The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  How to do this? It was all very simple, in Talleyrand’s scheming brain. The United States had negotiated President Adams’s semi-surrender peace treaty with Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph. The very next day, Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien, negotiated another treaty at the country palace of the Spanish king, Carlos IV. This agreement would return to France the immense territory of Louisiana, which King Louis XV had given to Spain in 1763 to compensate them for their losses in the Seven Years War. To prove the new arrangement was between good friends, Napoleon agreed to put King Carlos’s son-in-law on the throne of Tuscany—most of northern Italy—and vowed, as any and all listeners would later attest, that he would never give or sell Louisiana to a third power.

  Louisiana made Tuscany look like a mere dot on the world’s map. Stretching from the Canadian border to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from the western bank of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, it was a third of the continent. Santo Domingo was the pivot on which this gigantic power grab revolved. France was broke. Napoleon—and Talleyrand—remembered when “Saint Domingue,” as the French called it, was France’s most valuable overseas colony, a cornucopia that produced thousands of tons of sugar from its fertile soil. Bonaparte wanted to restore this flow of francs to the Consulate’s treasury.

  Within hours of receiving Pichon’s message of President Jefferson’s cooperation, the First Consul ordered his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, and twenty thousand of his best troops, to prepare for a long voyage and a tropical campaign. Bonaparte was so sure that Leclerc could dispose of Louverture and his “gilded Africans,” he gave his beautiful sister, Pauline, permission to accompany her handsome husband.

  The campaign on Santo Domingo should not last more than six weeks, Bonaparte told General Leclerc. That would give him plenty of time to reembark most of his army and take possession of New Orleans and Louisiana. Control of the Mississippi’s mouth would make it much easier to “persuade” the western Americans to see things from a French point of view. These bumpkins were extremely dependent on the right to ship their grain from New Orleans. A dozen or so regiments stationed along the Mississippi would add to General Leclerc’s powers of persuasion. Vive la France! would soon become the favorite expression of western Americans—or else.

  President Jefferson and his Secretary of State, James Madison, remained in contented ignorance of this plan. They had many other things on their minds. The President was upset about the warlike statements emanating from Algiers and other Muslim ports in North Africa. He decided to send a hefty portion of the tiny U.S. Navy to deal with these pirates—rather than pay the usual tribute to keep their corsairs away from American ships in the Mediterranean Sea. This decision would have American sailors and Marines fighting and dying in the Mediterranean for the next fourteen years.8

  President Jefferson had other, somewhat contradictory ideas about the Navy. He thought it was a mistake to let it become too large. Especially wrong was the officers’ fondness for frigates and ships of the line. The President thought these oceangoing vessels were prone to behave truculently toward foreign nations, leading to unnecessary wars. What the Navy needed were ships built to defend the nation’s ports against intruders. The new president found time to design one of these vessels and order its construction.

  It was a long, slim gunboat, carrying two or three cannon. Its outsized sails and oars theoretically gave it speed and the ability to maneuver. Soon there were dozens of these ships on the way. Alas, the Navy’s professional officers did not like them. They claimed that they were too fragile. A single blast of their own cannon threatened to turn them into debris. But the President scoffed at these complaints and ordered his brainchild multiplied exponentially.

  The President also fretted over the fact that almost all the officers in the minimal U.S. Army of three thousand men were Federalists, thanks to General Hamilton. Jefferson decided to found the military academy Hamilton and Washington had frequently recommended—and appoint only Democratic-Republicans to its student body. To make sure they did not threaten the government, as he believed standing armies were prone to do, the President chose remote West Point, far up New York’s Hudson River, as the academy’s home.9

  Another presidential worry emanated from Richmond, Virginia, where newsman James Thomson Callender had just spent six months in jail for violating the Sedition Act. Jefferson had repeatedly supported this consummate smear artist in his attacks on John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. One of the President’s first acts was pardoning Callender, on March 16, 1801, a mere twelve days after he took office.

  The President also took an extraordinary interest in making sure Callender’s $200 fine was remitted. This involved unexpected complications; Jefferson had to fire the Federalist federal marshal, David Meade Randolph, the brother-in-law of the president’s son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, because the marshal had supposedly packed the jury with Federalists for Callender’s trial. The enraged marshal said he might exact revenge on Callender, who claimed he was afraid to go near him to collect his fine.10

  Things only got worse. Callender informed the President that he would not be happy unless he became the well-paid postmaster of Richmond. When Jefferson balked, Callender came to Washington, D.C., to argue truculently with James Madison. Callender talked loudly of having information that might force Jefferson to resign his high office. The President sent him $50, which later looked to many people like blackmail.

  When it became evident that he was not going to get his government job, the journalist began publishing some of his trove of damaging facts in his newspaper, the Richmond Recorder. These included the letters of praise Jefferson had bestowed on his literary efforts and receipts for the money he had given him—and the claim that the President had fathered several children by a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings.

  Callender assured his readers it was well-known among Monticello’s neighbors that Jefferson had kept Sally as “his concubine” since he returned from Paris. Their romance had begun in the City of Light, when fifteen-year-old Sally had escorted his daughter Maria Jefferson to France. Among the proofs visible at Monticello was a boy named “Tom,” who had red hair and a striking resemblance to the President.

  Federalist editors leaped on the story. It was reprinted in paper after paper across the nation, often with a poem first published in the Federalist Boston Gazette.

  Of all damsels on the green

  In mountain or in valley

  A lass so luscious neer was seen

  As Monticellian Sally.

  Chorus: Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle

  What wife was half so handy?

  To breed a flock of slaves for stock

  A blackamoor’s the dandy

  When pressed by load of state affairs

  I seek to sport and sally

  The sweetest solace of my cares

  Is in the lap of Sally.

  This was mortification in capital letters for a president who hoped—even expected—to eclipse George Washington. Benjamin Franklin Bache had reprinted British-forged letters portraying Washington in the grip of passion for a loyalist lady in 1776. But no one with even a minimum of intelligence believed them. The Sally Hemings story had plausibility stamped all over it.

  Historians are still debating whether Jefferson was guilty of this liaison. In recent years some researchers have advanced what they consider conclusive proof, based on DNA evidence. Other historians have pointed out that there are several kinds of DNA. The one that the accusers cite proves little or nothing about an individual. Not a few people have begun to think that the accusation cannot be proved—or disproved.

  All President Jefferson could do was grimly refuse to acknowledge the story. This was not an easy task, since he had once hailed the man who published the tale as a journalist without peer. Callender added additional injury by printing another story, claiming that Jefferson once tried to seduce attractive Betsy Walker, the wife of neighbor John Walker.
Now a very angry Federalist, Walker confirmed the journalist’s revelation and talked of challenging the President to a duel.

  It is hard to resist wondering if the politician who had introduced ideological slurs and sneering accusations into America’s political discourse with the aid of Philip Freneau was getting what he deserved. A great many Federalists, notably Alexander Hamilton, who had started a newspaper in New York, the Evening Post, thought this was unquestionably the case.

  Another problem confronting the President was traceable to a strong Jefferson prejudice—his hatred of cities. He was extremely happy to find himself presiding in semi-rural Washington, D.C. Many—probably most—of the rest of the federal government felt otherwise. By 1800, everyone who had invested money in the District of Columbia’s real estate had abandoned the place.

  The only completed block of private buildings stood empty and crumbling. On Greenleaf Point, another large cluster of buildings was described by one visitor as looking like “a considerable town which has been destroyed by some unusual calamity.” On Rock Creek, a bridge that was supposed to connect the federal city to the rest of the nation—it had been built with symbolic stones from the thirteen original states—had collapsed.11

  President Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republican administrators also found that the District had a strong appeal for those who thought Napoleon or General Hamilton or the ghost of George Washington was persecuting them. More numerous were those who connected the pursuit of happiness to a government job. Only 233 males in the population of 4,000 had more than $100 in cash or property. Welfare, called poor relief in those more candid days, consumed 45% of the District’s expenses.

  “In the heart of the city,” wrote one visitor, “not a sound is to be heard,” even by day. “Everything here seems to be in a dead calm,” reported a newly arrived congressman. “An absolute supiness overwhelms all.” The President’s abandonment of internal taxes meant that the Capitol remained unfinished, after completing the wings for the Senate and the House of Representatives. There was no central hall or dome. The two wings were connected by a crude covered boardwalk. Around it clustered the only real community, seven or eight boarding-houses and a few shops.12

  Most of the year, Pennsylvania Avenue, which linked the Capitol and the President’s “palace,” was a mile-long morass in which carriages sank to their axletrees. Congress voted $10,000 to build a sidewalk. The contractor used chips from the stone for the Capitol. The result was a surface that sliced open shoes when it was dry; in wet weather it became a kind of glue that often pulled them off a walker’s feet.

  In the congressional boardinghouses, life was dismal. Even senators slept two or three to a room. They entertained guests in an overheated parlor, “full of noise and confusion.” Inevitably, men from New England lived together and ditto for southerners and middle staters. Most remained strangers to each other. Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a cosmopolitan New York becoming a capital like London, strengthening the federal union with its arts and culture and creature comforts, had become its stark opposite in President Jefferson’s “federal village.”

  No one put it better than George Washington’s friend, Senator Gouverneur Morris. “We want nothing here,” he said. “Nothing but houses, cellars, kitchens, well informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of that kind, to make our city perfect.” A French diplomat agreed wholeheartedly. “My God!” he cried. “What have I done to be condemned to reside in such a city?”13

  Another source of the erosion of the “fraternal affection” that President Washington had seen as essential to the future of the Union was phenomenal congressional turnover, and poor attendance by those who had been elected. President Jefferson often mentioned the size of the Democratic-Republican majority in the Senate or the House of the Sixth Congress—when and if everyone “arrived.” Very few congressmen or senators brought their wives to this cultural and culinary desert. One congressman told an old friend that “a banishment of six months to Siberia would not be more disagreeable” than a sojourn in the nation’s capital.14

  All in all, the Revolution of 1800 resembled that other Jefferson fantasy—his worship of the French Revolution. That chimera was about to bring him extremely disturbing news.

  CHAPTER 27

  How a Mosquito Rescued Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency

  IN LATE JANUARY 1802, General Victor Leclerc’s armada hove off to Santo Domingo. The size of his fleet and army made Toussaint Louverture and his generals suspicious. It was much too large to be the escort of a delegation from Paris, offering a new relationship between France and the semi-independent island. They had recently received a letter from First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, intimating that some arrangement of that sort was contemplated.

  Leclerc called on Henri Christophe, the general in command of the port of Cap Francois, to surrender the city. When Christophe refused, Leclerc’s warships and regiments attacked from land and sea. Christophe slaughtered the port’s white inhabitants, set the place afire, and retreated into the countryside. An exasperated Leclerc discovered he was in a ruined city where almost all the food was in American-owned warehouses or on ships in the harbor. He was stunned by the prices the proprietors demanded.

  The general rushed an agent to New York to borrow a million francs. The agent came back empty-handed. A bankrupt France’s credit was worthless. Leclerc bombarded Chargé Andre Pichon with letters, ordering him to browbeat the Americans into making good on their promise to feed his troops. When Pichon sought help from Secretary of State Madison, he got questions instead of answers.

  Why was the French army so large, Madison asked? He had heard from several people that part of the army was destined for Louisiana. Was that true? Was there anything to the rumor that the French had acquired this immense territory from the Spanish? On Madison’s desk was a letter from Fulwar Skipwith, former consul and now the American commercial agent in Paris, warning him that this transfer had almost certainly taken place, although Talleyrand and Bonaparte repeatedly denied it.1

  A desperate Chargé Pichon begged Madison for a loan of a million francs. Out of the question, Madison replied. It would infuriate Congress. A Pichon interview with President Jefferson produced soothing phrases about friendship with France but no money.

  Meanwhile, General Leclerc, having seized wholesale tons of American owned supplies, was fighting a ferocious war on Santo Domingo. He won battle after battle. He captured Toussaint Louverture and shipped him to France, where he would die in a freezing dungeon. But Leclerc’s casualties were shockingly heavy. Suddenly, he learned even worse news from his alarmed surgeons: A strange illness was creeping through the army. Soldiers suddenly grew too weak to carry their muskets. In twenty-four hours came black vomit, yellowing skin, convulsions, and death. It was yellow fever, produced by the bite of the most important and least known political ally in American history—a tiny buzzing female mosquito called aedes egypti. In regiment after regiment, whole companies collapsed and died virtually en masse. An appalled Leclerc asked for reinforcements, and Bonaparte sent him another fifteen thousand men. They suffered the same disastrous fate.2

  Back in Paris, Minister Robert Livingston was asking the same sort of questions that Secretary of State Madison had thrust at Pichon. He was soon convinced that the transfer of Louisiana was a fact and sent the news to his government. A stunned President Jefferson replied that if it were true, America had only one choice: “We must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”3

  In Paris, Envoy Livingston, a Hudson River grandee whose family had ruled much of the Hudson River Valley for generations, declined to panic. Instead, he wrote a clever “memorial” and circulated twenty copies of it throughout the French government. The essay warned them that an attempt to colonize Louisiana would cost a huge amount of money and might lead to war with the United States. Why was France risking the triumphant peace she had fought so long and hard to achieve? Santo Domingo was another expensive proposition. L
ivingston predicted that “ages will elapse” before the colony “ceased to drain the wealth and strength of France.”4

  The memorial was a seed that would take time to grow. For the moment, such opinions did not seem to matter. In August 1802, a blatantly engineered plebiscite made Napoleon First Consul for Life. A majority of the French people voted against it. But Lucien Bonaparte, the Man of Destiny’s younger brother, operating as Minister of the Interior, declared him the victor by three million votes. It was one more ironic touch in the decline and fall of President Jefferson’s “polar star,” the French Revolution. Somewhere, Edmund Burke, who had died in 1797, was laughing. Tom Paine, marooned in France (Federalist vituperation had persuaded him to reject Jefferson’s offer of transportation by U.S. Navy frigate), prudently decided not to attack the First Consul for Life with the sort of invective he had flung at George Washington.5

  On November 2, 1802, General Leclerc died on Santo Domingo. Napoleon was undeterred. He shipped more troops and appointed as new commander, General Donatien de Rochambeau, son of the man who had headed the French Expeditionary Force during the American Revolution. He also ordered another general to embark as soon as possible with twenty thousand men to occupy New Orleans and Louisiana. On board were numerous officers empowered to play civil as well as military roles. Secret orders included bribing Americans to spy and agitate in France’s favor—and form alliances with Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River.

  Further reassuring the First Consul and his officers was the knowledge that the commander in chief of President Jefferson’s army, General James Wilkinson, was Agent 13, a spy on the Spanish payroll. King Carlos paid the general thousands of dollars a year to keep him aware of what the restless western Americans were saying about the moribund Spanish empire. Napoleon was confident that the threat of betrayal—and the promise of more cash—would make Wilkinson a complaisant tool while French grenadiers created Talleyrand’s “wall of brass” along the Mississippi.