A Wilderness So Immense Read online

  The final disposition of Benet Truly’s cargo and company are unknown, but when Thomas Ormis (or Amis) appeared with two flat-boats and a pirogue laden with ninety barrels of flour and other country produce in June 1786, Navarro confiscated the flour for the garrison at Natchez. The intendant sold the remaining goods at auction in New Orleans on August 3, while Ormis escaped upriver, denouncing the Spaniards to anyone who would listen.

  When Ormis’s complaints came to the attention of George Rogers Clark, who was leading a Kentucky expedition against the Wabash Indians, Clark responded by capturing three Spanish traders at Vincennes and confiscating their goods—a cautionary show of force that sent a clear message to officials in New Orleans. Thereafter, so long as Americans kept a civil tongue and a generous hand in their dealings with minor Spanish officials, many flatboats and their cargoes slid past the official restrictions with ease. Between February and July 1790, for example, 41 flatboats brought 4,904 barrels of flour, 916 hogsheads of tobacco, 261 barrels and 34,000 pounds of meat, 47 barrels and 100 gallons of whiskey, 35 barrels and 500 pounds of butter, 11 tons of iron, and 7 tons of hemp to New Orleans.29

  Smuggling and corruption had become rampant. Estimates vary, but Spanish officials may have neglected to record between one quarter and two thirds of the American produce that came downriver between 1785 and 1803. Merchant Phineas Bond declared, for example, that in 1786 Philadelphia’s contraband trade with the Spanish colonies was worth $500,000, while Governor Miró estimated that the illegal exports of gold and silver to pay for these goods totaled 400,000 pesos annually.30

  From Fort Harmar, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers near Marietta, General Henry Knox monitored the traffic downriver between 1786 and 1789. According to Knox, 598 wagons and 1,109 boats came down from Pittsburgh and Wheeling carrying 18,761 people, 8,487 horses, 2,199 cattle, and 1,833 sheep—but only 33 hogs.31 Pigs usually traveled the Ohio and Mississippi in barrels, as did those arriving in Natchez on April 11, 1790: 44 barrels of meat, 1,100 pounds of pork, 280 pounds of lard, 3 barrels of tallow, and 40 pounds of candles—along with 101 hogsheads of tobacco on three flatboats from Kentucky.32

  “The river is at present defenseless,” Governor Miró reported in January 1788. Then, with self-assurance born of desperation, he justified opening New Orleans to American trade as a defensive measure. “It is very easy,” he reminded his superiors in Havana, for the American settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains “to form an expedition against this province without our being able to notify [anyone] in time.” In the event of an invasion, Miró wrote, it was most probable that the Americans “will inform us by starting hostilities.” As Miró and Intendent Navarro had “informed the court, a long time ago,” the Americans were aggressive because they “had no other means of shipping their produce than the navigation of the Mississippi,” and “because they would be obliged by any other way to cross the summits of the [Appalachian] Mountains,” in which case “the cost of transportation would absorb the value of [their produce].”33

  “Who can tell if this day they may be in Tennessee,” Miró warned,

  constructing flatboats, which we call chalanas here, in order to come down after the snow melts. And how could I obtain news in time, since it takes three months to make a voyage from here, and it only would take them fifteen days … to go to Natchez, which is the first of our possessions that might see them? Your Lordship will be surprised … that the said settlements have one hundred and fifty thousand men capable of carrying arms: this is certain.34

  Twenty months later, living confirmation of Governor Miró’s warning strolled into his office in New Orleans.

  “There has just arrived from Quebec,” Miró exclaimed on October 30, 1789, “Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Sergeant-Major of the British Infantry Regiment,” bearing a passport from Guy Carleton. Knighted after successfully defending Canada from the American invasion of 1775–1776, Sir Guy Carleton was now Lord Dorchester, governor-general of Canada.35 One can only imagine his amusement as he signed the papers to indulge a high-spirited young nobleman’s impulse for a joyride up the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Twenty-year-old Fitzgerald impressed Miró with “the education and manners of his rank” (not his military rank but his social position as brother of the duke of Leinster and nephew of the duke of Richmond). “His object does not seem to be anything but the noble ambition to see new countries and obtain knowledge,” Miró wrote, hoping that it was true. “With this praiseworthy object… he undertook the journey in a birchbark canoe,” departing from Quebec on April 27 with Lieutenant Thomas Brisbane and six “oarsmen.” Fitzgerald and his party canoed from Quebec up the Great Lakes and either followed the familiar waterways of the coureurs de bois across Wisconsin or paddled through Lake Superior and down the Mississippi through Minnesota. Miró was unclear about the northernmost details of their route, but he knew they had paddled downstream to New Orleans as fast as any messenger could carry a warning from the Spanish outposts they passed en route.

  Miró was in shock. Fitzgerald arrived “without my being aware of this until he, in person, brought me the news as soon as he landed in this city.” The young sergeant major’s ramble from Quebec demonstrated the vulnerability of the entire colony of Louisiana. “This example,” Miró lamented, “shows how this province is exposed.” Utterly without warning, Louisiana could be overrun from the north at any moment. If it happened, Miró shuddered, the invaders themselves would “give us the first news with their presence.”36

  Miró faced a military crisis of profound historic dimensions. For centuries Spain had relied on a flexible network of religious missions and small garrisons, or presidios, as a distant early warning line that wandered across North America from St. Augustine to San Francisco. Some were permanent outposts, others were temporary responses to immediate threats. Together they defined the northernmost defensive salient of the Spanish borderlands—the sparsely settled zone protecting the riches of Mexico. Seen from an imperial perspective, these borderlands were ultimately expandable.37 Deep down, as Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró prepared to return to Spain in December 1791, he knew that his successors faced one of the most difficult of all military assignments: an orderly retreat.

  “A new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection [were] advancing and multiplying,” Governor Miró’s successor wrote in 1794, “with a prodigious rapidity.” Sweeping the Indians aside as they moved west, Miró’s successor continued, the Americans were

  attempting to get possession of all the vast continent which those nations are occupying between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Gulf of Mexico and the Appalachian Mountains … at the same time that they are demanding with threats the free navigation of the Mississippi.38

  François-Louis Hector, fourteenth baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, brought a military career and two years of administrative experience to the post of governor of Louisiana in December 1791. Under Carlos IV, family patronage connections were allowed a greater role in Carondelet’s appointment than had been apparent during the previous reign. Carondelet’s modest achievements in New Orleans, his canal linking the city with Bayou St. John and the introduction of oil-burning streetlights, were overshadowed by serious failures. His vacillations toward planters, slaves, Indians, and free people of color, for example, contributed to the abortive Pointe Coupée slave uprising of 1795. The creation of the Natchez district in 1789, with Manuel Gayoso de Lemos as governor, put Louisiana’s frontier affairs into the hands of an abler man. By 1797 Gayoso had so demonstrated his superior diplomatic skills that Carondelet was dispatched to Quito, Ecuador, where he died in 1807, while Gayoso moved to New Orleans and became governor-general of Louisiana. (Courtesy Library of Virginia)

  As governor of Louisiana, Miró’s successor, François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, enjoyed a reputation based as much on a stylish French surname and facile pen as his actual administrative skills.

&nb
sp; Born in 1747 in Cambrai, on the Schelde River near Flanders in the north of France, Carondelet was a captain of the Walloon Royal Guards at fifteen and subsequently joined the Spanish army. After recovering from severe wounds received in the invasion of Algiers in 1775, he fought valiantly in the 1781 siege of Pensacola and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After two years as governor of San Salvador, then a part of Guatemala, Carondelet succeeded Miró on December 30, 1791. The new governor was energetic but quick-tempered, gullible, and inclined to rash decisions based on inadequate information. “He has always shown a great predilection for new projects, formations of thousands of militiamen, and other variations,” an official in the ministry of war sneered, “without ever thinking of the funds or expenditures that such Projects naturally will cost.”39 He was perhaps an odd choice to govern Louisiana at such a critical moment—but he wrote well, he had married well, and perhaps he looked good on paper to Manuel Godoy.

  Carondelet knew that the “writings, public papers, and speeches” of the frontiersmen “all have as their object the navigation to the Gulf… and the rich fur trade of the Missouri.” In time, he warned, “they will demand the possession of the rich mines of the interior provinces of the very kingdom of Mexico,” and “their method of spreading themselves and their policy are [as] much to be feared by Spain as are their arms.”

  A carbine and a little maize in a sack are enough for an American to wander about in the forests alone for a whole month…. With some tree trunks crossed one above another, in the shape of a square, he raises a house, and even a fort that is impregnable to the savages by crossing a story above the ground floor.

  If these Americans and their log cabins “succeed in occupying the shores of the Mississippi or of the Missouri,” Carondelet warned, “there is, beyond doubt, nothing that can prevent them from crossing those rivers and penetrating into our provinces.”40

  The danger was clear: “A general revolution,” Carondelet concluded, “threatens Spain in America, unless it applies a powerful and speedy remedy.” His plan of defense—one of several eloquent proposals he offered Godoy—involved building and improving twenty-two Spanish forts all over North America, as far north as Minnesota, at a cost of 607,000 pesos. All this despite the fact that Carondelet could count on only 840 troops in his garrison at New Orleans (one sixth of whom were sick in hospital) and 5,440 militiamen spread from Illinois to Mobile and capable of sending “3000 men to a point on the Mississippi in 15 days when necessary.” Far too little, far too late—as the joy ride of Sergeant-Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald demonstrated—in the event of a surprise attack from the north.41

  Carondelet’s deficiencies as governor of Louisiana were offset, during the last years of Miró’s administration, by the creation at Natchez of a new administrative district in the borderlands with an able new governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos. In effect, upon Miró’s retirement, Carlos III sent two men to replace him and gave the forward position to the more capable man.

  “This officer served four years with me in the Lisbon Regiment from 1773,” Miró wrote proudly, “and even then he had distinguished himself through his talent, knowledge of various languages, and excellent conduct.” Gayoso was exactly Carondelet’s age, and in every respect the better man. Any doubt on that score can be settled by comparing Gayoso’s clearheaded 1792 report on the “Political Condition of the Province of Louisiana” with Carondelet’s visionary 1794 “Military Report on Louisiana and West Florida.”42

  Born in 1747 in Oporto, Portugal, the wine-exporting coastal town where his father was Spanish consul-general, Gayoso always identified himself as a native of Pontevedra, site of his family’s estate in Galicia. Educated at Westminster College in England, Gayoso retained, according to his American neighbors in Natchez, “the manners and customs of that nation … especially in his style of living.” A career soldier with a flair for diplomacy and a good understanding of languages, law, economics, and politics, Gayoso advanced rapidly under Carlos III. His was the kind of talent that senior officials coveted. While serving as an officer on the warship La España during the Spanish siege of Gibraltar of 1779–1783, General Alexander O’Reilly (whose many accomplishments included the imposition of Spanish rule in Louisiana in 1768) recognized his linguistic and diplomatic skills and recruited him as an aide-de-camp.43

  Promoted to captain, Gayoso learned the art of civilian administration at O’Reilly’s side during his tenure as governor of Cádiz from 1779 to 1786—except when he was polishing his diplomatic talents in Lisbon, where the Spanish ambassador “borrowed” him for months at a time (and where he also met and married the beautiful Theresa Margarita Hopman y Pereira). Not surprisingly, when the minister of the Indies cast about for the right officer to command the new district at Natchez, he found “that all the necessary qualities for this task are combined in the person of Lieutenant-colonel and Adjutant of the Plaza of Cadiz, Don Manuel Gayoso de Lemos.” Gayoso spent October and November 1787 in Madrid, studying Miró’s reports and correspondence from Louisiana and conferring with Floridablanca and Carlos Ill’s senior ministers.44

  Prompted in part by Diego de Gardoqui’s inability to achieve a treaty that closed the Mississippi to American traders, in part by the pressure of American settlements west of the Appalachians, in part by the advice of New Orleans officials such as Martín Navarro and Esteban Miró, and in part by the vacillation that accompanied the death of Carlos III, Spain was lurching toward new defensive policies for the Lower Mississippi. As early as May 1788, Floridablanca had floated a trial balloon to Gardoqui. If Spain could no longer keep the Americans from using the river, Floridablanca wondered, why not

  attract to our side the inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi, be it by alliance, by placing them under the protection of the King, or through union with his dominions under treaties which will insure their liberty, thus allowing them to export their products to New Orleans and to provide themselves at that town with goods they need from other countries.45

  Gayoso was fully briefed by Floridablanca before the death of Carlos III and encouraged to communicate directly to the ministry in Spain.

  After many delays—including the birth of Manuel and Theresa Gayoso’s first child, a difficult passage across the Atlantic, storms in the Gulf of Mexico, and a lengthy stop at Havana so that Gayoso could explain the nature of his mission and the evolving defensive policy to the captain-general of Cuba (Miró’s and Carondelet’s superior in the imperial chain of command)—the small brig La Industria moored near Grand Route St. John. On April 12, 1789, the new governor of Natchez stepped ashore to greet his old friend and comrade, Esteban Miró. The governor of Louisiana would soon return to Spain, and his successor, Carondelet, would come and go—dispatched after his six-year tenure in New Orleans to Quito, Ecuador, where he died in 1807.46 As governor of Natchez until 1797 and then governor of Louisiana until he succumbed to yellow fever in July 1799, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos represented Spain’s best hope of controlling the Mississippi River for a few more years.

  * Wittol: a cuckold who knows of his wife’s infidelity and submits to it.

  — CHAPTER SEVEN —

  Questions of Loyalty

  I hope that no one can say of me with justice that I break any law of nature or of nations, of conscience or of honor, in transferring my allegiance, from the United States to his Catholic Majesty.

  —James Wilkinson, August 22, 17871

  He has compromised himself entirely, so that should he not succeed in severing Kentucky from the United States, he will not be able to stay there, unless he has suppressed those articles which might be injurious to him—a possible procedure.

  —Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró, April 17, 17892

  That I have ever, in all my correspondence and intercourse with the Spanish government, conceded a tittle of the honour or interests of my own country, I most solemnly deny, in the face of God and man.

  —James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Time, 18163

 
THE ROBUST American officer who came downriver to meet Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró in New Orleans on July 2, 1787, was a perfect chameleon. Born in 1757 at Hunting Creek, near the tidal waters of the Patuxent River on Maryland’s western shore, James Wilkinson had begun studying medicine with a local physician at fourteen. By 1774 he was enrolled at the College of Philadelphia, America’s best medical school, and was practicing at the Pennsylvania Hospital. A few blocks away, the buzz of revolutionary politics at the First Continental Congress in Carpenter’s Hall and the flash of bright uniforms in the city’s patriot encampments caught the young physician’s fancy. “Arms,” James Wilkinson decided, would be “his profession and politics his hobby”—and thereafter he managed both with amazing dexterity4

  By December 1783, when Brigadier-General Wilkinson arrived in Kentucky as the accredited mercantile representative of Barclay, Moylan & Co., of Philadelphia, his career had already demonstrated a bent for intrigue. “Some men are sordid, some vain, some ambitious,” he once told Diego de Gardoqui. “To detect the predominant passion, to lay hold of it, is the profound part of political science.” Wilkinson knew whereof he spoke. He had served closely with Benedict Arnold in the invasion of Quebec and with Horatio Gates when Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga, and he was deeply involved in the so-called Conway Cabal of 1777, a purported scheme to replace Washington with Gates as commander in chief. Most recently he had resigned as clothier-general of the army in 1781 amid charges of irregularities in his accounts.5