A Wilderness So Immense (56 page)

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty merely repeated the language of earlier treaties—and the Americans got no help from Talleyrand.
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In a conversation a few weeks after signing the treaty, Robert Livingston had asked the sly diplomat if he could clarify the boundaries that France had ceded to the United States. “I can give you no direction,” Talleyrand replied. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
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Between 1803 and 1819, as world events pressed the necessity of fixing the boundaries of Louisiana upon them, Americans did make the most of their noble bargain.

Spain had responded to the Louisiana Purchase with angry protests to the United States. The first ground of complaint was that Bonaparte had agreed not to sell the province. The second argument was that the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800, which had transferred Louisiana to France, was void because Bonaparte had failed to combine Tuscany, Parma, Florence, and the principality of Piombino into the kingdom of Etruria for Prince Louis of Parma, Queen Maria Luisa’s nephew and son-in-law.
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Secretary of State Madison’s official correspondence is full of carefully reasoned rebuttals of both Spanish complaints, but political realities rather than legal niceties decided the issue. It was obvious, Madison had Charles Pinckney explain to Spanish authorities in Madrid, on the one hand that Spain was too weak to challenge Bonaparte’s actions, and on the other that if Spain were somehow able to enlist French help in retaining Louisiana, Great Britain would step in and capture the province. “What is it that Spain dreads?” Madison asked.

“Does not common prudence then advise her,” Madison wrote, “to conciliate … the good will of a nation whose power is formidable to her,” rather than “adopting obnoxious precautions, which can have no other effect than to bring on the Calamity which she fears”? Spain’s final answer, Madison was confident, could only be yes—and he was right.
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Caught between Great Britain and France, Spain itself was rapidly falling into disarray at home and abroad. On October 21, 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the southern coast of Spain, a British fleet of twenty-seven ships commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson utterly defeated a somewhat larger fleet of Spanish and French vessels commanded by Napoleon’s Vice Admiral Pierre Charles de Villeneuve. Britain sustained about fifteen hundred casualties, their great admiral among them—but Villeneuve and thousands of his sailors were captured and twenty French and Spanish ships were destroyed or captured, while not a single British vessel had been lost. The defeat ended Napoleon’s plan to invade England, gave Britain supremacy on the high seas for the rest of the century, and stripped Spain of its last vestige of military power in the Napoleonic Wars.

Checked at sea, Napoleon nevertheless ruled the Continent. He had crowned his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Naples in 1806 and his brother Louis Bonaparte king of Holland. His Confederation of the Rhine gave him control of the German states except Austria, Prussia, Brunswick, and Hessen. By 1807 Britain and France were locked in the economic warfare defined by Napoleon’s Continental System, forbidding British trade with all European nations, and Britain’s Orders in Council, which prohibited neutral nations from trading in ports that complied with Napoleon’s decrees. When President Jefferson responded in 1807 with his disastrous embargo, his attempt to avoid war and maintain neutrality
by prohibiting American trade with European belligerents, the United States took its first steps toward the War of 1812.

America’s situation as a neutral power was difficult enough, but Spain’s position on the Continent was worse. Once again openly employed by Carlos IV and Maria Luisa as Spain’s admiral-general and “Alteza Serenísima,” or Most Serene Highness, Manuel Godoy had been secretly courting Napoleon’s favor in the hope of obtaining a small kingdom when the emperor got around to carving up Portugal. Godoy’s admiration turned to alarm, however, when Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena and captured Berlin in October 1806. “If Czar Alexander does not succeed in bringing down this colossus,” Godoy whispered to the Russian ambassador, “our turn will come and we shall be the last victims.”
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Napoleon promptly crushed the Russian army at Friedland in June 1807 and forced Alexander to sue for peace. Then he turned his attention south. “The Spanish Royal House are my personal enemies,” Napoleon confided to the Austrian diplomat Prince Klemens von Metternich, the man who arranged Napoleon’s marriage to the archduchess Marie Louise after his divorce from Josephine and who in 1814–1815 rearranged the face of Europe in the Congress of Vienna. “They and I,” Napoleon said, “cannot be on thrones at the same time.”
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Spain would be messier. Cultivating the hatred between Prince Ferdinand, Carlos IV and Maria Luisa’s son, and Godoy, their favorite, Napoleon had planted seeds of destruction in very fertile soil. He toppled the Bourbon monarchy on May 6, 1808, sending the trinity of Carlos, Maria Luisa, and Godoy into permanent exile in Italy. When Napoleon put his brother on the throne vacated by His Most Catholic Majesty, however, the Spanish people rose in revolt and drove Joseph Bonaparte out of Madrid. “We cannot recognize as our king,” one Spanish churchman said to another, “someone who is a freemason, a heretic, and a Lutheran, as are all the Bonapartes and indeed all the French people.” The ensuing struggle for Spain, depicted on Goya’s patriotic canvases and known as the Peninsular War, pitted a large French army against British forces led by Arthur Wellesley, future duke of Wellington. The war also inspired the term
guerrilla,
or “little war,” to describe the Spanish irregulars and civilians who continued to fight despite the defeat of Spain’s royal army.
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Napoleon’s war on the Iberian Peninsula started ominously when Talleyrand resigned in protest (a departure that had become a reliable omen of any regime’s impending doom). The Spanish Ulcer, as the French called the war, dragged on until 1813—a year before Napoleon’s first abdication and two years before his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo
on June 18, 1815.
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For six years the Peninsular War tied down an entire army that Napoleon might have used elsewhere to decisive advantage (or merely squandered in his disastrous campaign against Russia). And for six years Napoleon’s Spanish Ulcer precluded any progress in America’s negotiations about the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase.

By the end of the first year of the Peninsular War, many of Spain’s more talented and experienced career officials had allied themselves with the Junta Central, which aimed to put Prince Ferdinand on the throne. It was their foresight that sent forty-seven-year-old Luis de Onís y González to the United States as the representative of the patriotic provisional government based in Aranjuez. Born in Salamanca, Onís had studied Greek and Latin at eight, taken legal training at the University of Salamanca, and devoted thirty years to the Spanish diplomatic service. Onís spoke fluent French, German, and Italian, and passable English, and he was a protégé of Carlos Ill’s great minister, the count of Floridablanca, president of the Junta Central until his death on November 20, 1808.
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Onís’s credentials made little impression on President James Madison’s administration when he landed in New York on Wednesday, October 4, 1809. Reluctant to offend Napoleon and his brother, the United States declined to recognize Onís as a representative of Spain, citing “the contending claims of Charles and Ferdinand” to the throne—despite former President Jefferson’s private admission that by American principles “the right of the Junta to send a Minister could not be denied.”
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By the time Secretary of State James Monroe did accept Onís’s diplomatic credentials—on December 19, 1815—the Spanish Ulcer had been lanced. Bourbons were back on their thrones in Spain and France. Talleyrand was helping the Congress of Vienna restore a balance of power among the monarchies of Europe. And the French colossus, Napoleon, stood master of the forty-seven-square-mile island of St. Helena, twelve hundred miles off the African coast in the South Atlantic. In the Americas, Mexico and other Spanish colonies were striving for independence, Louisiana had been admitted to the union in 1812, and the United States had ended the unhappy War of 1812 with a flourish—Andrew Jackson’s magnificent defeat of Wellington’s veterans at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8.

Four more years of negotiation stood ahead. Years of “tiresome reiteration” and the “higgling and splitting of hairs,” according to one chronicler, as Onís and John Quincy Adams, President James Monroe’s secretary of state, nailed down the final boundaries of that vast unmeasured world
beyond the river. They chose February 22, 1819—Washington’s birthday (which happened to be a Monday)—to sign the Adams-Onís Treaty, “designed to end all the differences between the two governments which have been pending for eighteen years.” A jubilant Senate unanimously ratified the treaty two days later, while the disgruntled Spanish ratified it two years later.
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The Adams-Onís Treaty secured Texas for Spain and surrendered the Floridas to the United States (provisions that were later controversial but readily accepted by Americans at the time). Together with the Convention of October 20, 1818, between the United States and Great Britain, the treaty set the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase at the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods, in Minnesota, to the Rocky Mountains. It drew a boundary between Oregon and California at the forty-second parallel but left the northern boundary between the Rockies and Pacific undefined.
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As defined by the Adams-Onís Treaty, the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase started at the mouth of the Sabine River on the Gulf of Mexico and ran northerly along the west bank of that river to the thirty-second parallel (near Logansport, Louisiana). From there the line ran due north to the Red River (near Ogden, Arkansas), followed the river west to the hundredth meridian (southwest of Hollis, Oklahoma), and then ran due north to the Arkansas River (at Dodge City, Kansas) and west along the river. At this point in the negotiation (and in the final treaty) geographic ignorance intruded upon legal precision. Based upon the John Melish map of 1818, Adams and Onís thought the Arkansas River began at the forty-second parallel. In fact it rises just above the thirty-ninth parallel west of Leadville, Colorado (two hundred forty miles due south of the forty-second parallel at Seminoe Reservoir, near Hanna, Wyoming). On the Melish map the Arkansas River intersected the forty-second parallel near the southwest corner of Idaho, whence Adams and Onís ran the boundary due west to the Pacific Ocean (now the northern boundary of California, Nevada, and Utah).
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“For the first time our government begins to see its way to the Northern Pacific Ocean with any thing like a clear and definite view of sovereignty,” Joel K. Mead’s
National Register
crowed from the capital in response to the Adams-Onís Treaty.

This map of the Louisiana Purchase was published in the first edition of François Barbé-Marbois’s
Histoire de la Louisiane et de la Cession de Cette Colonie par la France aux Etats-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale
(Paris,
1829J.
The boundaries shown were drawn in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. An American edition of Barbé-Marbois’s
History,
translated under the supervision of Jared Sparks, was published in 1830. Barbé-Marbois died in Paris in
1835. (Collection of the author)

But the Louisiana Purchase had other implications that were less magnificent. Within a year, in 1820, the American debate over slavery focused on the admission of Missouri as a slave state—as the immediate aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase led the nation inexorably toward the Civil War.
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