History of the United States During Thomas Jefferson's Administrations (Complete 4 Volumes). Henry Adams
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 ordered18 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