A Wilderness So Immense (62 page)

1.
Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954), 7–10.

2.
Led to the headwaters of the Mississippi River by an Anishinabe guide named Ozawindib, the pioneering ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft gave Lake Itasca its name in 1832, a coinage from portions of the Latin words for
truth
and
head:
verITAS CAput. Statements of the length of the Mississippi River vary from 2,340 to 2,552 miles, in part because the river is constantly extending its delta into the Gulf and altering its course with bends and cutoffs. I have my parents’ photographs of my sister Connie and me playing at the headwaters of the Mississippi on a 1953 excursion from Verndale, Minnesota, about seventy miles south of the little lake. The river left no lasting impression in my memory, but the steam locomotives and their coaling towers in Wadena did, as did the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, at a park in Bemidji, a few miles north of Lake Itasca.

1.
Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 1786,
Jefferson Papers,
9: 217–19.

2.
Thomas Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay January 25, 1786,
Jefferson Papers,
9: 219–22.

3.
Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, April 18, 1790, quoted in James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds.,
Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826.
Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2d ser. (Princeton, 1997), 771.

4.
Jefferson’s Memorandum Books,
432–33, 713–14; Susan R. Stein,
The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello
(New York, 1993), 18–28, 103, 350–63, 370, 428–33; Edward T. Martin,
Thomas Jefferson: Scientist
(New York, 1952), 131–91.

5.
Howard C. Rice,
L’Hôtel de Langeac: Jefferson’s Paris Residence, 1785–1789
(Paris and Monticello, 1947); Stein,
Worlds of Thomas Jefferson,
18–28; interview with Susan R. Stein, December 1, 1999.

6.
Interview with Lucia C. Stanton, December 6, 1999; Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, October 1, 1785, in Richard Alan Ryerson et al., eds.,
Adams Family Correspondence:
vols. 5 and 6,
October
1782-
December
1785 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 6: 396, cf 391.

7.
Stanton interview; Abigail Adams to Elizabeth Cranch, September 5, 1784,
Adams Family Correspondence,
5: 433;
Jefferson’s Memorandum Books,
567.

8.
George Green Schackelford,
Jefferson’s Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1848
(Lexington, Ky, 1993), 13–132; Jon Kukla, “Flirtation and Feux d’Artifices: Mr. Jefferson, Mrs. Cosway, and Fireworks,”
Virginia Cavalcade
26 (Autumn 1976): 52–63.

9.
Family details are from Dumas Malone,
Thomas Jefferson and His Time
(6 vols., Boston and New York, 1948–1981); Annette Gordon-Reed,
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Flemings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville, 1997); Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds.,
Sally Flemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture
(Charlottesville, 1999); and my conversations with Lucia C. Stanton and Diane Swann-Wright, November-December 1999. Genealogical charts are found in Malone,
Jefferson,
1: 426–34, and Lewis and Onuf,
Hemings and Jefferson,
xii. The articles in the
National Genealogical Society Quarterly
89, no. 3 (September 2001): 165–237, provide a reliable summary of the evidence about Jefferson and Hemings.

10.
Malone,
Jefferson,
1: 366.

11.
Jefferson to Adams, September 25, 1785,
Adams Family Correspondence,
6: 391; Jefferson to Monroe, May 20, 1782,
Jefferson Tapers,
6: 185.

12.
Martha Jefferson’s recollections,
Jefferson Tapers,
6: 199–200.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Ibid.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Ibid.

17.
Jefferson to Chastellux, November 26, 1782,
Jefferson Tapers,
6: 203.

18.
The correspondence about Polly Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s voyage is collected in Lester J. Cappon, ed.,
The Adams-Jefferson Fetters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams
(Chapel Hill, 1959), 178–86.

19.
Ibid.

20.
Ibid.

21.
Ibid.

22.
“Not until the summer of 1787 was the circle of his little family completed,” Dumas Malone wrote in his monumental biography of Jefferson, “and not until then did the American Minister become fully reconciled to life in France” (Malone,
Jefferson,
2: 12). Ironically, exactly fifty years after the publication of this statement, DNA evidence regarding Jefferson’s paternity of Sally
Hemings’s children amplified Malone’s statement in ways that the admiring biographer never intended (“Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,”
Nature
396 [Nov. 5, 1998]: 27–8; Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “Founding Father,” ibid., 13–14).

23.
Jefferson’s correspondence of January 25–26, 1786, is published in
Jefferson Papers,
9: 215–22.

24.
Randolph C. Dowries, “Trade in Frontier Ohio,”
MVHR
16 (1930): 469–71.

25.
Stuart to Jefferson, October 25, 1785,
Jefferson Papers,
8: 644–47.

26.
B. L. Rayner,
Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson, with Selections of the Most Valuable Portions of His Voluminous and Unrivaled Private Correspondence
(New York, 1832), 524; Fiske Kimball,
The Capitol of Virginia: A Landmark of American Architecture,
ed. Jon Kukla (Richmond, 1989), 12–13.

27.
Kimball,
Capitol of Virginia,
12–13, 22.

28.
Ibid., 18, 58–59.

29.
Ibid., 22–23.

30.
Ibid., 25, 59, 60.

1.
The earl of Bristol to William Pitt, August 31, 1761, quoted in Sir Charles Petrie,
King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot
(London and New York, 1971), 96–97.

2.
Petrie,
Charles III of Spain,
164–65.

3.
Ibid., 165.

4.
The original 1786–1788 portrait is owned by the duquessa de Fernán de Núñez in Madrid; four replicas hang in the Prado and other collections; Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson,
The Life and Complete Works of Francisco Goya
(Paris, 1970; New York, 1971), 31, 78, 95;
OED,
s.v cordon.

5.
Petrie,
Charles III of Spain;
John D. Bergamini,
The Spanish Bourbons: The History of a Tenacious Dynasty
(New York, 1974), 83–101; Marcel Brion,
Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Glory and the Grief (New York, 1
960), 38–59; Joseph Jay Davis,
The Town of Hercules: A Buried Treasure Trove
(rev. ed., Malibu, Calif, 1995), 37–49.

6.
A. P. Whitaker, “James Wilkinson’s First Descent to New Orleans in 1787,”
HAHR
8 (1928): 82–97; Leslie Bethell, ed.,
Cambridge History of Latin America,
vol. 2 (1984), 34.

7.
Anthony H. Hull,
Charles III and the Revival of Spain
(Lanham, Md., 1981), 403.

8.
Bergamini,
Spanish Bourbons,
86.

9.
Hull,
Charles III,
304.

10.
Eleta’s first name is mentioned in W N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley
Eighteenth-Century Spain, 1700–1788: A Political, Diplomatic and Institutional History
(Totowa, N.J., 1979), 115; Petrie,
Charles III of Spain,
229.

11.
Bergamini,
Spanish Bourbons,
101.

12.
Records and Deliberations of the Cabildo, Book no. 3, from January 1, 1788, to May 18, 1792; City Archives, New Orleans Public Library 55–57.

13.
Jacques Marquette, “The Mississippi Voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, 1673,” in Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed.,
Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699
(New York, 1917), 256.

14.
Henri de Tonty “Memoir on Pa Salle’s Discoveries, by Tonty, 1678–1690,” in Kellogg,
Early Narratives of the Northwest,
302; Francis Park-man,
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West
(Boston, 1903), 308.

15.
D. A. Brading, “Mexican Silver-Mining in the Eighteenth Century: The Revival of Zacatecas,”
HAHR
50 (1970): 665–81; D. A. Brading and Harry P. Cross, “Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru,”
HAHR
52 (1972): 545–79; Herbert S. Klein,
The American Finances of the Spanish Empire: Royal Income and Expenditures in Colonial Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, 1680—1809
(Albuquerque, 1998), 15–29.

16.
Several eyewitness accounts of this fire are extant. One unofficial account dated March 26 was printed in
The London Chronicle
on August 19, 1788. Another composed ca. April 1 was published in the
Gaceta de Mexico
on May 6, 1788. Both are reprinted in Lauro A. de Rojas and Walter Pritchard, eds., “The Great Fire of 1788 in New Orleans,”
LHQ
20 (1937): 578–89, along with secondary accounts by Charles Gayarré, Alcée Fortier, and others. At its meeting on November 18, 1896, “President Fortier entertained the [Louisiana Historical] society by translating a valuable French document, published at Cap Français, and giving an account of the great fire of 1788 in New Orleans”;
Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society
1, no. 4 (1896): 10–11. The official report dated April 1, 1788, exists in at least two versions. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) translation from Legajo 1394 is preserved in the Spanish Despatches. A shorter version, dated April 1, 1788, was published with Gilbert Pemberton’s quirky “‘Noblesse Oblige’: Why New Orleans Can Always Come Back,”
Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society
8 (1914–1915): 56–63. The subject warrants an authoritative documentary edition, for substantial differences between the WPA transcription and Pemberton’s text suggest the existence of multiple versions of the report. The WPA translation is a long report signed by Miró that mentions the death of the “sick negress.” Pemberton’s translation is half as long, lacks many details including any mention of deaths, and is presented as a report from Miró
and
Navarro.

17.
Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 177–78; Martín Navarro to Fernando José Mangino, superintendent of the royal mint, February 28, 1788, Kuntz Collection, Tulane University; Jack D. P. Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of the Spanish Governors of Louisiana,”
HAHR
42 (1962): 523.

18.
Brian P. Coutts, “Martín Navarro: Treasurer, Contador, Intendant, 1766–1788: Politics and Trade in Spanish Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1981), 514n.

19.
James Alexander Robertson published the report and dated it “ca. 1785” (Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 235–61), but the manuscript was dated August 29 and
sent to imperial authorities on September 24, 1780 (Coutts, “Martín Navarro,” 306n). In quoting Navarro’s treatise, I use Robertson’s edition as “copy text” unless Brian E. Coutts’s chapter, “Trade and Commerce, 1780–1788” (Coutts, “Martín Navarro,” 306–447) provides a superior translation.

20.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford, 1976), 592–94.

21.
Caroline Maude Burson,
The Stewardship of Don Esteban Miró, 1782–1792: A Study of Louisiana Based Largely on the Documents in New Orleans
(New Orleans, 1940), 86–87.

22.
Coutts, “Martín Navarro,” 505–8;
Dictionary of Louisiana Biography,
s.v “Navarro, Adelaide de Blanco,” “Demarest, Louis George.”

23.
Coutts, “Martín Navarro,” 505–8, 550–53; Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 247.

24.
Robertson,
Louisiana,
1: 247, 249–50.

1.
Sarah Vaughan to Catherine Wilhelmina Livingston, October 10, 1784, Massachusetts Historical Society, quoted in Harry Ammon,
James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity
(New York, 1971), 46.

2.
Sarah P. Stetson, “The Philadelphia Sojourn of Samuel Vaughan,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
73 (1949): 459–74.

3.
George Washington to Archibald Cary, May 30, 1779; Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, May 22, 1779,
Ammon, James Monroe,
27–28.

4.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 18, 1774; Titus Hosmer to Jeremiah Wadsworth, July 19, 1778,
Letters of Delegates,
1: 79; 25: 644.

5.
Count Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp’s account of a spring 1784 conversation with Thomas Jefferson, ibid., 21: 494n.

6.
Abiel Foster to Jonathan Blanchard, March 30, 1785, ibid., 22: 296–97.

7.
Monroe to Jefferson, June 16, 1785, ibid., 22: 462.

8.
Rufus King to Timothy Pickering, April 15, 1785; Richard Henry Lee to George Washington, May 7, 1785; Rufus King to Timothy Pickering, May 30, 1785; and William Grayson to James Madison, May 28, 1785, ibid., 22: 341–42, 383–84, 406, 416; Peter S. Onuf,
The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787
(Philadelphia, 1983), 149–72.