A Wilderness So Immense (8 page)

Intendant Martin Navarro’s treatise,
Political Reflections on the Present Conditions of the Province of Louisiana,
made the case for open trade and population growth. Written late in 1780, after two devastating hurricanes had struck the colony and demoralized its inhabitants, Navarro’s treatise blamed Spanish imperial trade restrictions for Louisiana’s poverty
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Navarro recognized “the indispensable need for forming a barrier to the great and envied continent of Mexico”—the bedrock of Carlos Ill’s North American trade policy since 1762—but he also contended that under “a sovereign whose laws were not opposed to a system of free trade,” Louisiana would quickly prove itself “one of the most useful and best established provinces in America.” The colony offered “furs, indigo, tobacco, timber, cotton, pitch, tar, rice, maize, and all kinds of vegetables,” as well as wheat, barley, hemp, and flax “if they be cultivated with intelligence.” Despite its agricultural potential, however, Louisiana’s “commerce is poor” because it was conducted “in a manner most harmful and burdensome to the colony as well as to the king.” Optimistic about the “advantages that would result from a numerous population and large commerce,” Navarro’s opinions echoed other critics of mercantilism.

Whether expressed in Spanish, French, English, or Dutch, the free traders’ argument was that nations and kings benefited when their colonies thrived, regardless of where the goods went—a viewpoint that Carlos III and his ministers could readily find in Adam Smith’s
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
published in 1776. Smith contended that when individuals pursue their own self-interest their actions contribute to the good of all, as if guided by an invisible hand, and that government interference with trade was generally detrimental.
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Navarro’s observations about free trade and laissez-faire economics grew directly out of his experience in Louisiana and his recognition of its strategic importance as a no-man’s-land between the United States and Mexico—and for these reasons he had profound influence among Spanish policymakers well into the 1790s.

Reviewing the early economic history of the colony, Navarro blamed both the French and the Spanish for “the decadence of Louisiana.” Under the French, royal policies had undermined the currency while local corruption had discouraged credit, “for it was a crime to demand
justice for a debt contracted by a member of the council or by any person immediately related to such a member.” After the Spanish takeover, trade with France and the French Caribbean was suppressed and Louisiana was forced into a “mercenary trade with Havana,” a Spanish port that was unable to supply “articles and things of prime necessity” and where Louisiana products had low market value. “From that time,” Navarro concluded,

Having described the historic roots of Louisiana’s economic decadence, Navarro turned next to the colony’s “present state.” Martin Navarro was not Adam Smith, but for a Spanish royal official his arguments were unexpectedly close. Like Smith, Navarro saw the virtue of “self interest and a bettering of one’s fortune.” He openly admired the energy and industry of English and French smugglers “excited by self interest.” Navarro advocated

In this section of his treatise, Navarro referred to “the deity to whom all the most illustrious nations with just reason present their adoration,” but he was not talking about God. The deity was “commerce”—as he had seen it practiced by English-speaking interlopers in New Orleans in the 1770s.

New Orleans had been desperate, and “the English were not backward.” Smugglers operated with impunity from Natchez and Baton Rouge on the Mississippi, and from the marshy village at Pass Manchac, where the Amite River and Lake Maurepas drain into the western end of Lake Pontchartrain. Between 1770 and 1779 they “established a trade which was annually worth many millions,” and “their audacity c[a]me to such an extreme that,” without permission from Spanish authorities at New Orleans, “they built a dock on the land in order to facilitate the passage
of the floating warehouses of their vessels”—in short, a place of deposit where cargoes could be transferred from canoes, bateaux, and flatboats to oceangoing vessels.

On one occasion, Navarro recalled, Bernardo de Gálvez attempted to enforce Spanish regulations by confiscating thirteen English vessels in the Mississippi.

Navarro admired Bernardo de Gálvez, one of the best governors in the Spanish empire, but in these circumstances even Gálvez “vacillated between extremes, without daring to take other measures than that of conformity—a sad recourse.”

Spanish officials had no alternative but to tolerate the contraband trade until Gálvez captured Natchez, Baton Rouge, Manchac, Mobile, and Pensacola in his brilliant campaign of 1779–1780. They stood by, Navarro recalled, “with the pain of not being able to remedy it, although on the other hand, we had the consolation of seeing the inhabitant and the hunter profiting from the fruit of their labors.” They knew that Louisiana owed its economic survival “to the illicit trade of the English.” Without it, Navarro asked,

“What pain for a watchful governor like Don Bernardo de Gálvez,” Navarro wrote. “Although an eyewitness to this forbidden trade,” he could not take decisive action without betraying either “the sovereign authority or the happiness of the province.” Experiences such as these convinced Navarro of the virtues of free trade, which he advocated in writing and put into personal practice as soon as he could.

In January 1782, Carlos Ill’s ministers wrote new provisional regulations for Louisiana, influenced less by Navarro’s study than by a medley of exemptions advanced through the influence of the Gálvez family. On Friday, April 5, 1782, the royal decree was read aloud from the balcony of the
casa capitular.
Artillery units fired a salvo from the Place d’Armes
below, answered by a triple salute from decorated ships anchored in the river. The city greeted the new regulations “with such acclamations of joy that there was scarcely time to conclude the meeting with proper formality before attending the High Mass and Te Deum which the King had decreed in gratitude for the success of the Royal Arms over the English.” People placed candles in their windows that evening, “indicating how willingly the citizens would have given more appropriate expression to their joy did their circumstances and conditions permit.” And finally, French translations were distributed to the citizenry “so that they might know the great benefits His Majesty had bestowed upon them.”
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The experiment fell short of Navarro’s program, but for ten years it opened trade between Louisiana and specified ports in France, opened trade with the French West Indies in case of “urgent necessity,” and permitted duty-free importation of slaves. These three provisions took effect in 1783 (with the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution) and, together with a special-interest exemption for the export of barrel staves to the sugar islands, they governed Louisiana trade until 1794.

From his long experience enforcing trade regulations, and from the questions asked by puzzled New Orleans merchants, Navarro found many ambiguities in the new rules—who, for example, decided when the colony’s necessity was “urgent” enough to permit trade with the French islands? The decree showed signs of haste and the rules lacked the coherence of Navarro’s recommendations (so much so that extensive clarifications had to be issued in 1784); nevertheless, they unlocked the door. And in private dealings, the advocate of free trade was not slow to push where the new regulations may have opened doors wider than intended.

Navarro had lived modestly for decades on a salary of 4,000 pesos. Although he never married, he acknowledged his daughter, Adelaide de Blanco Navarro Demarest, born in 1768, and gave her a dowry of 6,000 pesos for her wedding in 1785. As late as 1781 Navarro had complained that none of his business ventures had ever prospered, but the new regulations included an obscure provision to encourage trade by giving New Orleans merchants two years to buy sailing vessels without paying any duty. Navarro entered a series of partnerships, and between 1782 and 1788 the slave trade, real estate, and money-lending made him one of the richest men in the city
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“A man of talent, active, disinterested, and popular,” wrote Governor Miró when he recommended Navarro for appointment as Spanish ambassador to the United States, the intendant was “apt for whatever position [and] possessing ability in the English language.” Among the transactions
for which records survive, Navarro sold fifteen slaves for 6,400 pesos in 1785, and the next year pocketed 24,455 pesos as his share of the profit on a cargo of slaves imported with Daniel Clark. He invested in rental property in Spain—ten houses, three farms, and two wine shops in partnership with his brother in La Coruña—as well as land and plantations upriver from New Orleans, and rental property on St. Peter Street. He made business loans to a druggist, an indigo planter, and people buying houses or slaves. His largest loan was 14,000 pesos to help a colleague reestablish himself after the fire of 1788. Living elegantly on Royal Street, his own household included his secretary, a housekeeper, apprentices and servants, and a slave trained as a barber and tailor. As he contemplated retiring from the intendancy at fifty, Martín Navarro was worth 3.7 million pesos—living proof that, as he had advised the crown in 1780, “self interest and a bettering of one’s fortune overrides all inconveniences.”
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For all his enthusiasm about free trade, however, Navarro had never lost sight of the strategic importance that Carlos III attached to Louisiana. And despite his lucrative slave-trading partnership with Daniel Clark, an Irish-born, Eton-educated Pennsylvanian who was amassing great wealth as a shipping agent in New Orleans, Navarro regarded Americans as the emerging threat to the Spanish colony. The presence of Americans on the tributaries of the Mississippi, he had warned in 1780,

Navarro saw the hard truth that every American who crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle along the Ohio River and its tributaries weakened the buffer between the Spanish territories and the energetic republican neighbor.

T
HE TWENTY
-three-year-old Philadelphia belle Sarah Vaughan only remembered seven of the eight “perfections” that her circle of stylish young women attributed to the tall, shy young Virginian they met aboard a sloop bound for Albany in 1784. Miss Vaughan, whose merchant father helped found the American Philosophical Society, had done her homework. The gossip she was sharing with thirty-three-year-old Kitty Livingston, daughter of the governor of New Jersey, was more accurate than not.
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James Monroe was a freshman member of Congress, a rising young attorney representing his native Virginia after several years in the state legislature, and on the governor’s advisory council. He was not rich, then or later, but at twenty-six he was young and single and had bright prospects.

At seventeen Monroe had abandoned his studies at the College of William and Mary and volunteered for service in the American Revolution. The faculty’s dull lectures bore no comparison to the revolutionary ideals voiced in debate near the other end of Duke of Gloucester Street at the Capitol and at Raleigh Tavern. Heading north from Williamsburg
as a subaltern in the Third Virginia Regiment, Monroe tasted the joy of victory in a skirmish on Manhattan Island in 1775 and again in the surprise attack at Trenton for which Washington’s army crossed the Delaware River late on Christmas Day 1776. Wounded in a brave assault against a Hessian artillery position, Monroe nearly bled to death from a severed artery in his shoulder. Promoted to captain and returned to duty after months of convalescence, he soon achieved the rank of major on the staff of Washington’s brigade commander William Alexander, known as Lord Stirling in honor of his claim to a Scottish earldom—a title recognized as legitimate by the English law courts but denied to the American-born “Lord” by the House of Lords.