. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison, however, had intimated to the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón, that if Monroe were disappointed in France he would seek an alliance with Great Britain. “According to all I can gather,” Pichón warned Talleyrand, “I see that Mr. Monroe has
carte blanche
and that he will go to London if he is badly received at Paris.”
²⁴

War with Great Britain was imminent. Leclerc was dead, his Haitian expedition was a disaster, and the reinforcements for St. Domingue and Louisiana were trapped at Hellevoetsluis. New Orleans was vulnerable, and the westerners were armed and angry. On April 8, 1803—while James Monroe and his family were coming ashore at La Havre in the pilot boat of the
Richmond
—Talleyrand and Bonaparte took Ross’s resolutions and Pichon’s warning to heart. Talleyrand, who had strongly opposed the idea of selling Louisiana, was now ready to see it as “an advantageous arrangement” to compensate for “the inevitable loss of a country that war was going to place at the mercy of another nation.”
²⁵
Two days later, on Easter Sunday, the first consul summoned François
Barbé-Marbois and Denis Decrès to the garden of his palace at St. Cloud and announced his intention to sell Louisiana to the United States.
²⁶

Early Monday morning, April 11, Napoleon Bonaparte renounced Louisiana to Barbé-Marbois and directed him to sell it to the United States. “Do not even wait for the arrival of Mr. Monroe,” the first consul said, “have an interview this very day with Mr. Livingston.” That afternoon, however, it was Foreign Minister Talleyrand, not the treasury minister, who invited Chancellor Livingston to his office on rue du Bac, on the Left Bank in St.-Germain-des-Prés.
²⁷

Livingston opened the conversation by reiterating his conviction that in reaction to Spain’s revocation of the right of deposit the United States was certain to seize New Orleans and the Floridas either now or at the first outbreak of the next European war. Talleyrand listened patiently. Then he wondered aloud “whether we wished to have the whole of Louisiana.”
²⁸

“No,” Livingston replied (accurately reflecting Jefferson’s objectives), “our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas.” However, as he had suggested on earlier occasions, it would be wise policy on the part of France “to give us the Country above the River Arkansas in order to place a barrier between [French Louisiana] and Canada.”

If France sold New Orleans to the United States, Talleyrand responded, the rest of Louisiana had little value. “What,” he asked Livingston, would you “give for the whole”?

Livingston doubted the sincerity of Talleyrand’s question. His skepticism, Barbé-Marbois wrote long after the event, was “justified by the many deceptions that had been previously practiced upon him.” Dickering over land prices was nothing new, however, so the Chancellor started low. He “supposed we should not object to twenty Millions provided our Citizens were paid.” (Twenty million francs was about $3.75 million, and Livingston wanted to keep Talleyrand and Bonaparte from evading their promise to settle American claims from the Quasi-War of 1797–1800.)
²⁹

“This was too low an offer,” Talleyrand replied, inviting Livingston to “reflect upon it and tell him tomorrow.”

“As Mr. Monroe would be in Town in two days,” Livingston suggested that he “would delay my further offer until I had the pleasure of introducing him.”

After fifteen months in Paris, Livingston knew the former bishop of Autun well enough to see an immediate connection between Talleyrand’s
next remark and the recent news of the saber rattling by the United States Senate. With the shrug of indifference by which he habitually veiled matters of utmost importance, Talleyrand ventured “that he did not speak from authority, but that the idea had struck him.”
³⁰

That evening the Chancellor wrote a letter to Madison, with key passages in code, explaining the full significance of his conversation with Talleyrand. “I have reason … to think,” he surmised, “that this resolution [to sell Louisiana] was taken in council [with Bonaparte] on Saturday, for on Friday I received Mr. Ross’s motion [and] I immediately sent it to Mr. Talleyrand with an informal note expressive of my fears that it would be carried into effect.” Livingston had also sent a French translation of Ross’s motion to General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who had immediately taken it to Joseph Bonaparte. The Ross resolutions, Livingston believed, were the “exciting causes” of Napoleon’s change of heart about Louisiana, “which … we shall be able on the arrival of Mr. Monroe to pursue to effect.”
³¹

The next day—Tuesday, April 12—Livingston met again with Talleyrand, and then added a postscript at the bottom of his letter to Madison before sealing it and entrusting it to the secretary of the French legation for delivery to America:

Tuesday evening Monroe called upon Livingston at his house on the Right Bank at rue Trudon (a street that disappeared in the nineteenth century with the opening of rue Auber and the opera at the Palais Garnier, home of the Phantom). They agreed to spend the next day reviewing their joint instructions from Jefferson and their files of official correspondence.

It is not easy to sort out exactly who said what to whom and when during the second week of April. Events were moving quickly. Monroe had just arrived and his credentials had not yet been formally presented to, or accepted by, the first consul. This fact troubled Monroe and Livingston. If their negotiations failed, they did not want to be criticized for any lapse in diplomatic protocol. Bonaparte, who could be a stickler for protocol when it suited his purposes, knew that these negotiations were not likely to fail and was less concerned with procedural formalities.

Although eager to reach an agreement, Bonaparte added another layer of complexity to the discussions by working through at least two independent intermediaries, Talleyrand and Barbé-Marbois, who spoke sometimes to one American and not the other. And if this were not confusing enough, Monroe injured his back in the middle of April—the pain was “very excruciating” and he was bedridden for several days.
³³
Not surprisingly, then, these complex negotiations left some ambiguities in the documentary record.

Livingston’s and Monroe’s contemporary notes and correspondence about the Louisiana Purchase are replete with vague or inaccurate dates, loose ends, dead ends, and occasional misinformation. No one observer witnessed everything at the time, and documents could be misdated in haste or fatigue. Monroe and Livingston wrote several joint reports to Madison, but each man also wrote private letters to Madison or Rufus King, the American minister in London, that reflected his individual perception of his personal role in the negotiations. Retrospective accounts such as Monroe’s
Autobiography
and Barbé-Marbois’s
History of Louisiana
were susceptible to the usual frailties of human memory—further compounded by differences between the Julian and the French revolutionary calendars. April 12 on the Julian calendar, for example, was 22 Germinal an XI on French correspondence and documents.

All this said, however, the final unpleasant truth is that after the success of the Louisiana Purchase, Livingston and Monroe each tried to play up his claim to glory for an achievement that ultimately belonged, more than to any others, to Jefferson and Bonaparte. Goaded by admirers or detractors, nudged by ambition and pride, both American ministers tampered with their files (Livingston to a much greater extent than Monroe) and adjusted their memories of the negotiations.
³⁴

Chancellor Livingston’s terse postscript of April 12 confirming to Madison that his conjecture about the French intention to sell Louisiana was “well founded” was based on his second meeting with Talleyrand, hours before Monroe’s arrival in Paris. “On the 12th,” Livingston explained in his next letter—written after midnight on April 14—“I called upon [Talleyrand] to press this matter further.”
³⁵

The foreign minister was evasive. He again thought it proper “to declare that his proposition was only personal,” Livingston reported, “but still requested me to make an offer” for Louisiana. When the Chancellor declined because Monroe was soon to arrive with fresh instructions from
the American government, Talleyrand “shrugged up his shoulders” and tried to change the subject. Livingston, however, had prepared himself for Talleyrand’s ploys. Stating that he “wished merely to have the negotiation opened by any proposition,” the Chancellor presented Talleyrand with “a note which contained that request.”

Talleyrand responded that “he would answer my note, but that he must do it evasively because Louisiana was not theirs.” Livingston “smiled at this assertion and told him that I had seen the Treaty … [and] knew the Consul had appointed officers to govern the country, and that [Bonaparte] had himself told me that Gen[era]l Victor was to take possession.”