The Americans took both versions, each titled “Project of a secret convention,” and spent April 28, Monroe’s birthday, poring over them. Price remained an obstacle. However, as Monroe and Livingston worked through the articles, the structure of an agreement took shape. Using Barbé-Marbois’s document as a template, the American negotiators prepared their own draft. The substantive changes included assuring French assistance in any future negotiation with Spain regarding Florida, and reducing French exclusive commercial rights on the Mississippi to a period of twelve years. They presented this to the French finance minister on April 29. He read it in front of them, and when he reached the article on price he declared that he would not proceed in the negotiation on an amount less than eighty million francs. This time the Americans could tell he meant it. Faced with the prospect of losing everything, they folded. “On this . . . explicit declaration on his part,” Monroe wrote, “we agreed to accede to his idea and give eighty millions.”50
The rest fell quickly into place. Out of a sense of propriety, they thought it best to separate the agreement into three treaties. “The first,” Barbé-Marbois explained, “related to the payment of the price of the cession. This instrument was made separate from the [others], as some embarrassment was felt in mentioning, at the same time, the abandonment of the eminent right of sovereignty and the sale for money of the . . . territory.”51 The second document transferred the territory, its government buildings, records, and archives, and articulated the extent and duration of the French commercial privileges and navigational rights. Barbé-Marbois persuaded Monroe and Livingston to abandon the clause regarding France committing to use its influence with Spain over Florida. “These stipulations of good offices,” he wrote, “are not rare in treaties, but their execution is almost always attended by embarrassments; and I induced the Americans to be satisfied with the assurance that, should the occasion arise, [Napoleon] would afford them all the assistance in his power.”52 The final instrument provided for the payment of the French debts, and the establishment of a tribunal to adjudicate the claims as protection against speculators and opportunists. Since the government of the United States could not pay the purchase price in cash, the negotiators created a stock instrument redeemable over fifteen years payable to two investment banks that would advance the money. The banks were Hope and Company, of Holland, and Baring Brothers, of England. The use of a British financial firm must have been particularly satisfying to Napoleon. It was understood that he intended to use the funds for an invasion of England, and it was quite an accomplishment to arrange for British money to finance it.
The afternoon of April 30, Barbé-Marbois presented the document to Napoleon at St. Cloud. Barbé-Marbois returned to Paris that evening and called Monroe and Livingston to his office in the French treasury to tell them of Napoleon’s acceptance of the arrangement. The next day, Livingston let Talleyrand know that Monroe had recovered sufficiently to be presented to Bonaparte at the monthly diplomatic reception. Monroe and Livingston dined with Napoleon before returning to meet with Barbé-Marbois at his home at eight thirty, where they reviewed and edited the final draft. With them unwilling to lose a day, Barbé-Marbois promised to “see [Napoleon] next morning, fix the points in question, and come prepared sometime in the course of that day to conclude and sign the treaty.”53
On May 2, Barbé-Marbois, Monroe, and Livingston signed the treaty transferring Louisiana to the United States. They then rose and shook hands. “We have lived long,” Livingston declared, “but this is the noblest work of our whole lives. The treaty we have signed has not been obtained by art nor dictated by force; equally advantageous to the two contracting parties, it will change vast solitudes into a flourishing country. Today the United States takes its place among powers of the first rank.”54
The government in Washington knew nothing of the direction the talks had taken, and on the day of the signing in Paris, President Jefferson wrote candidly to a friend, “I am not sanguine in obtaining a cession of New Orleans for money.”55
When told of the signing, Napoleon said, “The negotiations leave me nothing to wish. Sixty million for an occupation that will not last perhaps a day!”56 Napoleon had reason to be pleased, having never relinquished control of Tuscany, which he had promised to Spain in return for Louisiana. He noted that, “By this increase in territory, the power of the United States will be consolidated forever.”57 War erupted in Europe two weeks after the treaty was signed, and France spent every penny it received from the purchase on preparations for an invasion of England that was never launched.
Several weeks later, Ambassador Livingston asked Talleyrand for further guidance regarding Louisiana’s borders. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves,” Talleyrand replied cryptically, “and I suppose you will make the most of it.”58 In avoiding a war with France for New Orleans, which President Jefferson estimated would have taken seven years and cost over a hundred thousand lives, the United States instead gained a region larger than the combined area of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Great Britain, containing just under a million square miles, or over five hundred million acres. The territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase forms part or all of Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
In some quarters the purchase faced resistance. Senator Samuel White of Delaware declared, “I believe it will be the greatest curse that could ever befall us. . . . I would rather see it given to France, to Spain, or to any other nation . . . upon the mere condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within its limits.”59
The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on October 20, 1803 by twenty-four to seven, followed by the House of Representatives, which appropriated the funds five days later. Later that year, President Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition to survey the new acquisition, which ushered in an era of exploration and mass western migration that would continue for the next century.
The United States fought several border wars with Spain over Florida before finally annexing it in 1819. James Monroe never recovered financially from the personal debts he incurred in order to undertake the negotiation, and after serving as secretary of state and two terms as president of the United States, he died in penury in his daughter’s home in New York City on July 4, 1831. Disposal of the claims for the French debt to American ship owners proved more troublesome than expected, and the debts transferred to the American government as part of the Louisiana Purchase were not fully settled until 1925.
Chapter 3
The Congress of Vienna
1814–1815
In 1814, after raging across Europe for twenty years, the Napoleonic wars ended with France’s defeat by the great powers. Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s disastrous retreat from Moscow and the fall of Paris to the Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the victorious powers exiled Napoleon to Elba and restored the deposed Louis XVIII to the French throne. A peace treaty signed in May of that year extended generous terms to France, restored its pre-Napoleonic boundaries of 1792, and returned French territories captured by Britain during the war. It called on “all of the powers engaged on either side” of the conflict, which included virtually every nation in Europe, to send representatives to a conference to be held in Vienna that would decide all outstanding territorial questions and establish a balance of power to keep future rivalries in check.1 The heads of Europe gathered in Vienna to divide up the continent and construct a framework to restore order amid the wreckage and confusion Napoleon had left behind.
The foreign ministers of the four primary powers and France arrived several weeks before the scheduled opening of the congress. British Foreign Minister Viscount Castlereagh joined Prussian Chancellor Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Russia’s foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand–Perigord, and Austrian Chancellor P
rince Klemens von Metternich. Tsar Alexander of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia made their entrance to Vienna a week later to a thousand-gun salute lasting over an hour on a sunny afternoon on September 25. In their train followed a legion of Europe’s statesmen. Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire and the cultural and intellectual capital of central Europe, hosted 215 heads of state, including principalities and the smaller grand duchies, and over one hundred thousand attendants, servants, and hangers-on.
On September 29, with the congress due to begin in two days, the four great powers appointed themselves as a directing committee to decide all important questions. As a courtesy, they would inform France and Spain of their decisions once they were made, and the full congress would then be assembled to endorse the settlement. “They had formed a league,” Talleyrand complained, “to make themselves masters of everything, and constitute themselves supreme arbiters of Europe.”2 As the representative of the defeated power, Talleyrand was in an unenviable position. He naturally objected to the victors’ excluding France from the major decisions, but he also felt that such a structure would rob any outcome of lasting credibility. “It is to be hoped,” Talleyrand told them, “that in Europe force will no longer be transformed into law, and that equity, not expediency, will be made the rule.”3
Talleyrand’s argument, which coincided with France’s interests, was that a balance of power alone was not sufficient. What Europe needed was a lasting peace, requiring the additional element of legitimacy to endure the storms of European politics. At a minimum, this demanded the concurrence of all the great powers, which meant including France as an equal partner in the new system. “I ask for nothing,” Talleyrand told them, “but I bring you something important–the sacred principle of legitimacy.”4
Talleyrand preferred that they convene the full congress at once and put the questions before it directly, but Castlereagh and Metternich insisted that would lead to chaos. “The intervention of Talleyrand,” Friedrich von Gentz, Metternich’s lieutenant and the secretary of the congress, complained, “has hopelessly upset all our plans.”5 Unable to agree on a plan or a structure, they postponed the opening of the congress until November 1.
The first question was the future of Poland. In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been steadily carved up by its powerful neighbors Prussia, Austria, and Russia until it disappeared entirely in 1796. Tsar Alexander intended to revive a nominally independent puppet state of Poland out of the former Prussian, Austrian, and Russian parts of Poland. He argued that Russia, having suffered the burning of its capital during Napoleon’s occupation, and having played a key role in the decimation of Napoleon’s army in his disastrous retreat from Moscow, was entitled to compensation, which he demanded in the form of a reconstituted Kingdom of Poland with him at its head. Austria and Prussia would be compensated for their loss of Polish lands by territory taken from elsewhere. The tsar reminded his fellow statesmen that the Russian army, with six hundred thousand men the largest and most powerful in Europe, was already in possession of the areas he sought.
Castlereagh welcomed the restoration of Poland but made it clear that Great Britain would oppose uniting it under the tsar. Castlereagh argued that they had fought the war against Napoleon for the benefit of Europe and to rid the continent of a tyrant and a threat to freedom, not to increase their holdings. Protected by the English Channel and the Royal Navy, Great Britain asked for no continental territories but sought to avoid the emergence of a dominant power on the continent and desired to create a balance of power that would leave England free to use its control of the seas to expand its colonies and overseas trade. Castlereagh feared that a Russian annexation of Poland would concentrate too much power in the tsar’s hands and leave the Austrian heartland strategically vulnerable to attack, and he warned the Russian foreign minister that the tsar’s ambitions would ignite another war. He told the tsar the choice was his whether “the present Congress shall prove to be a blessing to mankind, or only exhibit a scene of discordant intrigue, and a lawless scramble for power.”6 The tsar responded coolly that “the question could only end in one way, as he was in possession,”7 and declared his willingness to go to war to achieve his ambition. “I have two hundred thousand men in the duchy of Warsaw,” he said. “Let them put me out of that.”8 The tsar dismissed Talleyrand’s talk of legitimacy and international law. “What do you suppose I care for all your parchments and treaties?”9
Castlereagh approached Hardenberg on October 9 to bring Prussia, a large and rising power in northern Germany that sought territorial gains that would establish it as the dominant power in Northern Europe, into alliance with Austria and Britain against the Russian plan. As part of his Polish vision, the tsar had promised Prussia Saxony, a large, ancient Germanic kingdom whose ruler had allied himself with Napoleon, for Prussia’s support and as compensation for giving up Prussian possessions that would form part of the tsar’s new Kingdom of Poland. Hardenberg agreed to join Castlereagh’s coalition against the tsar but in return demanded support for Prussia’s bid to acquire Saxony. Castlereagh wanted a large, powerful Prussia to serve as a counterweight with Austria to France and Russia in Central Europe, and was willing to sacrifice Saxony to achieve it. Hardenberg and Castlereagh asked for Metternich’s approval, which the Austrian chancellor reluctantly gave. While Austria could satisfy its territorial ambitions in the south without infringing on the other great powers, it needed to prevent unacceptable concentrations of power on its borders. Austria was competing with Prussia for dominance over the German principalities, and allowing Prussia to absorb Saxony would make Prussia a major rival in Central Europe.
With Prussia’s and Austria’s support, Castlereagh felt able to stand against Alexander’s ambitions on Poland. Castlereagh offered him an ultimatum of three choices: he could re-create a free and independent Poland with its original borders; he could reconstitute a smaller version with less territory; or he could consent to a division of Poland among those three powers, leaving Russia bounded by the Vistula River. If the tsar could not accept either of these, the matter would be put before the full congress for a decision.
Metternich’s personal life intruded. His mistress, Duchess Wilhelmina Sagan, had spurned Metternich in favor of a young cavalry officer, Prince Alfred Windischgraetz, plunging Metternich into an all-consuming despair. “You have done me greater harm,” he wrote her, “than can ever be compensated by the whole universe—you have broken the springs of my soul, you have compromised my existence at a moment when my destiny is linked to questions which will decide the fate of whole generations to come.”10 Meanwhile the other countries were kept in almost complete darkness. “Our existence here is very pleasant, but we are told nothing of what is going on or of what will happen to us,”11 wrote a puzzled King Maximilian of Bavaria. They occupied themselves instead with lavish entertaining. Every Monday Metternich hosted a seated dinner in his residence for 250 people. Each night was filled with parties, salons, concerts, and balls so elaborate (including a masquerade ball for ten thousand) that the Austrian Empire was forced to institute a fifty percent income tax to pay for them. In early October, Emperor Francis I gasped, “If this goes on I shall abdicate. I can’t stand this life much longer.”12
Emperor Francis brought the tsar and the king of Prussia on a week-long tour of Hungary on October 30. The tsar, who had a powerful personal hold over the weak and impressionable Frederick William, reminded the Prussian king over dinner of their friendship, how much he valued it, and the importance to him of the reestablishment of a Kingdom of Poland. “Now that he was on the eve of the accomplishment of his desires,” Alexander asked, “was he to have the grief of counting his dearest friend among those who opposed him?”13 The king, swayed by the tsar’s personal appeal, swore to support Alexander over Poland and immediately ordered Hardenberg to withdraw from Castlereagh’s coalition against Russia. On the monarchs’ return, Castlereagh learned that his coalition had failed. “The hopes,” Talleyra
nd reported, “which they had built upon the cooperation of Prussia have been of brief duration.”14
Castlereagh found the ground cut from under his feet. “You will see,” he complained to the Duke of Wellington, “we are at sea and we have only to pray for favorable winds and currents.”15 Talleyrand hoped that confronting Russia with a Europe unified in opposition would be sufficient, but he believed that giving “dominion of Russia over the whole of Poland would threaten Europe with so great a danger, that if it were to be avoided by force of arms only, there must not be a apportionment of power,’ and so on were trumped up only not be a moment’s hesitation in taking them up.”16 With the prospects for successful diplomacy fading, each of the great powers prepared for war. At Talleyrand’s urging France called up its army, mobilizing nearly a half million troops. Austria drew up war plans and deployed four hundred thousand soldiers to its borders, and Russian forces were already in the field. Castlereagh insisted that if the emperor would not back down from his position, “he must be forced to do so by war.”17 The Austrian secret police reported to Metternich that “things are pointing toward a general war which will not long delay in breaking out.”18 The only step ever taken toward convening the congress came on November 1, the official day it was to open, when a committee was formed to receive, inspect, and verify the credentials of the representatives who had arrived in Vienna. The only meaningful deliberations would be among the representatives of the primary powers.
Great Negotiations Page 5
