Read A Wilderness So Immense Online
Authors: Jon Kukla
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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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“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”
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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.”
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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.”
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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”
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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 next 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.
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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 Kentucky
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Jefferson and Knox wanted Shelby to act on his authority as governor of Kentucky. Beyond that all Jefferson could offer was his “hope that the citizens of Kentuckey will not be decoyed into any participation in these illegal enterprizes … by any effect they may expect from them on the navigation of the Mississippi.” Whistling in the dark, Jefferson expressed his confidence that “their good sense will tell them … that their surest dependance is on those regular measures which are pursuing and will be pursued by the general government, and which flow from the United authority of all the states.”
Time and again, Kentuckians had complained of “the feeble attempts which have been made by the executive under the present government, and the total silence of Congress on this important subject.” Now, with Clark’s sabers rattling in the background, Governor Isaac Shelby applied exquisite pressure on the Washington administration.
After conferring with his like-minded attorney general, James Brown, on January 13, 1794, Governor Shelby dispatched a forceful letter to the secretary of state. “I have great doubts,” he wrote, “whether there is any legal authority to restrain or punish” Clark and his expedition,
for if it is lawful for any one citizen of this State to leave it, it is equally lawful for any number of them to do it. It is also lawful for them to carry with them any quantity of provisions, arms and ammunition; and if the act is lawful in itself, there is nothing but the particular intention with which it is done that can possibly make it unlawful, but I know of no law which inflicts a punishment on intent only.
Shelby also felt “little inclination to take an active part in punishing or restraining any of my fellow citizens for a supposed intention, only to gratify or remove the fears of the ministers of a foreign prince who openly withholds from us an invaluable right.” Nevertheless, “whatever may be my private opinion, as a man, as a friend to liberty, an American citizen, and an inhabitant of the Western Waters,” he concluded, “I shall at all times hold it as my duty to perform whatever may be constitutionally
required of me as Governor of Kentucky, by the President of the United States.”
While Governor Shelby’s ultimatum made its way east, Clark’s call for volunteers appeared in the January 25 issue of Cincinnati’s weekly
Centinel of the North-Western Territory
and the February 4 issue of John Bradford’s
Kentucky Gazette
in Lexington:
George R. Clark, Esq.
Major General in the armies of France, and Commander in Chief of the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi River.
PROPOSALS
For raising the volunteers for the reduction of the Spanish posts on the Mississippi, for opening the trade of the said river, and giving freedom to its inhabitants, etc. All persons serving the expedition to be entitled to one thousand acres of Land—those that engage for one year, will be entitled to two thousand acres—if they serve two years or during the present war with France, they will have three thousand acres of any unappropriated Land that may be conquered…. All lawful Plunder to be equally divided agreeable to the custom of War…. Those that serve the expedition will have their choice of receiving their land or one dollar a day.
G. R. CLARK
In the east, the first published report of Clark’s plans, a mid-November letter from Fort Washington, appeared in Philadelphia newspapers on January 4 and reached the
Connecticut Courant
by January 13. “A revolution is on foot in Louisiana,” exclaimed another letter from Cincinnati that was published in the
Maryland Journal,
the
Virginia Centinel,
and the Haverhill, Massachusetts,
Guardian of Freedom:
The French inhabitants on the west side of the river Mississippi inspired by the glorious cause of their brethren in Europe, are determined to shake off the despotic yoke of Spain. … By the best accounts, the French and American settlements on the Mississippi, can bring into the field an army of 6,000 men, all excellent marksmen. … A contemplative mind will easily conceive the great advantages that would accrue to the world in general, and the United States in particular, should such an event actually take place—it would open the road for millions of the human race to emigrate to this favor’d
spot, on which nature has lavished its gifts…. The road once opened, would be die means of civilizing not only die natives of die soil, but… die Spaniards themselves over die Gulf of Mexico, whom priest-craft and ignorance has made useless to society. Such a revolution would produce more: it would put Americans in die full possession of die navigation of die most noble river within their territory, the right of which (contrary to nature’s law) has been arbitrar[il]y withheld, and by diem shamefully given up to a people whom we neither ought to love or fear.
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The tricolor of France was a flag of convenience for George Rogers Clark and his Kentucky neighbors. In his hands, Citizen Genet’s grand expedition against Louisiana had always been an American enterprise—designed to put “Americans in the full possession of the navigation of the most noble river within their territory.” Clark’s moment for military glory may have escaped, but his demonstration of Louisiana’s vulnerability forced Spain and America back to the bargaining table in earnest.
When Governor Shelby’s ultimatum reached the secretary of state’s office in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, former governor of Virginia and formerly Washington’s attorney general, was behind the desk. Jefferson had retired to Monticello on December 31, but the impending change of personnel at the French embassy was more immediately important. On March 6, 1794, promptly upon his arrival in Philadelphia, Genet’s replacement, Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, issued a proclamation canceling all French support for Clark’s expedition. Two weeks later, President Washington issued his own proclamation against enlisting citizens of the United States “for the purpose of invading and plundering the territory of a nation at peace with the United States.” For good measure the commander in chief also dispatched General Anthony Wayne to “establish a strong military post at Fort Massac on the Ohio, and prevent by force, if necessary, the descent of any hostile party down the river.” George Rogers Clark’s boats, guns, ammunition, provisions, and men never got farther than “a Small Camp” on the Mississippi four hundred miles south of Louisville “Fortifyd within fifty Miles of the Enemys lines.”
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