A Wilderness So Immense Read online

  As far as it went, the French diplomat’s assessment of the regional conflict over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations was accurate. But neither Otto nor the American populace knew just how close the nation came to fragmentation. Between January and August 1786, very few men in and around Congress witnessed the full progress of the secret Massachusetts separatist movement. One who did was the attentive and sensible James Monroe.

  The nation’s first separatist movement occurred on Monroe’s watch. It began quietly in November 1785, festered for nine months, and then erupted in August. With his ear cocked to the diplomatic stalemate over the Mississippi River, Monroe caught the first hints of the New Engenders’ scheme in January, and witnessed its development during subsequent months. When their talk turned to action, a secret ploy to surrender the Mississippi to Spain, it was James Monroe who sounded the alarm—first in May and then in August 1786.

  Soon after John Jay and Diego de Gardoqui began their conversations, Congress had directed Jay “particularly to stipulate the right of the United States to … free Navigation of the Mississippi, from the source to the Ocean.” On this point, Gardoqui had his own explicit instructions to deny the Americans use of the Mississippi where Spain controlled both banks of the river. Jay and Gardoqui quickly recognized their dilemma and reported the impasse to their superiors. Jay spoke informally with Monroe and other influential members of Congress and Gardoqui sent written reports to Spain. There could be no progress on the Mississippi question (or much else) unless either Congress or Carlos III gave ground, but in the meantime Jay and Gardoqui met weekly and talked cordially.

  Whether directly from Jay or perhaps in whispered conversations with New York merchants or New England congressmen, Gardoqui discovered that many influential Americans thought that closing the Mississippi River was just fine. By January, his discussions with Jay were focused on what seemed an attractive compromise. In exchange for guaranteeing fishing rights off Newfoundland and trade privileges in Spanish ports (the equivalent of most favored nation status), Spain asked the United States to surrender navigation of the Mississippi for a period of twenty-five or thirty years. While Gardoqui waited for further guidance from Spain, Jay tested the waters with selected members of Congress. He even spoke to Monroe, who “was appriz’d [of Jay’s thinking] upon my first arrival here in the winter”—around Christmas 1785—but probably not in great detail. The conversation put Monroe on alert for any threats to the Mississippi, and he monitored what he came to regard as “all the previous arrangements [that] those in fav[o]r of [relaxing Jay’s instructions] found necessary to make, to prepare for its reception” in Congress.37 Nevertheless, until early summer, Monroe found no reason to link John Jay with the talk he was hearing from Massachusetts congressmen about creating a separate New England confederacy.

  The next development in the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations occurred during the last week of May. On May 25, 1786, bolstered with fresh advice from Carlos III and his ministers, Gardoqui increased the pressure on Jay with a letter explaining not only that his king regarded the navigation of the Mississippi River as nonnegotiable, but that Spain claimed the territory east of the Mississippi as theirs by conquest. As instructed, Gardoqui urged the United States to concede these rights.

  Four days later, on May 29, Jay reported to Congress that difficulties had arisen in his negotiations with Gardoqui—and then he dropped the other shoe. Jay asked Congress to appoint a special secret committee with full authority to direct and control his negotiations with Gardoqui. The ploy was clever enough: a secret committee could quietly rescind the insistence upon American rights to navigate the Mississippi River. If negotiations led to an attractive treaty, everyone might be happy. If not, no harm was done. And if a controversy arose, those responsible for the reversal could hide behind parliamentary procedure. The only hitch was James Monroe, who “immediately perciev’d that the object was to relieve [Jay] from the instruction respecting the Mississippi and to get a committee to cover the measure.”38

  Rufus King greeted Jay’s letter about the Spanish negotiations with a long smoke-and-mirrors speech, but his rhetorical diversion failed. The Virginians pegged him as “associated in this business” with Jay, but the votes simply were not there—for either side.39 For reasons that soon became fully apparent to Monroe (and that will soon be clear to the reader, too), Jay’s ploy to create a secret committee could work only if the measure slipped quickly and quietly through Congress. Jay’s friends did not have the votes to reverse his instructions, but if the southerners who cared about the Mississippi had been looking the other way, the trick might have worked.

  Three years of careful attention to business, however, had taught Monroe a few tricks of his own. He had learned that few things were easier than to persuade Congress to duck an issue by consigning it to further study. Instead of appointing the committee Jay wanted—one with power to direct his negotiations and alter his instructions—Congress appointed three men to consider Jay’s request and report back later. They met the next day, came to an immediate and permanent deadlock, and two months later recommended that Congress summon Jay to the floor and take up the issue in a full congressional debate. And so it happened that in August 1786 the fate of the Mississippi River forced Congress into the most divisive sectional conflict of the Confederation period while the New England separatists tried one last time to make their scheme work.

  — CHAPTER FOUR —

  A Long Train of Intrigue

  The Southern States have much to fear from a dissolution of the present Confederacy. Enervated, disposed over a large territory but little inured to constraint, they are capable of making … but little resistance to a foreign enemy or one near home. Nor are their best men totally unacquainted with these circumstances. These considerations must press them into Federal measures—they surely must be alarmed even at the suggestion of a confederacy of the States north of the Potomac or even the Delaware and give up their opposition to avoid such a measure.

  —Nathan Dane to Edward Pulling, January 8, 17861

  This is one of the most extraordinary transactions I have ever known, a minister negotiating expressly for the purpose of defeating the object of his instructions, and by a long train of intrigue and management seducing the representatives of the States to concur in it…. Certain it is that Committees are held in this town of Eastern men and others of this State upon the subject of a dismemberment of the States East of the Hudson from the Union and the erection of them into a separate gov[ernmen]t.

  —James Monroe to Patrick Henry, August 12, 17862

  THERE ARE OBJECTIONS to New York,” a lawyer visiting the seat of Congress with his wife admitted in the summer of 1786. “The water for Example is execrable. There are more flies than in most places; nor is there a scarcity of muskettoes.” Manhattan’s “houses are ill constructed; the rooms often very small. They have not an inch of garden, nay, hardly of yard. In most parts of Town, the Streets in general are very narrow—illy paved, and crooked. Their Butter and Meats are far inferior to Phil[adelphi]a.” Despite these and other shortcomings, however, the rising Virginia jurist St. George Tucker liked New York. “Under all these Circumstances,” he admitted, “if my fortune would permit it I would live on the Island of New York in preference to any spot I have ever seen”3—a sentiment that countless other visitors mixing business and pleasure in Manhattan have echoed through the decades.

  His extended family’s legal affairs had brought Tucker to New York from Virginia, where today his restored house stands a few doors from the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. He also hoped the northern excursion might help his wife recover from the miscarriage of what would have been her ninth child. Frances Bland Randolph Tucker was regarded “as a woman not only of superior personal attractions, but [one] who excelled all others of her day in strength of intellect.” Married in 1778, the Tuckers had five young children together, but his chatty diary of their trip to New York was something that St. George Tucker intended for the
benefit and amusement of his three teenage stepsons. Jack, the youngest of the Randolph boys, would serve in Congress almost thirty years into the next century—the brilliant and eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke4—but by ancestry and upbringing all the boys in the household were destined for careers in politics and public life.

  While the Tuckers visited New York City in August 1786, the members of Congress with whom they dined and partied were engaged—entirely in secret—in the most divisive arguments about the future of the country since the Declaration of Independence ten years earlier. Their debates were so cloaked in official secrecy that even as astute and well placed a visitor as St. George Tucker, writing entirely for the private edification of three aspiring young politicians, heard nothing about schemes that many participants (and their descendants and biographers) preferred to forget.

  The deliberations of Congress were secret. A dozen years earlier, at its first meetings in 1774, Congress had resolved that its doors “be kept shut during the debates And that every Member be obligd under the strongest obligation of Honor to keep secret the proceedings of the Congress until they shall be ordered to be publishd”—a fact that delegates quickly learned to explain to their friends. “I am obliged to be very reserved,” a typical congressman wrote, “by the Injunction of Secrecy laid on all the Members of the Congress, and tho I am aware of the Confidence I might repose in your Prudence, I must nevertheless submit to the Controul of Honour.”5

  Despite the constraints of house rules, honor, and prudence that had kept St. George Tucker in the dark about the goings-on in Congress, there were practical political limits to the secrecy of congressional debates. It is true, as Poor Richard’s Almanack put it, that “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead,” but absolute secrecy was neither possible nor desirable for congressmen of the Confederation period. Congressmen were accountable to the state legislatures and governors who had sent them to Philadelphia or New York, and who wanted to know, at least in summary, what their agents (and the other states’ agents) were up to. Term limits enforced this primary allegiance, for a man could serve no more than three one-year terms within any six-year period in Congress. Owing their seats not to independent citizen voters but to the state legislatures, congressmen had few incentives to go public with the details of congressional deliberations. Poor Richard might have professed surprise at how well American congressmen kept their deliberations secret (especially in wartime), but the real Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues spent a sweltering Philadelphia summer behind the closed doors of the Pennsylvania State House—from May to September—with the windows nailed shut to protect the secrecy of the deliberations that created the United States Constitution. This eighteenth-century predilection for keeping public debates out of the public eye offered a secure field upon which statesmen and scoundrels might play for good or ill—shielded even from the gaze of astute and well-connected political observers like St. George Tucker.

  Settling into their “intollerably hot” rooms on Maiden Lane, the Tuckers initially regarded New York City in mid-July 1786 as “a very hot disagreeable situation.” Despite the heat, however, their spirits soon were lifted by an evening at the theater. Then came an invitation to dinner with one of Mrs. Tucker’s cousins, Virginia congressman Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee, who “very politely traversed half the town to aid [them] in search of a good house.” Within a few days the couple were happily immersed in “the hurly burly of paying and receiving visits,” and socializing with members of the Virginia congressional delegation. Colonel Edward Carrington “looks wretchedly,” they thought, but they found James Monroe “much improved by matrimony.”6

  The Tuckers ate well, too. Breakfast was “always a scene of the highest good humour and Entertainment,” Tucker wrote, but “dinners are no less a Scene of unrestrained Gayety and lively conversation.” The Tuckers dined several times with Boston merchant Nathaniel Gorham, president of Congress and a leader of the Massachusetts delegation, and feasted with Baron von Steuben and General Henry Knox, secretary of the War Department, as frequent dinner guests of New York City mayor James Duane.

  One afternoon while savoring “the hurly burly and bustle of a large town” (New York was home to about thirty thousand people), they stepped out of a fashionable shop and nearly stumbled over a congressman whose girth had “given rise to a waggish observation. That the State he represents has more weight in Congress than any other in the Union.” A few days later Tucker tagged along on a hunting expedition near von Steuben’s summer retreat along the East River overlooking Long Island. Finally, the Tuckers accepted an invitation to reside with Virginia congressmen Edward Carrington and William Grayson, who had rented a large house “about an hundred yards out of the city … commanding a fine view of the north river,” where St. George Tucker hoped the “fine, pure, refreshing air” of suburban New York might improve his wife’s health.7

  During their entire visit, however, nothing in or around New York City pleased St. George Tucker more than the company of Diego de Gardoqui. The Tuckers first met the Spanish envoy to the United States during the first week of August while visiting Anthony Walton White at his country estate north of the city. Gardoqui and the Dutch minister Pieter Johann Van Berckel, along with Gardoqui’s secretary Francisco Rendón and several Americans, had spent the afternoon shooting waterfowl near the Harlem River, where “the heat of the day had occasioned them to drink rather more than usual.” At dinner that evening, Tucker noted in his diary,

  The Dutchman preserved his phlegm but the Spaniard [Rendón] had no longer any pretensions to his national Gravity. He sung, laugh’d, danc’d and play’d as many tricks as [a] West-Indian or Frenchman. I have since observed that neither himself, nor Don Gardoqui have any of that solemnity about them which characterizes the Spanish nation. In the case of the latter … he is a Biscayan, the natives of which province are celebrated for the vivacity as well as Versatility of their parts and Genius. I dined with Don Gardoqui this week, in company with a number of members of Congress. He is an extremely polite well bred man, and is allowed … in particular to excel the whole Diplomatic Corps.8

  Three weeks later, the Tuckers boarded a stagecoach for Philadelphia and headed home to regale the Randolph boys with stories of congressmen, diplomats, the mayor, and nearly everyone who was anyone around Congress—with some notable exceptions. They had not, of course, penetrated the Knickerbocker aristocracy of old New York. Nor had they dined with John Jay or the young Rufus King, who had married into that exalted society. And if Tucker’s otherwise chatty diary can be held accountable for its silences, the debate raging in Congress over Jay’s negotiations with Diego de Gardoqui was kept from their ears.

  On August 6, 1786, Diego de Gardoqui dictated a confidential report to Madrid on the status of his negotiations with Secretary for Foreign Affairs John Jay. Every word of his report was translated into code. The original message was dispatched to Spain by way of Boston, while copies, also in code, went by other routes and other ships. The codes and copies were standard operating procedure in the Spanish administration of a New World empire that dated back to Columbus. The first of these reports to reach the Spanish court was promptly deciphered and presented to Carlos III and his chief minister (and the duplicates remain to this day undeciphered in the Spanish archives).

  The procedures were familiar, but Gardoqui’s news from New York was unexpected. Despite a year of weekly meetings, despite the lavish dinners to impress Jay’s wife, despite all the cigars and fine wines for the members of Congress, and despite the gift of a Spanish stallion for Jay himself, the talks between the Spanish envoy and the American secretary remained at an impasse. Gardoqui had demonstrated surprising flexibility on the question of drawing a western boundary line between America’s trans-Appalachian territories and the Spanish colonies of Louisiana and the Floridas.9 He was offering an attractive package of trading privileges in Spanish ports in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, Spanish support for American
access to the rich cod fisheries of the North Atlantic, and the Spanish market as a new outlet for the catch. Jay and many congressmen, especially from New England, were eager to say yes.

  The only remaining obstacle to a treaty that could benefit the farmers, merchants, and fisherman of the northern and middle states was Carlos Ill’s insistence that the Mississippi River remain closed to American boats and traders. Carlos knew (though his able negotiator did not let on) that the silver mines of Mexico accounted for half the export trade of the entire Spanish empire. No wonder Carlos III assigned all the expenses of Gardoqui’s mission (generously budgeted at 50,000 pesos a year!) to the viceroy of Mexico.10 Louisiana was the buffer between those mines and a boisterous adolescent republic. The Mississippi River was the key to Louisiana, and Carlos III was not inclined to loosen his grip.

  John Jay had been over this ground before, and at heart he cared little about the Mississippi River. He was, of course, bound by his instructions—but he had made no secret of his personal opinion that the United States had plenty of land and opportunity for its citizens east of the Appalachian Mountains. As early as 1779, when Jay was president of Congress, the New Yorker had persuaded himself that if Spain were to close the Mississippi to American trade for a period of years, the interruption would somehow encourage backcountry families to establish farms, develop “an attachment to property and industry,” and stop “living in a half-savage condition.” “Would it not be wiser,” Jay wondered privately,

  gradually to extend our Settlements than to pitch our Tents through the Wilderness in a great Variety of Places, far distant from each other, and from those Advantages of Education, Civilization, Law, and Government which compact Settlements and Neighbourhood afford?11