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  O’Fallon’s list of Clark’s accusations also reflects the rivalries of frontier leaders in the young republic. Clark, O’Fallon believed, was telling people that the doctor had “forged Gen [eral Anthony] Wayne’s letters” inviting him to serve as physician on an Indian campaign north of the Ohio River. Wayne’s 1794 defeat of a confederation of Delaware, Miami, Shawnee, and Wyandotte tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (near present-day Toledo) led to the Treaty of Fort Greenville (northwest of modern Dayton) in 1795, which opened the present state of Ohio to American settlement.34

  The final episode in this domestic drama, an angry brawl between George Rogers Clark and James O’Fallon, had an international audience. General Clark “provoked me without cause,” O’Fallon complained to his estranged wife, “and he suffered for it.” “He attempted to strike me,” the defiant Irishman bragged, “but before his blow could reach, he lay sprawling on the floor, from blows which heavily reached him.” From Natchez, where he was monitoring developments in Kentucky as best he could, Governor Manuel Gayoso passed along a different version of the fight in a letter to Governor Carondelet in New Orleans. “O’Fallon has parted from his wife,” Gayoso reported, “who has withdrawn to the house of Clark, her brother, and he, in resentment of this offense has maltreated O’Fallon, even going so far as to break his stick over his head, inflicting injuries from which he had not yet recovered.”35

  Hard times may have been forced upon George Rogers Clark, but he was a Virginian, an officer, and a gentleman—and O’Fallon was “a Rogue, Rascal and Villain,” and an Irishman to boot. Gentlemen settled their differences on the field of honor, but a caning—a thorough beating about the head and shoulders with a stout hickory stick often resulting in serious injury and utter humiliation—was the way gentlemen chastised men of inferior status. James O’Fallon was dead at forty-five within months of his encounter with the cane of George Rogers Clark.36 What damage, Gayoso and Carondelet must have wondered, might Clark be capable of inflicting if he donned a tricolor cockade and marched thousands of men against Louisiana?

  Throughout the United States, forty Democratic-Republican societies loosely modeled on the Jacobin clubs of France were clamoring for “the free and undisturbed use and navigation of the Mississippi River [a]s the natural right of the inhabitants of the countries bordering on the waters communicating with the river.” Such was the language of an October 1793 resolution written in Lexington, Kentucky, and endorsed by Democratic-Republican clubs from Vermont to South Carolina.37 The moment was ripe for George Rogers Clark to mount a successful expedition against New Orleans in the autumn of 1793, and his military preparations put real teeth behind the Democratic-Republican societies’ angry rhetoric.

  “The feeble attempts which have been made by the executive under the present government, and the total silence of Congress on this important subject” infuriated the influential Democratic-Republican Society of Lexington. Presidential inaction and congressional silence were “strong proofs that most of our brethren in the eastern part of America, are totally regardless whether this our just right is kept from us or not.” Near Pittsburgh, the Democratic-Republican club of Washington County, Pennsylvania, warned that “patriotism, like every other thing, has its bounds,” and that “attachments] to governments cease to be natural, when they cease to be mutual.” Free navigation of the Mississippi was “a right which must be obtained,” the Washington County society declared. “If the general government will not procure it for us, we shall hold ourselves not answerable for any consequences that may result from our own procurement of it.” Frontier Americans “are strong enough to obtain that right by force,” the Lexington club warned, although “we hope … we shall not be driven to use those means to effect it with which we have been furnished by the God of nature.”38

  Clark’s main obstacle was money. Genet had sent him only $750, and his personal finances were a mess. But with Michaux en route to Philadelphia with Clark’s request for funds, neighbors and supporters of the Conqueror of the West could make a few things happen. “This kind of Warefare is my Ellement,” Clark assured Genet in October, and “had you fortunately have got my Letter in time … I could have before this time in all probability Executed my first Project that of getting compleat Possession of the Mississippi… but at present the season being far advanced and I find an impossibility of keeping it a secret I of course shall in some Instance deviate from my first plan and act agreeable to Circumstance.” Preparing for an attack in the spring of 1794, Clark’s associates at Louisville assembled two boats, five hundred pounds of powder, and a ton of cannonballs. More boats were being built at Cincinnati, and Kentucky’s Democratic-Republican clubs at Georgetown, Lexington, and Paris were gathering food, military equipment, boats, ammunition, and “all the encouragement in their power.”39

  In the middle of all this activity, with Clark’s urgent pleas for money tucked into his baggage along with seeds and bark samples, Andre Michaux spent the last week of September and the entire month of October visiting prominent Kentuckians and collecting botanical notes and specimens. By November 10 Michaux had only reached Danville, eighty miles east of Clark’s home, were he began in earnest the seven-hundred-fifty-mile trek toward Philadelphia by way of the Cumberland Gap and Wilderness Road. This southern route through Tennessee and Virginia was only forty miles longer than Michaux’s alternative through Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania. With winter approaching it was the wiser choice, and for once Michaux traveled at the pace of a courier rather than botanist. Averaging nearly twenty-five miles a day, he reached Philadelphia on December 12, reported to Genet on the 13th, and met with Jefferson and David Rittenhouse, president of the American Philosophical Society, on the 14th.40

  George Rogers Clark’s best opportunity to attack Louisiana had already slipped away in the accumulated delays on the part of Genet and Michaux, and the failures were political, not military. The French minister not only lacked money for Clark, but on December 5 President Washington had informed Congress that he had asked France to recall Citizen Genet. Washington and his cabinet had made the decision in August, and Secretary of State Jefferson had scarcely finished his lengthy letter to the American minister in Paris chronicling Genet’s “gross usurpations and outrages of the laws and authority of our country,” when he had opened an urgent message from the Spanish commissioners in Philadelphia.41

  In their letter, Josef Ignacio de Viar and Josef de Jaudenes, Diego de Gardoqui’s successors, informed Jefferson that since mid-July they had been investigating rumors of an expedition against Louisiana and had “managed to get our hands on one of the printed circulars,” which they enclosed. Not surprisingly, since there are three additional copies in his papers, Jefferson recognized the pamphlet as Genet’s address to the citizens of Louisiana, printed in Philadelphia as Les Français Libres à leurs frères de la LOUISIANE. The Spanish consuls were especially troubled by the passage “in which the author promises that the inhabitants of the western part of these States will assist and protect the people of Louisiana whenever they start the revolution.” The author, they felt, was guilty “of plotting, fomenting, and printing in a country that is both neutral and a friend of Spain, projects that quite openly have as their object the stirring up of one of her possessions and separating it from the [Spanish] government.” They asked Jefferson “to tell us whether such an offer has been made with the knowledge of your government.” If not, they hoped the American “government will properly take measures to punish the daring of the man who has proposed, without any authority, to involve the United States” in events that could lead to war. That autumn, Governor Carondelet sent a translation of the printed circular back to Spain, vowing to prevent its dissemination in Louisiana, “since its diffusion in this province, inhabited in great part by French settlers, might have the most fatal consequences not only here but also in the old, inland provinces of the kingdom of New Spain.”42

  Viar and Jaudenes also warned Governor Carondelet, in
New Orleans, that Genet was “engaged in secretly seducing and recruiting … to form an expedition against Louisiana,” supported by “two ships of seventy-four [guns], and six or eight frigates” from a French fleet that had carried refugees from St. Domingue to the United States. The fleet, they thought, correctly, “will meet with endless obstacles.” Its sailors were on the verge of mutiny and insisted on returning to France, as they eventually did. The danger, Viar and Jaudenes warned Carondelet, was attack by land, “since the perversity of the French, scattered through the whole continent, gives much ground for apprehension.”43

  Jefferson’s immediate response, on August 29, signaled a change in attitude toward Genet and Clark that would eclipse the military expedition and open the way for a diplomatic resolution in Pinckney’s Treaty. Jefferson, of course, knew much more than he let on when he promised the Spanish consuls that “the President will use all the powers with which he is invested to prevent any enterprize of the kind proposed.” He also informed them that he was forwarding the printed circular to the governor of Kentucky—the same Isaac Shelby to whom “Mr. Jeff.” had recommended Genet’s emissary, Andre Michaux, only two months earlier—“with instructions to pay strict attention to any endeavors … among the citizens of that state to excite them to join in the enterprize therein proposed or any other, and to use all the means in his power to prevent it.” Just how much authority the president or the governor actually had, remained an open question, and surely “Mr. Jeff.” knew that.44

  Written the same day as his letter to the Spanish consuls in Philadelphia, Jefferson’s letter to Isaac Shelby described the Spanish consul’s complaint and enclosed Genet’s printed address. On behalf of President Washington, who reviewed and approved the letter, Jefferson asked Shelby “to be particularly attentive to any attempts of this kind among the citizens of Kentucky.” Jefferson urged Shelby to “take those legal measures which shall be necessary to prevent any such enterprize.” As if to explain his own change of heart, Jefferson pointed out that both “the peace of the general Union” and “the special interest of the State of Kentucky” would now suffer if Clark marched against Louisiana. “Nothing could be more inauspicious,” he wrote, “than such a movement at the very moment when those interests”—the navigation of the Mississippi—“are under negotiation between Spain and the United States.”45

  An early immigrant from the mountains of Virginia, forty-five-year-old Isaac Shelby was nobody’s fool and nobody’s tool. Deliberate and clear in his thinking, slow to anger, Shelby was the first elected governor of Kentucky. Upon learning of his nearly unanimous election in 1792, however, Shelby kept everyone waiting for several days as he pondered whether “his walk through life … quallified him to fill [the office] with real advantage to his country or honour to himself.”46

  The rivers of Lincoln County, where Shelby lived about fifty miles south of Lexington, flow into the Kentucky and the Cumberland Rivers, and the governor was as resolute as any Kentuckian about opening the Mississippi. A few years earlier, his friend John Brown, now one of Kentucky’s first United States senators at the age of thirty-six, had worked closely with Gardoqui and Wilkinson in the so-called Spanish Conspiracy. Born in Staunton and educated at Washington College, the College of New Jersey, and William and Mary, Senator Brown had read law with Jefferson and opened his law office in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1782. “Competent people,” a foreign visitor wrote, “tell me that in Virginia he is inferior only to Mr. Madison,” who shared the same congressional boardinghouse in Philadelphia. The senator’s brother, James Brown, was Governor Shelby’s attorney general and a founder and officer in Lexington’s Democratic-Republican Society.47 No one knows how far Shelby’s personal sympathies extended toward Wilkinson’s separatism or Clark’s expedition, but the Browns helped Governor Shelby make the most of that uncertainty.

  Nothing in Jefferson’s letter escaped Shelby’s notice, and on October 5, only weeks after he had met with Andre Michaux while Genet’s emissary was in Kentucky, Shelby wrote Jefferson a short note of reassurance saying exactly what the Spanish wanted to hear. Thanking Jefferson for his warning about “an interprize against the Spanish Dominions on the Mississippi,” Governor Shelby pretended to be “well perswaded at present none such is in Contemplation in this State. The Citizens of Kentucky possess too just a Sence of the Obligations they owe the General Government, to embark in any interprize that would be so injurious to the United States.” As expected, Jefferson sent a copy of the note to the Spanish commissioners Viar and Jaudenes. Shelby, meanwhile, passed along Jefferson’s warning to the French agent Charles Depauw with a diffident comment that “to this charge I must pay that attention which my present situation oblidges me.”48

  “Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in tilts,” Gouverneur Morris commented in a letter briefing Jefferson about the situation in Europe—“The times change and we change with them”—and the adage was no less true along the Mississippi. “I find that we can get as many men as we pleace,” Clark wrote, “but it will be out of our power to keep our design a secret. It is gen[eral]ly known already”49

  Two men who were very attentive to news of Clark’s plans were François-Louis Hector, baron de Carondelet et Noyelles, in New Orleans and Manuel Gayoso de Lemos in Natchez. Their military situation was desperate. “If the project planned by the enemies is carried into effect,” Governor Carondelet advised the Spanish minister Manuel Godoy in a top-secret letter, “the whole of upper Louisiana” from St. Louis to the Walnut Hills (now Vicksburg) “will fall into the hands of the enemy in Spring, since the forces that can be collected for the defense of the[se] forts … do not amount to 90 men of regular troops and 200 militia; and even these can be but little trusted.” Once those forts were taken, Carondelet believed, “it is evident that all Louisiana will fall into their hands with the greatest rapidity and facility, since … few of the American inhabitants will side against an army composed of their countrymen, and as the French inhabitants will still less offer to take arms in our favor.” Once Clark took Natchez and moved south against New Orleans, Carondelet lamented, “I shall have no other resource than an honorable surrender, or to perish.”50

  Gayoso drew darker but more accurately nuanced conclusions in a report that Carondelet forwarded to Godoy on January 1, 1794: “The capital destined for this expedition is a million dollars,” Gayoso wrote, and Clark’s army was “composed of 5,000 men.” The attack would “start next spring,” and Clark’s aim was “to invade Louisiana and Mexico.” Grasping at straws, Gayoso could only hope that “the transportation of artillery” might not work, or the money not “be realized,” or the differences between Clark and O’Fallon might be disruptive, or, finally, “that the measures of the American Government” might prove “sufficient to obstruct this enterprise.”51

  With no prospect of timely reinforcements from Cuba, Carondelet offered “no further hope than in the [errors] the enemy may commit and in accidents which may perhaps favor us.” Clark committed no errors, and even the “impossibility of keeping it a secret” from the Spanish was not fatal. If anything, the intelligence from Kentucky that reached Carondelet, Gayoso, and their garrisons was demoralizing. Clark’s expedition was poised to move “on or before the 20th of February”52 and Carondelet and Gayoso knew that St. Louis, New Madrid, and Natchez would fall in succession. Unless some “accident” or “measure” intervened, they expected to surrender Louisiana in the spring of 1794.

  By January 1, 1794, the high visibility of George Rogers Clark’s impending military expedition, regardless of its ultimate fate, had created a diplomatic opportunity that Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby was quick to exploit. Early in November Secretary of State Jefferson and Secretary of War Henry Knox had warned Shelby that Genet had dispatched four French agents—Citizens August Lachaise, Charles Depauw, Pis Gignoux, and a carpenter named Mathurin—“with money … and with blank commissions” for an expedition “to descend the Ohio and Mississippi and attack New Orleans.” The ne
xt day General Arthur St. Clair dispatched a letter from Marietta, Ohio, on the Ohio River a hundred and forty miles below Pittsburgh, warning Shelby “that General Clark has received a commission from the government of France, and is about to raise a body of men in Kentucky to attack the Spanish settlements upon the Mississippi”—and that “a large sum of money, a paymaster, and a number of French officers, are arrived at the Falls of Ohio; and a number of boats for the expedition laid down.” To round things out, on November 25, the French agents August Lachaise and Charles Depauw wrote Shelby directly. They were puzzled about “strange reports … that your excellence has positive orders to arrest all citizens inclining to our assistance.” They also asked Shelby to distribute “some of these handbills”—probably Genet’s printed address to the people of Louisiana—“to that noble society of democrats,” presumably the Democratic-Republican Society of Lexington.53

  Although the letter from Jefferson and Knox advocated “suppression by the militia” to stop Clark’s expedition, the cabinet officers knew they were on shaky legal ground when they urged Shelby to employ “peaceable means of coercion” (indictments, bonds for good behavior, and “such other legal process as those learned in the laws of your state may advise”). President Washington had issued a proclamation of neutrality, but in point of law it was merely advisory and not enforceable. Similarly, General St. Clair’s proclamation of December 7, 1793, exhorting “inhabitants of the territory of the United States North West of the Ohio … to observe a strict neutrality towards Spain [and] to abstain from every hostility against the subjects or settlements of that Crown,” had no legal force in Kentucky54