A Wilderness So Immense (13 page)

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.”
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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.
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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,

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.
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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.
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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,

Anyway, a diplomat’s instructions could change with changes in circumstances. As the American minister to Spain from 1780 to 1782—at a time when America’s desperate need for money to fight the war overshadowed any hopes of future navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers—Congress (with Virginia’s explicit blessing) had reluctantly authorized Jay to surrender all American claims to the use of the Mississippi in exchange for Spanish support in the war against Great Britain. As Carlos Ill’s rising expert on all things North American, Diego de Gardoqui had been party to Jay’s negotiations in Madrid. He knew how Jay and many East Coast Americans felt, and with that knowledge he played them like a violin throughout the spring and summer of 1786. In Gardoqui’s own figure of speech, he squeezed them like an orange.

“For nearly a month,” Gardoqui reported in the encoded confidential dispatch of August 6, 1786, to José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, “the Congress has worked with vigor concerning our affairs. Never has it had greater nor more acrimonious debates because those of the North argue in accord with us and those of the South oppose bitterly.” The northern congressmen, he told Carlos Ill’s chief minister, “have gone as far as to threaten secession and that they will make a treaty with His Majesty.” The result was that John Jay would be called before Congress to report on the Spanish negotiations. Jay “resisted giving his verbal opinion,” Gardoqui knew, “and he gave it in writing. I believe it is not bad.”
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Gardoqui knew that Jay was seeking permission to surrender navigation of the Mississippi for a period of twenty-five or thirty years in exchange for the attractive commercial treaty Spain was offering. The Spanish negotiator may not have known exactly how Jay hoped to evade the constraints of his instructions. He did know that within a few days, on August 10, “Congress must meet in a great assembly.” He expected “very bitter debates,” but he was uncertain of their outcome. “I don’t have full confidence” of success, he admitted, but in the hope that Jay and the northern congressmen might pull it off, “I do not cease working day and night. A deep secrecy is kept and it seems strange to everyone.”

The Spanish envoy was too worldly to indulge in paranoia, but his closing remarks reveal just how tense things were—with the future of the American union at stake. Even though his letter was written entirely in secret code, Gardoqui was circumspect. He “had much to say but there is no safe conduit and as a contingency I write this via Boston. They ought to decide soon; I will take care to inform your excellency.”

Having dictated his report to the clerk who would translate it into code—probably his able secretary, predecessor, and hunting companion Francisco Rendón—Gardoqui continued to work day and night toward his goal, and apparently with success. Before dispatching his report to Madrid, Gardoqui was able to add a momentous postscript, also in code:

While Congress was busy trying to remedy its chronic poverty and lack of authority, James Monroe had been closely monitoring the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations. In letters to influential Virginians such as George Washington, James Madison, and Governor Patrick Henry, Monroe consistently reported that he had caught wind of the northern stratagem “upon my first arrival here in the winter, and [had] been acquainted with all the previous arrangements, those in favor of it found necessary to make, to prepare for its reception.” Their “plan,” as Monroe saw it, was “to enter into engagements” with Gardoqui that would close the river “at least for a certain term … and further to enter into a reciprocal guarantee [between Spain and the United States] of their respective possessions in America.” In exchange for surrendering the use of the Mississippi for twenty-five or thirty years, Jay and his northern supporters expected a commercial treaty with Spain in which “we are to be admitted reciprocally, they into our ports here and we into theirs in Europe, upon an equal footing.”

The northern scheme had begun to unfold (and unravel) on May 29, 1786, when Secretary Jay informed Congress of the difficulties in his negotiation with Gardoqui and asked Congress for a special committee with full power to direct his negotiations. “It was immediately perciev’d,” Monroe told Madison, “that the object was to relieve him from the instruction respecting the Mississippi and to get a committee to cover the measure.” The plan, in short, was to sidestep a straightforward debate in Congress about giving up the use of the Mississippi—which Jay and the New Englanders knew they could not openly win. By asking Congress to establish a special committee “to instruct and direct him on every point and subject relative to the proposed treaty with Spain,” Jay, King, and their collaborators sought to evade the congressional stipulation insisting upon “the free Navigation of the Mississippi, from the source to the Ocean, as established in their Treaties with Great Britain.”
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When Jay’s letter reached the floor of Congress on May 31, Monroe continued, Rufus King (“who is associated in this business”) rose to distract the delegates’ attention from their hidden agenda with “a long speech in which he took a view of the insidious designs of France” in its recent negotiations about the Newfoundland fisheries. King’s real objective, Monroe believed, was to make “a tryal of the pulse of the house on the subject” of lifting the Mississippi restriction in Jay’s instructions. Congress failed to take the bait. Instead it referred Jay’s request to a committee composed of Charles Pettit, the former assistant quartermaster general from Pennsylvania; Rufus King, who was in on the scheme; and James Monroe, who was on to him. They immediately arranged to meet with Jay the next day, June 1, 1786.