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  Acclaim for Jon Kukla’s

  A Wilderness So Immense

  “A story of fascinating international intrigue and fallible human beings dealing with issues far beyond their comprehension. It is the best book on the subject yet available.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “As exciting and readable a narrative of the Louisiana Purchase as we are likely to get in the foreseeable future.”

  —The New Republic

  “Enlightening. … Kukla is good at showing what a ferment of ideas and resultant activities the world was going through at this time.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “A thoroughly readable, entertaining, and informative history of the incredible period that led to the purchase of a land that doubled the size of the United States. … A wonderful book, not to be missed.”

  —The Decatur Daily

  “A well-researched study.… Packed with fast-moving descriptions of the complicated negotiations. Kukla has a fine sense of context and detail.”

  —The Roanoke Times

  “A wonderful story, wonderfully told.”

  —W. W. Abbot, Editor Emeritus of

  The Papers of George Washington

  “Engaging and authoritative…. Kukla is at his best in reconstructing the politics and diplomacy…. His mastery of developments (and sources) in European capitals as well as in New Orleans is unparalleled.”

  —American Historical Review

  JON KUKLA

  A Wilderness So Immense

  Jon Kukla received his B.A. from Carthage College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has directed historical research and publishing at the Library of Virginia and has been curator and director of the Historic New Orleans Collection. In 2000 he returned to Virginia as director of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation. He lives in Charlotte County, Virginia.

  ALSO BY JON KUKLA

  Patrick Henry: Voice of the Revolution

  (2001, with Amy Kukla)

  Speakers and Clerks of the Virginia House of Burgesses,

  1643–1776 (1981)

  EDITOR:

  The Bill of Rights: A Lively Heritage (1987)

  A Key to Survey Reports and Microfilm of the Virginia Colonial

  Records Project (1990, with John T. Kneebone)

  A Guide to the Papers of Pierre Clement Laussat,

  Napoleon’s Prefect for the Colony of Louisiana,

  and of General Claude Perrin Victor (1993)

  Will republicans, who glory in their sacred regard to the rights of human nature, purchase an immense wilderness for the purpose of cultivating it with the labor of slaves?

  —The Balance and Columbian Repository, September 20, 1803

  Louisiana is ours! If we rightly improve the heaven sent boon, we may be as great, and as happy a nation, as any on which the sun has ever shone. The establishment of independence, and of our present constitution, are prior, both in time and importance; but with these two exceptions, the acquisition of Louisiana, is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states.

  —Dr. David Ramsay, May 12, 1804

  No event in all American history—not the Civil War, nor the Declaration of Independence, nor even the signing of the Constitution—was more important.

  —Bernard DeVoto, March 21, 1953

  For Amy,

  for Jennifer,

  and for Elizabeth

  Contents

  Tributaries

  ONE Piece by Piece

  TWO Carlos III and Spanish Louisiana

  THREE Poor Colonel Monroe!

  FOUR A Long Train of Intrigue

  FIVE The Touch of a Feather

  SIX Bourbons on the Rocks

  SEVEN Questions of Loyalty

  EIGHT Banners of Blood

  NINE A New Era in World History

  TEN Mr. Pinckney’s Mission

  ELEVEN Affairs of Louisiana

  TWELVE The Embryo of a Tornado

  THIRTEEN Selling a Ship

  FOURTEEN Midnight in the Garden of Rue Trudon

  FIFTEEN An Immense Wilderness

  SIXTEEN Fluctuations of the Political Thermometer

  EPILOGUE A Various Gabble of Tongues

  Appendixes

  A Treaty of 1795 Between the United States and Spain

  B Louisiana Purchase Treaty

  C Louisiana Purchase Conventions

  D Draft Amendments to the Constitution, July-August 1803

  A Note on Texts and Translations

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Tributaries

  The Mississippi will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1,000 miles by water, but only 500 by land…. The Mississippi, below the mouth of the Missouri, is always muddy….

  The Missouri is, in fact, the principal river, contributing more to the common stream than does the Mississippi, even after its junction with the Illinois. It is remarkably cold, muddy, and rapid….

  The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted… three or four miles below Louisville.

  —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 17851

  IN THE PINE WOODS of northern Minnesota, about one hundred eighty miles inland from Lake Superior and the port of Duluth, the Mississippi River begins its winding journey of 2,552 miles from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. As it flows out of the lake to begin a pilgrimage through the heartland of North America, the shallow brook is about a dozen yards wide. Passing tamarack bogs and the burial mounds of the Anishinabe, the river gains width and depth. Fed by scores of glacial ponds and lakes, the Mississippi tumbles over the Falls of St. Anthony, between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Navigable from there to the Gulf, the mighty river swells with the water of tributary creeks and streams that drain more than a million square miles of farmland and forest. As lesser rivers converge into the larger tributaries that join the Mississippi—the St. Croix River at Point Douglas, Minnesota, the Wisconsin at Prairie du Chien, and the Illinois at Grafton—the Mississippi sprawls to half a mile wide or more to greet its peers, the Missouri at St. Louis and the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois. Born of this trinity, the Mississippi River below Cairo rolls omnipotently across the alluvial land that it deposited after the last ice age.2

  The power and destiny of the Lower Mississippi is scarcely imaginable along the north shore of Lake Itasca, where picnic tables sheltered by tall pines dwarf the tiny stream. Here, fifty years ago, a tow-headed and dimpled midwestern child splashed from rock to rock across the shallow brook, cheerfully ignorant that he was ankle deep in the first tide of a turbulent force of nature and history. Everything impressive about the Mississippi River lay far downstream in his distant future. In time the child who splashed over stepping-stones at Lake Itasca swam against the lazy summer current at Wyalusing State Park. He heard calls for volunteers to pack sandbags against the angry flood near Prairie du Chien. And he stood on the levee at Jackson Square, far below the tributary streams of his childhood, watching the all-powerful and unforgiving river send enormous oceangoing ships skidding through the treacherous bends at New Orleans. As age, distance, and experience revealed the connections between that tiny crystal brook at Lake Itasca and the mighty muddy flood of the Lower Mississippi, the man who long ago played in the clear waters of the Upper Mississippi came to realize that the story of the Louisiana Purchase had its tributaries, too.

  At the end of the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase lay hidden far beyond the horizon, twenty years downstream into the future. The background s
tories that comprise its tributaries were as distant from one another as are the easternmost headwaters of the Ohio River—on the Allegheny near Coudersport, Pennsylvania—from the mountain creek near Dillon, Montana, that eventually becomes the Missouri. Like gravity pulling water through a great river system toward the sea, time brought together the stories from Paris, Madrid, New Orleans, New York, Kentucky, and Haiti that finally converged in the monumental events of 1803.

  In 1803 the destiny of North America was formally decided by men who never set foot in the Mississippi Valley, who never walked the narrow streets of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, and who never laid eyes on the rivers that drain an expanse of field and forest slightly larger than Western Europe. Thomas Jefferson never traveled west of the Shenandoah Valley, Robert R. Livingston never got beyond the Catskills, James Monroe never made it west of Nashville, Tennessee. Napoleon Bonaparte never visited America, and his ministers knew only the Atlantic Coast. François Barbé-Marbois once visited the Mohawk Valley from his diplomatic post in New York City during the last years of the American Revolution, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord sat out the Reign of Terror in Philadelphia. The key participants in the diplomatic story of the Louisiana Purchase were statesmen in Europe and America who knew the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers only as lines on a map, and the Missouri River only as a legend at third hand. The territory of Louisiana itself was a wilderness so immense that its boundaries remained indefinite for years.

  The destiny of America was decided by women and men who crossed the Appalachians into Kentucky and floated their produce to New Orleans on flatboats and bateaux, but their determination was shaped by statesmen with maps and imagination. None of them studied or dreamt more grandly than Thomas Jefferson. No one knew it at the time—least of all Jefferson himself—but elements of the Louisiana Purchase first began to take shape in his map-strewn study near the Champs-Elysées at the edge of Paris in January 1786.

  — CHAPTER ONE —

  Piece by Piece

  Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled. We should take care to not… press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them peice by peice. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have. This is all we are as yet ready to receive.

  —Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 17861

  Mortar never becomes so hard and adhesive to the bricks in a few months but that it may easily be chipped off.

  —Thomas Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay,

  January 25, 17862

  THE SKIES OVER Paris were cloudy on Wednesday, January 25, 1786, and the early morning temperature was 42 degrees in the courtyard of the elegant new mansion, the Hôtel de Langeac, at the corner of the Champs-Elysées and rue de Berri just inside the western wall of the city. Designed by Jean F. T. Chalgrin, who later built the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical townhouse served from 1785 through 1789 as the office and residence of the forty-two-year-old United States minister to the court of Louis XVI, Thomas Jefferson.

  A decade earlier, on July 1, 1776, Jefferson had started a lifelong practice of recording the temperature every day when he rose and again at midafternoon. At first he sometimes checked the temperature four times a day—as he did in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, perhaps to test the new thermometer he had purchased on that historic day for three pounds, fifteen shillings from John Sparhawk. Soon he had established a routine: “My method,” he explained, is to make two observations a day the one as early as possible in the morning, the other from 3. to 4. aclock, because I have found 4. aclock the hottest and day light the coldest point of the 24. hours. I state them in an ivory pocket book … and copy them out once a week.3

  Thomas Jefferson, about 1787. Despondent over the death of his wife, Jefferson found refuge in his appointment as American minister to the court of Louis XVI in 1784. Three years later the artist John Trumbull captured Jefferson in a life portrait for his famous Declaration of Independence. This unsigned watercolor is a copy of Trumbull’s original. The artist was a frequent visitor at Jefferson’s Hotel de Langeac starting in 1785, when the two men toured the public buildings of Paris as Jefferson was contemplating the design of a new Capitol for Virginia—as well as the future of North America. (Courtesy Virginia Historical Society, Richmond)

  Jefferson cluttered his pockets with gadgets. The ivory notebooks in which he recorded meteorological data looked like small fans—their pages were wafers the size of business cards joined at one end by a brass rivet. Jefferson jotted his daily notes in pencil on the ivory, and after copying the information into the leather-bound memorandum book at his desk, he wiped the ivory clean for the week ahead.

  Eighteenth-century thermometers were large, and Jefferson bought at least twenty of them during his lifetime—along with nearly every other scientific gizmo that caught his eye in Paris or London. He recorded the temperature every morning, with rare exceptions, from the dawn of American independence until shortly before his death at Monticello on July 4, 1826. In the afternoon, other activities occasionally interrupted his daily routine. Nevertheless, over the course of fifty years Thomas Jefferson recorded the morning temperature virtually every day between 5:30 and 8:00 a.m. and the midafternoon temperature, on average, about six days out of seven. He would have loved the Weather Channel.

  While in Paris, Jefferson also acquired two kinds of hygrometers to measure relative humidity. Their appeal was irresistible, but if he had felt any hesitation about buying these instruments, the perfect excuse was at hand. He needed them to refute a theory advanced by his new acquaintance, the great French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. America, the naturalist contended, was more humid than Europe. Moreover, Buffon maintained that high humidity contributed to a universal degeneracy that he ascribed to all the plants, animals, and people of the New World. Jefferson knew better. Paris itself was damp, and Jefferson had felt its ill effects for months after his arrival. But the question was a scientific one, and the patriotic spokesman for the Western Hemisphere needed proof. The new hygrometers were weapons in Jefferson’s battle against Buffon’s theory.4

  Twice a day, at dawn and again at midafternoon, Thomas Jefferson recorded the temperature and weather conditions on ivory pocket notebooks. Each week for half a century, from July 1, 1776, to within months of his death on Independence Day 1826, Jefferson transcribed the accumulated meteorological data into a leather-bound folio volume, wiped his pencil notes from the ivory wafers, and started anew. (Courtesy Monticello—The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Inc.)

  At 42 degrees, the courtyard at Langeac was chilly. On a warmer morning, after recording the temperature Jefferson might have wandered the curving paths of the garden, planted in the fashionable and informal “English” style, in Romantic contrast to the classical symmetry of the great French gardens such as Versailles. In the “hot house” at the far corner of the property, he might have inquired about seeds or seedlings imported from America and entrusted to the care of his gardener, a Frenchman whose identity has been lost to history. Or, crossing the courtyard to the porter’s lodge, Jefferson might have said bonjour! to his coachman, Anselen, and glanced into the stables, carriage house, and harness room.5

  Save for the papers in his office, nothing in the mansion demanded Jefferson’s attention that morning. His twenty-six-year-old secretary and protégé, William Short, had rooms at Langeac, but Short and his manservant, Boullié, were away. The kitchen had been without a scullery maid since December, but the Monticello slave James Hemings, who had come to France with Jefferson and his eldest daughter, Martha, was in the kitchen with his culinary mentor, a female chef whose name we do not know. Hemings had come to Paris for the express purpose of learning to cook, and Jefferson, who was almost a vegetarian, attached unusual significance to his gastronomical training. Abigail Adams, wife
of his diplomatic counterpart at the Court of St. James’s in London, gleefully recounted Jefferson’s opinion of meat-eating Englishmen to her sister. “Says he,” Abigail reported,

  it must be the quantity of Animal food eaten by the English which renders their Character unsusceptible of civilisation. I suspect that it is in their kitchens and not in their Churches, that their reformation must be worked.

  Parisian chefs, Jefferson felt certain, could do more good for the English than missionaries “endeavoring] to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy”6

  Marc, the butler in the main house, had responsibility for five large rooms on the first floor as well as Jefferson’s office suite, three main bedrooms, and secondary rooms upstairs. His stewardship was assisted by Sansón, a valet de chambre filling in for Adrienne Petit, and the frotteur Saget. Painted floors were the fashion of the day, and they required constant attention. Before John and Abigail Adams left Paris for London, Abigail had watched in amazement as her floors had been painted first with pigment and glue and “afterward with melted wax, and then rubbed with a hard Brush; upon which a Man sets his foot and with his Arms a kimbow strip[p]ed to his Shirt, goes driving round your room. This Man is called a Frotteurer, and is a Servant kept on purpose for the Business.”7

  While Saget skated around the Hotel de Langeac on footbrushes and five or six French employees and James Hemings looked after the house and garden, the labor of the consulate fell entirely to Jefferson himself. Although Jefferson had invited Short to Paris as his personal secretary, Short often traveled on diplomatic business or stayed at the small house in the village of Saint Germain where he had perfected his French. The charming young Virginia bachelor, who now spoke fluent French and moved gracefully in polite society, had become more useful to the nation as an apprentice diplomat than as Jefferson’s clerk. And if truth be told, Jefferson really preferred the immediacy, intimacy, and confidentiality of his own pen, even if, when he broke his wrist later that year, it meant learning to scrawl with the quill in his left hand.8