History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson/First/I:16

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Chapter 16: Closure of the Mississippi[edit]

Simultaneously with the order to restore slavery at Guadeloupe and St. Domingo, Bonaparte directed his Minister of Marine to prepare plans and estimates for the expedition which was to occupy Louisiana. "My intention is to take possession of Louisiana with the shortest delay, and that this expedition be made in the utmost secrecy, under the appearance of being directed on St. Domingo."[1] The First Consul had allowed Godoy to postpone for a year the delivery of Louisiana, but he would wait no longer. His Minister at Madrid, General Gouvion St.-Cyr, obtained at length a promise that the order for the delivery of Louisiana should be given by Charles IV. To the First Consul on two conditions: first, that Austria, England, and the dethroned Grand Duke of Tuscany should be made to recognize the new King of Etruria; second, that France should pledge herself "not to alienate the property and usufruct of Louisiana, and to restore it to Spain in case the King of Tuscany should lose the whole or the greater part of his estates."

To these demands Talleyrand immediately replied in a letter of instructions to Gouvion St.-Cyr, which was destined to a painful celebrity.[2] After soothing and reassuring Spain on the subject of the King of Etruria, this letter came at last to the required pledge in regard to Louisiana:—

"Spain wishes that France should engage herself not to sell or alienate in any manner the property or enjoyment of Louisiana. Her wish in this respect perfectly conforms with the intentions of the French government, which parted with it in 1762 only in favor of Spain, and has wished to recover it only because France holds to a possession which once made part of French territory. You can declare in the name of the First Consul that France will never alienate it."

St.-Cyr accordingly gave a formal written pledge in the name of the First Consul that France would never alienate Louisiana.[3]

Even yet the formal act of delivery was delayed. Bonaparte gave orders[4] that the expedition should be ready to sail in the last week of September; but the time passed, and delays were multiplied. For once the First Consul failed to act with energy. His resources were drained to St. Domingo as fast as he could collect them,[5] and the demands of the colonies on his means of transportation exceeded his supply of transports. The expedition to Louisiana was postponed, but, as he hoped, only to give it more scope.

From the time of Berthier's treaty of retrocession, Bonaparte had tried to induce the King of Spain to part with the Floridas; but Charles IV. refused to talk of another bargain. In vain Bonaparte wrote to the young King of Etruria, offering to give him Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, if Don Carlos would add Florida to Louisiana.[6] When at length the King signed at Barcelona, October 15, the order which delivered Louisiana to France, Bonaparte pressed more earnestly than ever for the Floridas. Talleyrand made a report on the subject, dissuading him from acquiring more than West Florida.[7]

"West Florida," he wrote, "suffices for the desired enlargement of Louisiana; it completes the retrocession of the French colony, such as it was given to Spain; it carries the eastern boundary back to the river Appalachicola; it gives us the port of Pensacola, and a population which forms more than half that of the two Floridas. By leaving East Florida to Spain we much diminish the difficulties of our relative position in regard to the United States,—difficulties little felt to-day, but which some day may become of the gravest importance."

Bonaparte did not follow this advice. On the death of the Duke of Parma he wrote with his own hand to the King of Spain, offering the old family estate of Parma as a gift for the King of Tuscany, in return for which France was to receive the Floridas.[8] The Queen, as before, favored the exchange, and all her influence was exerted to effect it; but Godoy was obstinate in evading or declining the offer, and after months of diplomatic effort Bonaparte received at last, toward the end of January, 1803, a dispatch from General Beurnonville, his new representative at Madrid, announcing that the Prince of Peace, with the aid of the British Minister John Hookham Frere, had succeeded in defeating the scheme.[9]

"The Prince told me that the British Minister had declared to him, in the name of his Government, that his Britannic Majesty, being informed of the projects of exchange which existed between France and Spain, could never consent that the two Floridas should become an acquisition of the Republic; that the United States of America were in this respect of one mind with the Court of London; and that Russia equally objected to France disposing of the estates of Parma in favor of Spain, since the Emperor Alexander intended to have them granted as indemnity to the King of Sardinia. In imparting to me this proceeding of the British Minister, the Prince had a satisfied air, which showed how much he wished that the exchange, almost agreed upon and so warmly desired by the Queen, may not take place."

Europe would have acted more wisely in its own interest by offering Bonaparte every inducement to waste his strength on America. Had England, Spain, and Russia united to give him Florida on his own terms, they would have done only what was best for themselves. A slight impulse given to the First Consul would have plunged him into difficulties with the United States from which neither France nor the United States could have easily escaped. Both Godoy and the Emperor Alexander would have done well to let French blood flow without restraint in St. Domingo and on the Mississippi, rather than drown with it plains of Castile and Smolensk.

Although the retrocession of Louisiana to France had been settled in principle by Berthier's treaty of Oct. 1, 1800, six months before Jefferson came into office, the secret was so well kept that Jefferson hardly suspected it. He began his administration by anticipating a long period of intimate relations with Spain and France. In sending instructions to Claiborne as governor of the Mississippi Territory,—a post of importance, because of its relations with the Spanish authority at New Orleans,—President Jefferson wrote privately,[10]
"With respect to Spain, our disposition is sincerely amicable, and even affectionate. We consider her possession of the adjacent country as most favorable to our interests, and should see with an extreme pain any other nation substituted for them."

Disposed to be affectionate toward Spain, he assumed that he should stand in cordial relations with Spain's ally, the First Consul. Convinced that the quarrels of America with France had been artificially created by the monarchical Federalists, he believed that a policy of open confidence would prevent such dangers in the future. The First Consul would naturally cultivate his friendship, for every Federalist newspaper had for years proclaimed Jefferson as the head of French influence in America, and every Republican newspaper had branded his predecessors as tools of Great Britain. In spite of the 18th Brumaire, Jefferson had not entirely lost faith in Bonaparte, and knew almost nothing of his character or schemes. At the moment when national interest depended on prompt and exact information, the President withdrew half his ministers from Europe, and paid little attention to the agents he retained. He took diplomatic matters into his own hands, and meant to conduct them at Washington with diplomatists under his personal influence,—a practice well suited to a power superior in will and force to that with which it dealt, but one which might work badly in dealing with Bonaparte. When Chancellor Livingston, the new minister to Paris, sailed for France, Jefferson wrote him a private letter[11] in regard to the appointment of a new French minister at Washington. Two names had been suggest,—La Forest and Otto. Neither of these was quite satisfactory; some man would be preferred whose sympathies should be so entire as to make reticences and restraints unnecessary. The idea that Jefferson could put himself in Bonaparte's hands without reticence or restraint belonged to old theories of opposition,—a few months dispelled it; and when he had been a year in office, he wrote again to Livingston, withdrawing the objection to La Forest and Otto. "When I wrote that letter," said he,[12] "I did not harbor a doubt that the disposition on that side the water was as cordial as I knew ours to be." He had discovered his mistake,—"the dispositions now understood to exist there impose of themselves limits to the openness of our communications."

"Even before Livingston sailed, the rumors of the retrocession of Louisiana had taken such definite shape[13] that, in June, 1801, Secretary Madison instructed the ministers at London, Paris, and Madrid on the subject. These instructions were remarkable for their mildness.[14] No protest was officially ordered against a scheme so hostile to the interests of the Union. On the contrary, Livingston was told, in September, 1801, that if he could obtain West Florida from France, or by means of French influence, "such a proof on the part of France of good-will toward the United States would contribute to reconcile the latter" to seeing Bonaparte at New Orleans. Even after Rufus King, the United States minister at London, sent home a copy of Lucien Bonaparte's treaty of Madrid, in which the whole story was told,[15] this revelation, probably managed by Godoy in order to put the United States and England on their guard, produced no immediate effect. Jefferson yielded with reluctance to the conviction that he must quarrel with Bonaparte. Had not Godoy's delays and Toussaint's resistance intervened, ten thousand French soldiers, trained in the school of Hoche and Moreau, and commanded by a future marshal of France, might have occupied New Orleans and St. Louis before Jefferson could have collected a brigade of militia at Nashville.

By the spring of 1802 Jefferson became alive to the danger. He then saw what was meant by the French expedition against Toussaint. Leclerc had scarcely succeeded, Feb. 5, 1802, in taking possession of the little that Christophe left at Cap Français, when his difficulties of supply began. St. Domingo drew its supplies chiefly from the United States. Toussaint's dependence on the American continent had been so complete as to form one of the chief complaints of French merchants. General Leclerc disliked the United States,—not without reason, since the Government of that country, as was notorious, had done its utmost to punish France, and had succeeded beyond expectation. Leclerc was a soldier,—severe, impatient, quick to take offence, and also quick to forget it. He knew that he could expect no sympathy from Americans, and he found that all the supplies in St. Domingo were American property. Of course the owners asked extortionate prices; and had Leclerc paid them, he would within six weeks have seen his harbors glutted with goods from Baltimore and New York. Instead of doing this, he seized them, and insulted the American shipmasters and merchants. By the month of March the newspapers of the United States were filled with stories of Leclerc's arbitrary and violent conduct. He was reported as saying that the Americans were no better than Arabs; and one of his general officers was said to have told Lear, the American consul-general, that they were the scum of nations. Cargoes were taken without payment, American shipmasters were seized and imprisoned for offences unknown to the law; while Lear was notified that no consul could be received in St. Domingo as a colony of France, and that he must quit the island within a fortnight. No protest availed against such summary discipline. Lear obeyed; and returning to Madison at Washington, told him of American property confiscated and American citizens in prison.

Madison sent for Pichon, then in charge of the French legation at Washington pending the appointment of a minister. Pichon was a relic of the French republic; he had been long in the United States, and felt little apparent sympathy with the consular régime or its plans. At Madison's request, Pichon undertook to interfere, and wrote to Leclerc letter upon letter of remonstrance.[16] America, he said, could either feed or famish the French army: "Experience proves it; our colonies were brought into revolt only by our unlucky misunderstanding with her; through her alone can we raise them up again." Leclerc resented the tone of these letters, and wrote to Bonaparte that Pichon was a scoundrel and a wretch, with whom he would hold no further relations;[17] but before Leclerc's letter could have arrived, the First Consul had already ordered[18] Talleyrand to rebuke the chargé at Washington for his American officiousness. Pichon's diplomatic career was closed; he retired into private life as soon as the new minister arrived, but meanwhile his remonstrances were not without effect upon Leclerc, whose anger rarely became vindictive.

The conduct of Leclerc in expelling Lear and imprisoning American shipmasters because munitions of war were found among the cargoes lying in the ports of Toussaint, first opened President Jefferson's eyes to the situation into which he was drifting; but other evidences were not wanting that Bonaparte was no friend of the United States. Talleyrand's conduct was almost as exasperating as when he provoked reprisals four years before. Chancellor Livingston reached France about Nov. 10, 1801, just in time to see Leclerc's expedition sail. He was met by private assurances that Louisiana and the Floridas had been bought by France, and he went to Talleyrand with inquiries.[19] The imperturbable Talleyrand looked him in the face and denied the fact. "It had been a subject of conversation," he said, "but nothing concluded." At that moment Rufus King was sending from London the text of Lucien Bonaparte's treaty, dated eight months before, which fixed the details of the retrocession. President Jefferson received at the same instant Talleyrand's explicit denial and the explicit proof that Talleyrand was trying to deceive him. Jefferson soon satisfied himself that Talleyrand's conduct rested on a system; and he became angrier with every act of the French foreign minister. Livingston, naturally somewhat suspicious and fretful, soon became restive under the treatment he received; for his notes and remonstrances were left equally without answer or attention, whether they related to Louisiana or to the debts due by the Government of France to American citizens. As Livingston grew hot, and Leclerc's temper burst into violence, Madison became irritable, and by the month of May had reached the point of saying that if such conduct should continue, "the worst events are to be apprehended."[20]

The President himself then intervened. A French gentleman, Dupont de Nemours, happened to be in the United States on the point of returning to France. Dupont's name was then as well and honorably known in France as that of his descendants was to become in the annals of the United States. To him Jefferson turned as a medium of unofficial communication with the First Consul. He enclosed to Dupont a letter addressed to Livingston on the Louisiana affair, which he requested Dupont to read, and, after reading, to seal.

"I wish you to be possessed of the subject," he wrote,[21] "because you may be able to impress on the Government of France the inevitable consequences of their taking possession of Louisiana; and though, as I here mention, the cession of New Orleans and the Floridas to us would be a palliation, yet I believe it would be no more, and that this measure will cost France, and perhaps not very long hence, a war which will annihilate her on the ocean, and place that element under the despotism of two nations,—which I am not reconciled to the more because my own would be one of them."

This idea was still more strongly expressed in the enclosure to Livingston, which Dupont was to read, in order that he might communicate its sense to Bonaparte:[22]

"The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. It seals the union of two nations, who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation. . . . Will not the amalgamation of a young and thriving nation continue to that enemy the health and force which are at present so evidently on the decline? And will a few years' possession of New Orleans add equally to the strength of France?"
Dupont was to impress on the First Consul the idea that if he should occupy Louisiana, the United States would wait "a few years," until the next war between France and England, but would then make common cause with England. Even a present cession of New Orleans and the Floridas to the United States, though it would remove the necessity of an immediate advance to England, would not prevent the risk of a quarrel with France, so long as France should hold the west bank of the Mississippi. To obviate such a quarrel was the object of Dupont's unofficial mission. "If you can be the means of informing the wisdom of Bonaparte of all its consequences, you have deserved well of both countries."

As though to alarm Bonaparte were not task enough for any one man, Jefferson suggested that it would be well to hoodwink Talleyrand.

"There is another service you can render. I am told that Talleyrand is personally hostile to us. This, I suppose, has been occasioned by the X. Y. Z. history; but he should consider that that was the artifice of a party willing to sacrifice him to the consolidation of their power. This nation has done him justice by dismissing them."

To do Talleyrand justice was impossible; but his reflections on the letter which Dupont was tacitly authorized to show him could hardly have been just to Jefferson. With the X. Y. Z. history, as Jefferson called it, fresh in Talleyrand's mind,—an instance of his venality so notorious that it had cost him his office, and so outrageous that even his associates of the 18th Brumaire had not at first ventured to reappoint him,—hostility to the United States had become with him a personal as well as a political passion. Accustomed to the penetrating candor of his own untroubled avowals, he read these words of Jefferson, announcing that an American President had been dismissed from office in order to do him justice:—

"This nation had done him justice by dismissing them; those in power are precisely those who disbelieved that story, and saw in it nothing but an attempt to deceive our country. We entertain toward him personally the most friendly dispositions. As to the government of France, we know too little of the state of things there to understand what it is, and have no inclination to meddle in their settlement. Whatever government they establish, we wish to be well with it."
Talleyrand must have known enough of the American character to feel that a Republican President could not seriously mean to represent his own election as an act of national justice to a venal French politician; in his eyes, the letter could have seemed to show only simple-mindedness. One point needed no analysis of character. Jefferson said that he did not know what sort of government the 18th Brumaire created, or care to meddle in its affairs; he wished to be well with it, and in any case should not go to war until England did so. Dupont remonstrated against the nature of the message. "A young soldier," he wrote back,[23] "whose ministers can keep their places only by perpetually flattering his military pride, will be much more offended than touched by this reasoning; and if this be all that is advanced, we may regard the negotiation as a failure." To make its chances worse, it crossed the ocean at the same time with the news that Toussaint had submitted, and that no obstacle to the immediate occupation of Louisiana remained. Dupont talked in vain. Bonaparte answered only by pressing Spain for the Floridas, and demanding possession of New Orleans.

Thus far American diplomacy was not successful; Jefferson's efforts were no more effective than Madison's more cautious suggestions. As the summer began, the President watched anxiously the course of events at St. Domingo, and found consolation there for the baseness of Callender and the assaults on Paine at home. "Though I take for granted," he wrote to Governor McKean,[24] "that the colonization of Louisiana is a settled point, yet I suspect they must be much stronger in St. Domingo before they can spare troops to go there. What has been called a surrender of Toussaint to Leclerc, I suspect was in reality a surrender of Leclerc to Toussaint."

The seizure of Toussaint and his disappearance from the island, which occurred as Jefferson wrote this letter, overthrew its hopeful theories; but before long, reports began to arrive in the United States that Leclerc had met with a new disaster, so terrible as to surpass the horrors even of St. Domingo history. The first French army, of seventeen thousand men, had been consumed in the task of subjecting the negroes. A second army was next swept away by yellow fever. In the middle of September, 1802, Leclerc wrote to the First Consul that of twenty-eight thousand three hundred men sent to St. Domingo, four thousand remained fit for service.[25] "Add to our losses that of five thousand sailors, and the occupation of St. Domingo has cost us till now twenty-four thousand men, and we are not yet definitely masters of it." He was depending on Toussaint's generals and army for his support against an insurrection of the laborers, who were maddened by the rumor that slavery had been restored at Guadeloupe, and was soon to be re-established at St. Domingo. Nothing could be more discouraging than Leclerc's letters:[26]

"I have no false measure to reproach myself with, Citizen Consul; and if my position, from being a very good one, has become very bad, it is necessary to blame here only the malady which has destroyed my army, the premature re-establishment of slavery at Guadeloupe, and the newspapers and letters from France, which speak only of slavery. Here is my opinion on this country. We must destroy all the negroes in the mountains, men and women, keeping only infants less than twelve years old; we must also destroy half those of the plain, and leave in the colony not a single man of color who has worn an epaulette. Without this the colony will never be quiet; and at the beginning of every year, especially after murderous seasons like this, you will have a civil war, which will shake your hold on the country. In order to be master of St. Domingo, you must send me twelve thousand men without losing a single day."

Besides these twelve thousand men and twelve hundred thousand dollars in specie, Leclerc required five thousand more men in the following summer. "If you cannot send the troops I demand, and for the season I point out, St. Domingo will be forever lost to France."

Long afterward, at St. Helena, Napoleon wrote comments[27] on the causes of his disaster at St. Domingo, severely blaming his brother-in-law Leclerc for failing to carry out his orders to arrest and send to Europe all the black generals, as he sent Toussaint. Napoleon's rule in politics, and one which cost him dear, was to disregard masses and reckon only on leaders. Toussaint came within a step of achieving the greatest triumph of his age. Had he been true to himself and his color, and had he hidden himself for a few months in the mountains, he need not have struck a blow in order to drive Bonaparte's generals back to Europe; the yellow fever and the blind despair of the negro laborers would have done the work alone. Bonaparte's theory in regard to the negro chiefs was an illusion. Christophe, Dessalines, Maurepas, and all Toussaint's chief officers served Leclerc faithfully till they saw his case to be hopeless. "Dessalines is at this moment the butcher of the blacks," wrote Leclerc Sept. 16, 1802, in the midst of insurrections; "Christophe has so maltreated them as to be execrated by them." The negro chiefs were traitors to both sides; and if not arrested by Leclerc, they deserved to be shot by their own people. While they helped to exterminate the black laboring class, Leclerc sent home reports that might have frozen the blood of any man less callous than Bonaparte:[28]

"The decrees of General Richepanse [at Guadeloupe] circulate here, and do much harm. The one which restores slavery, in consequence of being published three months too soon, will cost many men to the army and colony of St. Domingo. . . . I get news of a bloody combat sustained by General Boyer at the Gros Morne. The rebels were exterminated; fifty prisoners were hung. These men die with incredible fanaticism,—they laugh at death; it is the same with the women. The rebels of Moustique have attacked and carried Jean Rabel; it should have been retaken by this time. This fury is the work of General Richepanse's proclamation and of the inconsiderate talk of the colonists."

As the insurrection spread, and the fever reduced Leclerc's European force, the black generals and troops began to desert. Shooting was useless; drowning had no effect. No form of terror touched them. "Few colonial troops remain with me," wrote Leclerc in almost his last letter. "A battalion of the Eleventh Colonial, which had been joined with the Legion of the Cape, having furnished a number of deserters, 176 men of this battalion were embarked at Jacmel for Port Republican. Of this number 173 strangled themselves on the way, the Chef de Bataillon at their head. There you see the men we have to fight!"[29] At length the report came that Leclerc himself had succumbed. Worn by anxieties, exertions, and incessant fever, he followed his army to the grave.

News of Leclerc's death, Nov. 1, 1802, and of the hopelessness of Bonaparte's schemes against St. Domingo, reached the Government at Washington nearly at the same time with other news which overshadowed this. The people of the United States expected day by day to hear of some sudden attack, from which as yet only the dexterity of Godoy and the disasters of Leclerc had saved them. Although they could see only indistinctly the meaning of what had taken place, they knew where to look for the coming stroke, and in such a state of mind might easily exaggerate its importance. A few days before Congress met, the Western post brought a dispatch from Governor Claiborne at Natchez announcing that the Spanish Intendant, Don Juan Ventura Morales, had forbidden the Americans to deposit their merchandise at New Orleans, as they had a right to do under the treaty of 1795.[30]

No one doubted that although the attack might come from a Spanish Intendant, the real party with whom America had to deal was not Spain, but France. The secret papers of the French government show what was said, but hardly believed at the time, that the First Consul was not directly responsible for the act; but they also prove that the act was a consequence of the retrocession. The colonial system of Spain was clumsy and disconnected. Viceroys, governors, commandants, intendants, acted in Mexico, Cuba, New Orleans, Peru, everywhere without relation to each other. At New Orleans the Governor, Don Juan de Salcedo, was powerless to control the Intendant, Don Juan Ventura Morales, and no authority nearer than Madrid could decide between them. The entrepôt, or right of deposit, not only prevented the Spanish Intendant from imposing duties on American produce, but also covered a large amount of smuggling which further diminished the revenue. The Intendant, who had charge of the revenues, and was partly responsible for the large deficit which every year drained the resources of Spain to Louisiana, was forced to hear the complaints of the Treasury at Madrid, continually asking him to find a remedy, and at last, in one of its dispatches, letting slip the remark that "after all, the right of deposit was only for three years." The treaty of 1795 had in fact stipulated that the King of Spain would "permit the citizens of the United States, for the space of three years from this time, to deposit their merchandise and effects in the port of New Orleans, and to export them far from thence, without paying any other duty than a fair price for the hire of the stores; and his Majesty promises either to continue this permission if he finds during that time that it is not prejudicial to the interests of Spain, or if he should not agree to continue it there, he will assign to them on another part of the banks of the Mississippi an equivalent establishment."

According to the explanation given by Morales to Laussat,[31] the new French prefect whom Bonaparte sent to receive possession of Louisiana, the Spaniard acted on this own responsibility, in what he believed to be the interests of the colony, and within the stipulations of the treaty. Thinking that the retrocession offered a chance, which might never recur, for reopening a question which had been wrongly decided, Morales, defying the opposition and even the threats of Governor Salcedo, proclaimed the right of deposit to be at an end. He reasoned that Spain as a result of peace with England had shut her colonial ports to strangers, and this measure, so far as it included Louisiana, was illusory so long as the right of deposit should exist. The right had been granted for three years from 1795; and if the practice had been permitted to continue after these three years expired, it might have been owing, not to the treaty, but to the general privileges granted to neutrals during the war; and as for the Americans, it was their own fault not to have looked more carefully to their rights at the close of the three years, when they should have secured the continuation or the promised substitute. As Spain was about to lose Louisiana in any case, Morales remarked that she need not trouble herself about the quarrel he was making with the United States; while the French republic took Louisiana as it actually stood under the treaties, and ought therefore to be glad of whatever improved the actual situation, or opened the path to negotiations more advantageous. This view of the matter, as Morales presented it, was the more interesting because it was in the spirit of Talleyrand's plans, and reversed Godoy's policy.

The rumor that Spain had closed the Mississippi roused varied sensations as it spread eastward. Tennessee and Kentucky became eager for war. They knew that Morales's act was a foretaste of what they were to expect from France; and they might well ask themselves how many lives it would cost to dislodge a French army once fortified on the lower Mississippi. The whole power of the United States could not at that day, even if backed by the navy of England, have driven ten thousand French troops out of Louisiana. On the contrary, a vigorous French officer, with a small trained force and his Indian allies, could make Claiborne uneasy for the safety of his villages at Natchez and Vicksburg. No one could foresee what might be the effect of one or two disastrous campaigns on the devotion of the Western people to the Government at Washington. The existence of the Union and the sacrifice of many thousand lives seemed, in the opinion of competent judges, likely to be risked by allowing Bonaparte to make his position at New Orleans impregnable.

The New England Federalists were satisfied that President Jefferson must either adopt their own policy and make war on France, or risk a dissolution of the Union. They had hardly dared hope that democracy would so soon meet what might prove to be its crisis. They too cried for war, and cared little whether their outcry produced or prevented hostilities, for the horns of Jefferson's dilemma were equally fatal to him. All eyes were bent on the President, and watched eagerly for some sign of his intentions.


  1. Correspondance, vii. 485; Bonaparte to Decrès, 15 Prairial, An. x. (June 4, 1802).
  2. Talleyrand to Gouvion St.-Cyr, 30 Prairial, An x. (June 19, 1802); Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
  3. St.-Cyr to Don Pedro Cevallos, 23 Messidor, An x. (July 12, 1802). Yrujo to Madison, Sept. 4, 1803. State Papers, ii. 569.
  4. Correspondance, viii. 5; Bonaparte to Decrès, 6 Fructidor, An x. (Aug. 24, 1802).
  5. Correspondance, viii. 112; Bonaparte to Leclerc, 6 Frimaire, An xi. (Nov. 27, 1802).
  6. Ibid., Bonaparte to the King of Tuscany, 11 Fructidor, An x. (Aug. 29, 1802).
  7. Rapport au Premier Consul; Frimaire, An xi. (November, 1802); Archives des Aff. Étr, MSS.
  8. Correspondance, viii. 111; Bonaparte to the King of Spain, 6 Frimaire, An xi. (Nov. 27. 1802).
  9. Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 27 Nivôse, An xi. (Jan. 17, 1803); Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
  10. Jefferson to W. C. C. Claiborne, July 13, 1801; Jefferson MSS.
  11. Jefferson to R. R. Livingston, Aug. 28, 1801; Jefferson's Writings (Ford), viii. 85.
  12. Ibid., viii. 138.
  13. Rufus King to Madison, June 1, 1801; State Papers, ii. 509.
  14. Madison to Pinckney, June 9, 1801; Madison to Livingston, Sept. 28, 1801; State Papers, ii. 510.
  15. Rufus King to Madison, Nov. 20, 1801; State Papers, ii. 511.
  16. Pichon to Leclerc, 29 Ventôse-11 Messidor, An x. (March 20-June 30, 1802); Archives de la Marine, MSS.
  17. Leclerc to Bonaparte, 17 Prairial, An x. (June 6, 1802); Archives Nationales, MSS.
  18. Correspondance, vii. 508; Bonaparte to Talleyrand, 15 Messidor, An x. (July 4, 1802).
  19. Livingston to Madison, Dec. 10, 1801; Livingston to King, Dec. 30; King to Madison, Nov. 20; State Papers, ii. 511, 512.
  20. Madison to Livingston, May 1, 1802; State Papers, ii. 516.
  21. Jefferson to Dupont de Nemours, April 25, 1802; Works, iv. 435.
  22. Jefferson to Livingston, April 18, 1802; Works, iv. 431.
  23. Dupont to Jefferson, April 30, 1802; Jefferson MSS.
  24. Jefferson to Governor McKean, June 14, 1802; Jefferson MSS.
  25. Leclerc to Bonaparte, 29 Fructidor, An x. (Sept. 16, 1802); Archives Nationales, MSS.
  26. Leclerc to Bonaparte, 15 Vendémiaire, An xi. (Oct. 7, 1802); Archives Nationales, MSS.
  27. Correspondance, xxx. 534.
  28. Leclerc to Decrès, 21 Thermidor, An x. (Aug. 9, 1802); Archives de la Marine, MSS.
  29. Leclerc to Bonaparte, 15 Vendémiaire, An xi. (Oct. 7, 1802); Archives Nationales, MSS.
  30. Despatch of W. C. C. Claiborne, Oct. 29, 1802; State Papers, ii. 470.
  31. Laussat to Decrès, 29 Germinal, An xi. (April 19, 1803); Archives de la Marine, MSS.