A Wilderness So Immense (65 page)

36.
Miró to Cabello, October 30, 1789, Spanish Despatches. Miró wrote that Fitzgerald entered the Mississippi byway of the St. Peter River (now the Minnesota River), which flows from the southwest to meet the Mississippi at Minneapolis; Timothy Flint,
A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States or the Mississippi Valley
(Cincinnati, 1828), 2: 438; I am grateful to Edward James Redmond, of the Map Division of the Library of Congress, for this information.

37.
Herbert Eugene Bolton, “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands” (originally published in 1930), in John Francis Ban-non, ed.,
Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands
(Norman, Okla., 1964), 51.

38.
Carondelet, Military Report on Louisiana and West Florida, November 24, 1794, in Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 297–98.

39.
Joseph G. Dawson III, ed.,
Louisiana Governors: From Iberville to Edwards
(Baton Rouge, 1990), 64–69; anonymous Spanish report quoted in Jack D. L. Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of Spanish Governors of Louisiana,”
HAHR
42 (1962): 537–38.

40.
Carondelet, Military Report, in Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 298–99.

41.
Ibid., 1: 298–99, 344–45;
Territorial Papers,
33.

42.
Jack D. L. Holmes,
Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799
(Baton Rouge, 1965), 4–5; Dawson,
Louisiana Governors,
70–74. Both reports are published in Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 269–354.

43.
Holmes,
Gayoso,
4–10.

44.
Fray Bailío Antonio Valdés to Carlos III, November 2, 1787, quoted in ibid., 10.

45.
Floridablanca to Gardoqui, Aranjuez, May 24, 1788, quoted in Michael A. Otero, “The American Mission of Diego de Gardoqui, 1785–1789” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1949), 224.

46.
Holmes,
Gayoso,
10–11, 30; Dawson,
Louisiana Governors,
64–65.

1.
Wilkinson’s declaration of allegiance to Spain, August 22, 1787, translated in William R. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,”
AHR
9 (1903–1904): 497.

2.
Esteban Miró to Antonio Valdés y Bazan, April 11, 1789, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Papeles de Estado, Legajo 3893A, translated in Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 491n.

3.
James Wilkinson,
Memoirs of My Own Time
(3 vols., Philadelphia, 1816), 2: 114.

4.
James Ripley Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior: Major-General James Wilkinson
(New York, 1938), xii, 1–9.

5.
Ibid., 9–65.

6.
Humphrey Marshall, quoted in ibid., 71.

7.
Samuel Flagg Bemis,
Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800
(Baltimore, 1926; rev. ed., New Haven, 1960), 113; Patricia Watlington,
The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792
(New York, 1972), 103–4. I follow Watlington’s enumeration of the Kentucky conventions.

8.
Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
104; Bemis,
Pinckney’s Treaty,
113.

9.
Bemis,
Pinckney’s Treaty,
114.

10.
Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
38–39, 56–57, 118–19; Madison to Muter, January 7, 1787,
Madison Papers,
9: 231; Sandra Gioia Treadway,
ed., Journals of the Council of State of Virginia,
vol. 5 (Richmond, 1982), 395.

11.
Muter to Madison, February 20, 1787,
Madison Papers,
9: 280; Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
56–57, 119–21, 130–31; James Wilkinson to James Hutchinson, June 20, 1785, in “Letters of General James Wilkinson, addressed to Dr. James Hutchinson, of Philadelphia,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
21 (1888): 57.

12.
Wilkinson to Hutchinson, June 20, 1785,
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
21 (1888): 56.

13.
Arthur P. Whitaker, “James Wilkinson’s First Descent to New Orleans in 1787,”
HAHR
8 (1928): 82–97.

14.
Robert C. Anderson to the Governor of St. Louis, January 1, 1787, ibid., 94. Miró already knew about General (not Colonel) Thomas Green, whose letter extolling Clark’s raid at Vincennes had been intercepted and forwarded to Gardoqui, who presented it to John Jay, who forwarded it to Congress, which immediately passed resolutions condemning these irresponsible acts; Bemis,
Pinckney’s Treaty,
117–18.

15.
Wilkinson a son Excellance le Gouverneur de St. Louis, December 20, 1786, in Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 93–94.

16.
Humphrey Marshall,
The History of Kentucky. Exhibiting an Account of the Modern Discovery; Settlement; Progressive Improvement; Civil and Military Transactions; and the Present State of the Country
(2d ed., Frankfort, Ky, 1824), 271. Following Watlington’s example, I, too, have edited Marshall’s exuberant punctuation; Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
124.

17.
Grand-Pré to Miró, June 18, 1787, Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 95–96; Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
140; Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior,
77.

18.
Watlington,
Partisan Spirit,
140; Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 494 and n.; Whitaker, “Wilkinson’s First Descent,” 90. Some writers contend that Wilkinson was arrested upon his arrival in New Orleans, that he had previously corresponded with Miró, or that resident Americans had persuaded Miró not to confiscate Wilkinson’s cargo. Whitaker convincingly refutes these statements and confirms Wilkinson’s statement that he arrived in New Orleans as a “perfect stranger” (ibid., 83–84).

19.
Translated in Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 496–97. Assiduously parsing the words of his oath and declaring it “a meaningless gesture” with “no allegation of fealty of Spain,” Wilkinson’s biographers protest too much; Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior,
81; Thomas Robson Hay and M. R. Werner,
The Admirable Trumpeter: A Biography of General James Wilkinson
(Garden City, N.Y., 1941), 87.

20.
Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 505.

21.
Ibid., 498.

22.
Ibid., 499.

23.
Ibid., 501–3.

24.
Ibid., 503.

25.
Ibid., 501, 505; Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior,
86.

26.
Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 504n; Hay and Werner,
Admirable Trumpeter,
88.

27.
Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” 505.

28.
Ibid., 500.

29.
Michael A. Otero, “The American Mission of Diego de Gardoqui, 1785–1789” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1949), 224; Arthur Preston Whitaker,
The Spanish-American Frontier, 1783–1795: The
Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley
(Lincoln, Neb., 1927), 101.

30.
From Blountville and Sevierville, Tennessee, to New Madrid, Missouri, perhaps a dozen localities in the Mississippi watershed owe their existence to separatist schemes, colonization projects, or land companies led by William Blount, John Sevier, and James Wilkinson (for the three towns mentioned) as well as Pierre Wouves d’Arges, Bryan Bruin and his son Peter Bryan Bruin, William Butler, William Fitzgerald, Richard Henderson, Andrew Jackson, James Kennedy, Augustin Macarty George Morgan, Mauricio Nowland, James O’Fallon, Peter Paulus, James Robertson, Daniel Smith, James White, and countless associates and investors—all jockeying for land, political advantage, financial support, and prospective settlers. The resulting historical literature is vast and often tangled, as in Thomas Perkins Abernethy’s classic
Western Lands in the American Revolution
(New York, 1937). Of the older scholarship about individual entrepreneurs, Arthur P. Whitaker’s “Spanish Intrigue in the Old Southwest: An Episode, 1788–89,”
MVHR
12 (1925–1926): 155–76, and Max Savelle’s “The Founding of New Madrid, Missouri,”
MVHR
19 (1932–1933): 30–56, are instructive. Examples of more recent work include Andrew R. L. Cayton “‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,”
JAH
79 (1992–1993): 39–67, and Peter J. Kastor “‘Equitable Rights and Privileges’: Divided Loyalties in Washington County, Virginia, During the Franklin Separatist Crisis,”
VMHB
105 (1997): 193–226. Gilbert C. Din’s “Immigration Policy of Governor Esteban Miró in Spanish Louisiana,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
73 (1969–1970): 155–75, is definitive on its subject, and Din’s “Pierre Wouves d’Arges in North America: Spanish Commissioner, Adventurer, or French Spy?”
Louisiana Studies
12 (1973): 354–75, dispels mysteries about the French adventurer whose colonization proposals encouraged Aranda and Floridablanca to shift their attitudes about immigration as a means to bolster Spanish control of the Louisiana borderlands.

31.
Whitaker,
Spanish-American Frontier,
101–2.

32.
Ibid.

33.
“Miró’s Offer to Western Americans, April 20, 1789,” in Lawrence Kinnaird, ed.,
Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year
1945 (Washington, D.C., 1946), 3: 269–71.

34.
Caroline Maude Burson,
The Stewardship of Don Esteban Miró, 1782–1792: A Study of Louisiana Based Largely on the Documents in New Orleans
(New Orleans, 1940), 152–64; Patricia Watlington,
The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792
(New York, 1972), 133–87.

35.
Esteban Miró to Luis de Las Casas, October 7, 1790, in Burson,
Stewardship of Don Esteban Miró,
166; Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior,
88–109.

36.
Miró to Antonio Valdés y Bazan, May 20, 1789, and Las Casas to the count of Campo de Alange, February 17, 1791, in Din, “Immigration Policy,” 171, 173.

37.
Jack D. L. Holmes, “Irish Priests in Spanish Natchez,”
Journal of Mississippi History
29 (1967): 169–80.

38.
Ibid., 173–76.

39.
Gayoso to Manuel Godoy, March 31, 1795, in ibid., 176–79; Holmes,
Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799
(Baton Rouge, 1965), 77–85. Miró’s successor believed that “if disputes and quarrels over religious matters are not cut off at their roots or checked, they will have the most perverse and evil results”; Carondelet to Carlos Louis Boucher de Grand-Pré, July 26, 1795, ibid., 83.

1.
Quoted in Schama,
Citizens,
367–68.

2.
“Modern History Sourcebook: ‘Ca Ira,’” at
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/caira.html
.

3.
Richard E. Greenleaf, “The Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana, 1762–1800,”
New Mexico Historical Review
50 (1975): 45–72; Charles Gayarré,
History of Louisiana
(2d ed., New Orleans, 1879), 3: 268–69; Glenn R. Conrad, ed.,
Dictionary of Louisiana Biography
(New Orleans, 1988), 726–27; F. L. Gassier, “Pére Antoine, Supreme Officer of the Holy Inquisition … in Louisiana,”
Catholic Historical Review
2 (1922): 59–63; Christina Vella,
Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba
(Baton Rouge, 1997), 45.

4.
Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 48–49; Gayarré,
History of Louisiana,
3: 268–69. Forty-two compilations of the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
appeared between 1559 and 1966 (
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indexlibrorum.html
).

5.
Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 48–49; Gayarré,
History of Louisiana,
3: 268–69.

6.
Ibid, (emphasis added); Sir Charles Petrie,
King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot
(New York and London, 1971), 112–35.

7.
Gayarré,
History of Louisiana,
3: 268–69.

8.
Ibid.; Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 49–50.

9.
Gayarré,
History of Louisiana,
3: 268–69. Greenleaf, “Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana,” 50.

10.
Gayarré,
History of Louisiana,
3: 268–69.

11.
James Pi tot,
Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1799 to 1802,
trans. Henry C. Pitot (Baton Rouge, 1979), 31; Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, “Political Condition of the Province of Louisiana,” in Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 283.

12.
Georges Lefebvre,
The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793
(New York, 1962), 99–101; Schama,
Citizens,
281–83.

13.
Schama,
Citizens,
305.

14.
Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, quoted in Schama,
Citizens,
305.

15.
Schama,
Citizens,
305–7; Lefebvre,
French Revolution to 1793,
116–19.

16.
Schama,
Citizens,
385.

17.
Ibid., 383–88; Lefebvre,
French Revolution to 1793,
123–24.

18.
Schama,
Citizens,
389–406, 420.

19.
Ibid., 389–406, 420, 619–24.

20.
Ibid., 367–68, 422–25; Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, quoted in Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(London, 1790), ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis and New York, 1955), 196n; “Modern History Sourcebook: ‘Ca Ira.’”