Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Once the Lewis and Clark expedition had tracked the Northwest, the Southwest of the continent remained to be explored, even though much of it was Spanish territory. Several American expeditions in 1804 and 1805 looked for the elusive source of the Red River and created trouble with the Spanish. After having explored the Mississippi to its source in 1805, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike in 1806 led an expedition up the Arkansas River into what is now Colorado. Pike tried but was unable to reach the summit of the fourteen-thousand-foot peak that bears his name. His party was eventually captured by Spanish troops and brought to Santa Fe and then Chihuahua in Mexico before being sent under guard through Mexico to an American border post at Natchitoches in the northwest corner of present-day Louisiana.57

  Since Pike’s expeditions had been ordered by General James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory and commander-in-chief of the United States Army, Pike’s fame was tainted by Wilkinson’s reputation for intrigue and shady dealing. Indeed, the borders of the new Louisiana Territory were so vague, Spain’s hold on the East and West Florida and Texas was so weak, and the rough and unruly frontier inhabitants were so captivated by dreams of America’s inevitable expansion that adventurers, filibustering expeditions, and rumors of plots and conspiracies flourished throughout Orleans and the Southwest.

  THE MOST GRANDIOSE of these schemes was that of 1806–1807 involving Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s former vice-president, and General Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s involvement is explicable: he was a notorious schemer and plotter and was rumored, correctly, to be in the pay of the Spanish government. It is Burr’s participation that is astonishing, and it has captivated the imagination of Americans for over two hundred years. Indeed, Burr has become the most romanticized and vilified historical character in American literature. He has been the subject of countless poems, songs, sermons, and semi-fictional popular biographies, and the central figure in nearly three dozen plays and more than four dozen novels. Despite all his hustling and scheming, however, it is doubtful that Burr would ever have become embroiled in his mysterious adventures in the West if he had not become alienated from the Jefferson administration and had not killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

  Because of his passive behavior during the electoral deadlock in 1801, Vice-President Burr at once created doubts about his loyalty to the Jefferson administration. Jefferson did not ask his opinion on appointments to the cabinet and instead turned to Governor George Clinton of New York for advice and then appointed few of Burr’s followers to offices. Burr in turn began to defend Federalist policies and, to the consternation of Republican leaders, even participated in a Federalist celebration of Washington’s birthday.

  As Burr’s ties to the administration eroded, the Republicans in New York divided between the Burrites and the supporters of Governor Clinton and his nephew DeWitt Clinton. In 1802 the leading Republican journalist in the state, James Cheetham, a convert to the Clintonians, accused Burr of conniving to win the presidency for himself in the election of 1800. The charges had a devastating effect on Burr’s reputation among Republicans everywhere. By 1804 the Republican congressional caucus gave him not a single vote as the vice-presidential candidate on the ticket and replaced him with George Clinton.

  After a long and futile interview with Jefferson in January 1804, in which Burr apparently asked for an appointment, Burr decided to run for governor of New York against the Republican candidate backed by the Clinton and Livingston families. Frustrated at losing the race despite some Federalist support, Burr, according to one of his close friends, was “determined to call out the first man of any respectability concerned in the infamous publications concerning him.”58 Hamilton had opposed Burr’s candidacy, and he became that man. According to an Albany physician, Hamilton at a dinner party had expressed “a still more despicable opinion” of Burr than simply saying that he was “a dangerous man.”59 When Hamilton passed up an opportunity to disown this particular incident with some evasive remarks, the exchanges between the two men got out of hand. Finally, his anger fully aroused, Burr “required a General disavowal of any intention on the part of Genl Hamilton in his various conversations to convey impressions derogatory to the honor of M. Burr.” When Hamilton refused to make this sort of blanket denial, Burr challenged him to a duel.60

  Hamilton reluctantly accepted Burr’s challenge, and the two men met in Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804. Hamilton’s death from his wounds the next day released an outpouring of mourning, and Burr, shocked by the response to Hamilton’s death, was forced to flee New York to the island home of Pierce Butler off the coast of Georgia. With warrants out for his arrest, the vice-president had become a fugitive from justice.

  Already Burr was thinking of some exploit in the West that might recoup his reputation and his fortune. As war between the United States and Spain became more and more likely and the uproar in New York died down, Burr met with General Wilkinson many times in Washington during the winter of 1804–1805 and pored over maps of the Floridas and Texas. He seemed to think that the military officers in the West were so estranged from the Republican administration that they could be recruited to do most anything. In December 1804 General John Adair, a Kentucky speculator, wrote Wilkinson that his Kentuckians were “full of enterprise” and ready to move. “Mexico glitters in our Eyes—the word is all we wait for.”61 At the same time, Burr was trying to get British financial and naval backing for his schemes—support which the British refused to give. In the spring of 1805 he traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi and conferred with friends and others, including Andrew Jackson in Nashville and Wilkinson in St. Louis. Although the war with Spain never broke out, Burr in the summer of 1806 led sixty or so men and half a dozen flat-boats down the Mississippi toward New Orleans.

  Since Burr said so many different things to so many different people, his ultimate aim has never been entirely clear. Did he simply intend to lead Americans in a filibustering expedition to take over West Florida or Texas from Spain? Or did he actually mean to separate the West from the Union and create his own empire? As conflicting rumors flew about, federal officials in Kentucky in the late fall of 1806 charged Burr with plotting a military expedition against Mexico, but a sympathetic grand jury refused to indict him. With the Jefferson administration becoming more and more concerned with Burr’s activities in the West, Wilkinson decided to save himself by betraying Burr. In November 1806 he warned President Jefferson of “a deep, dark, and wide-spread conspiracy” and ordered Burr arrested.62 Constitutionally scrupulous as always, Jefferson worried about whether the president had the authority to call out the regular armed forces to put down a domestic attempt to dismember the Union, so he asked Congress for legislation giving him that authority.

  After being arrested, Burr was paroled. He then sought to flee to Spanish territory but was seized and brought to Virginia. In 1807 he was indicted for treason and brought to trial in the U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, Virginia, with Chief Justice John Marshall as the presiding judge. Unfortunately for Burr, Jefferson had already told Congress that Burr’s “guilt is placed beyond question.”63 Earlier Jefferson had been rather casual about the separation of the West from the Union; but in those cases he had assumed that the Western areas, namely Kentucky and Tennessee, were full of Americans who believed in American principles and therefore were citizens not much tempted by disunionist schemes. But Burr threatened the separation of New Orleans, which was not yet filled with Americans, and that made a difference.

  Determined to see Burr found guilty of treason, Jefferson worked hard for his conviction.64 Marshall’s decisions during the trial and his strict definition of treason frustrated Jefferson. Burr was eventually found not guilty, but his political career was ruined. He fled the country in disgrace, only returning years later to live out the remainder of his life in obscurity.

  JEFFERSON’S WEST WAS, of course, still inhabited by Indians, who were as fascinating to him as the West itself. Although Jefferson has been much criticized for his la
ck of modern ethnographic sympathy, he was actually a more sensitive ethnographer than most of his contemporaries. No other president in American history was as interested in the indigenous people as Jefferson. He collected every scrap of information about them—their bodies, their orations, their habits, their languages; in fact, he spent most of his life collecting and studying Indian vocabularies.65

  Jefferson’s obsession with the Indians was shared by most of his fellow Americans. Indeed, never before in American history had the Indian become so central to the hopes and dreams of educated white Americans. And never before was the Indian so admired and celebrated as he was by Jefferson’s generation. Since this was the generation that essentially destroyed the society and culture of those Indians living east of the Mississippi, this fixation becomes all the more curious and ironic. It actually grew out of the Americans’ nervousness over their New World habitat. Americans of the early Republic were informed by the best scientific authorities of the Western world that the American natural environment was deleterious to all animal life. There was in fact something terribly wrong—something inherent in nature itself—that made the climate of the New World harmful to all living creatures, including the Indians, who were the only humans native to the New World.66

  This was not the conclusion of a few crackpots or of some fanatic European aristocrats eager to malign American republicanism. It was the conclusion of the greatest naturalist of the Western world, the French scientist George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. In the rambling thirty-six volumes of his Natural History published between 1749 and 1800, Buffon presented a profoundly pessimistic but scientifically grounded picture of the American environment. There was in the New World, Buffon wrote, “some combination of elements and other physical causes, something that opposes the amplification of animated Nature.”67

  The American continents, said Buffon, were newer than those of the Old World. They had, it seemed, only recently emerged from the flood and had not as yet properly dried out. The American air was more humid than that of the older continents. Its topography was more irregular, its weather more variable, its forests and miasmic swamps more extensive. In short, America had an unhealthy climate in which to live.

  Animals in the New World, said Buffon, were underdeveloped—smaller than those of the Old World. America did not have any lions. The American puma was scarcely a real lion; it did not even have a mane, and “it is also much smaller, weaker, and more cowardly than the reallion.” The New World had no elephants; in fact, no American wildlife could be compared to the elephant in size or shape. The best that America had, Buffon wrote sarcastically, was the tapir of Brazil, but “this elephant of the New World” was not bigger than “a six-month-old calf.” All the American animals were “four, six, eight, and ten times” smaller than those of the older continents. Even the domestic animals introduced to America from Europe tended to shrink and dwindle under the influence of the New World’s climate.68

  Buffon’s conclusion about the environment was stark and frightening. “Living nature,” he wrote, “is thus much less active there, much less varied, and we may even say, less strong.” To learn that the peculiar American habitat had affected animal life was unsettling, but to learn that the environment of the New World was also unhealthy for humans was truly alarming. Buffon claimed that the American environment was responsible for the apparently retarded development of the native Indians, who seemed to be wandering savages stuck in the first stage of social development without any structured society. The Indians, Buffon said, were like reptiles; they were cold-blooded. Their “organs of generation are small and feeble.” The natives of the New World had no hair, no beards, no ardor for their females. Their social bonds were weak; they had very few children and paid little attention to those they had. In some way this strange, moist climate of the New World had devastatingly affected the physical and social character of the only humans native to it. The outlook for humans of the Old World transplanted to this forbidding environment was therefore not a happy one.69

  It is difficult to appreciate the extent of European ignorance about the Western Hemisphere, even as late as the eighteenth century. Since Alexander von Humboldt had not yet made his journeys and published his findings, even educated Europeans had strange ideas about the New World. Of course, at the beginning Europeans had expected the climate of America to be similar to that of the Old World. Indeed, “climate” was described, as, for example, in Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography (1796), as a belt of the earth’s surface between two given parallels of latitude. People assumed that places that were the same distance from the poles or the equator would have the same climate and were surprised to find the contrary. The latitude of London was north of Newfoundland; that of Rome was nearly the same as New York City. Yet the climates of these places on the same latitude were very different. It was out of this sense of difference between the Old and New Worlds and the hearsay it generated that Buffon fabricated his scientific conclusions.70

  The great naturalist’s theories about the New World were taken up by others, including Corneille de Pauw, the Abbé Raynal, and the Scottish historian William Robertson, and through such writers they entered the popular thinking about America in the late eighteenth century.71 Naturally those Americans who became aware of Buffon’s findings were alarmed. If Buffon’s scientific claims were true, then the chances for the success of the new American republican experiment were not good, and the predictions of pessimistic Europeans about the future of the New World would be proved correct. For many eighteenth-century Englishmen and Europeans the term “American” often had conjured up images ofunrefined if not barbarous persons, degenerate and racially debased mongrels living amidst African slaves and Indian savages thousands of miles from civilization. Hessian soldiers arriving in New York in 1776 had been surprised to find that there were actually many white people in the New World.72 Now the best scientific theories of the day seemed to reinforce these popular European images of the degeneracy of the New World.

  Of course, most Americans in the generation following the Revolution did not let these English and European charges seriously dampen their optimism and enthusiasm for the future. Instead, they reacted with indignant dismissal, exaggerated boasting, or extensive scientific comparison. Perhaps it was true, conceded Jefferson, that America had twice as much rain as Europe, but in America, he said, it fell “in half the time.”73

  Yet some Americans seemed to have an underlying anxiety that the European critics might be right after all. There did seem to be something peculiar about America’s climate. The same regions with temperatures well below zero in winter could swelter in heat close to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer; also, swings of forty degrees Fahrenheit in twenty-four hours were not uncommon. No place in Europe had these sorts of radical variations in temperature. The American climate did seem to have more moisture. Humidity was often high, and heavy rainfall alternated with an unusual number of sunny cloudless days. Some speculated that these peculiarities were due to the existence of so much uncultivated land with so many dense forests in America. Europe’s climate had once been like America’s, it was thought, but once most of its trees had been cut down, its climate had changed.

  The devastating epidemics of yellow fever that erupted in American cities during this period, beginning with the catastrophe in Philadelphia in 1793 (which killed 10 percent of the population), were not duplicated elsewhere in the Western world. This led some Americans, including Jefferson, to conclude that the disease was indeed “peculiar to our country.” Because the sun rarely shone in the middle and northern parts of Europe, the Europeans could “safely build cities in solid blocks without generating disease.” But America’s unusual atmosphere—the cloudless skies and the intense heat and humidity—fermented the garbage and filth in America’s cities, creating putrefaction that released effluvia and morbific fluids that bred disease; thus in America, said Jefferson, “men cannot be piled on one another with impunity.” He hoped
that some good might come out of these epidemics of yellow fever: Americans might be inhibited from building the sorts of huge sprawling cities that existed in Europe.74

  Although America’s cities were scarcely crowded or dirty by European standards, many Americans decided that their unusual climate required their cities to be designed differently from those in the Old World. Urban renewal in the early Republic was born out of these concerns. Jefferson was especially worried about New Orleans, which promised to become “the greatest city the world had ever seen. There is no spot on the globe,” he said, “to which the produce of so great an extent of fertile country must necessarily come.” But unfortunately at the same time “there is no spot where yellow fever is so much to be apprehended.” He decided that New Orleans and other American cities had “to take the chequer board” for a plan, with “the white squares open and unbuilt for ever, and planted with trees.”75

  Not just Jefferson but many other leading intellectuals of the day, such as Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Samuel L. Mitchill, and Benjamin Latrobe, also concocted plans for cleaning and renovating America’s cities. But Dr. Charles Caldwell, a Philadelphia physician, was the one who drew up the most elaborate plans for urban renewal to deal with the effluvia that presumably caused yellow fever. Caldwell thought all of America’s cities, which were simply “vast factories of this febrile poison,” would have to be rebuilt in accord with the country’s unusual climate—requiring lofty buildings, lots of squares, and many trees, especially Lombardy poplars, which were the best kind of tree for soaking up the miasma and emitting vital air.