The Tripolitan War did not end in a blaze of glory for the United States. It had been waged in the spirit of "not a cent for tribute"; it was concluded with a thinly veiled payment for peace; and, worst of all, it did not prevent further trouble with the Barbary States. The war had been prosecuted with vigor under Preble; it had languished under Barron; and it ended just when the naval forces were adequate to the task. Yet, from another point of view, Preble, Decatur, Somers, and their comrades had not fought in vain. They had created imperishable traditions for the American navy; they had established a morale in the service; and they had trained a group of young officers who were to give a good account of themselves when their foes should be not shifty Tripolitans but sturdy Britons.
CHAPTER IV. THE SHADOW OF THE FIRST CONSUL
Bainbridge in forlorn captivity at Tripoli, Preble and Barron keeping anxious watch off the stormy coast of Africa, Eaton marching through the windswept desert, are picturesque figures that arrest the attention of the historian; but they seemed like shadowy actors in a remote drama to the American at home, absorbed in the humdrum activities of trade and commerce. Through all these dreary years of intermittent war, other matters engrossed the President and Congress and caught the attention of the public. Not the rapacious Pasha of Tripoli but the First Consul of France held the center of the stage. At the same time that news arrived of the encounter of the Enterprise with the Corsairs came also the confirmation of rumors current all winter in Europe. Bonaparte had secured from Spain the retrocession of the province of Louisiana. From every point of view, as the President remarked, the transfer of this vast province to a new master was "an inauspicious circumstance." The shadow of the Corsican, already a menace to the peace of Europe, fell across the seas.
A strange chain of circumstances linked Bonaparte with the New World. When he became master of France by the coup d'etat of the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), he fell heir to many policies which the republic had inherited from the old regime. Frenchmen had never ceased to lament the loss of colonial possessions in North America. From time to time the hope of reviving the colonial empire sprang up in the hearts of the rulers of France. It was this hope that had inspired Genet's mission to the United States and more than one intrigue among the pioneers of the Mississippi Valley, during Washington's second Administration. The connecting link between the old regime and the new was the statesman Talleyrand. He had gone into exile in America when the French Revolution entered upon its last frantic phase and had brought back to France the plan and purpose which gave consistency to his diplomacy in the office of Minister of Foreign Affairs, first under the Directory, then under the First Consul. Had Talleyrand alone nursed this plan, it would have had little significance in history; but it was eagerly taken up by a group of Frenchmen who believed that France, having set her house in order and secured peace in Europe, should now strive for orderly commercial development. The road to prosperity, they believed, lay through the acquisition of colonial possessions. The recovery of the province of Louisiana was an integral part of their programme.
While the Directory was still in power and Bonaparte was pursuing his ill-fated expedition in Egypt, Talleyrand had tried to persuade the Spanish Court to cede Louisiana and the Floridas. The only way for Spain to put a limit to the ambitions of the Americans, he had argued speciously, was to shut them up within their natural limits. Only so could Spain preserve the rest of her immense domain. But since Spain was confessedly unequal to the task, why not let France shoulder the responsibility? "The French Republic, mistress of these two provinces, will be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America," he assured the Spaniards. But the time was not ripe.
Such, then, was the policy which Bonaparte inherited when he became First Consul and master of the destinies of his adopted country. A dazzling future opened before him. Within a year he had pacified Europe, crushing the armies of Austria by a succession of brilliant victories, and laying prostrate the petty states of the Italian peninsula. Peace with England was also in sight. Six weeks after his victory at Marengo, Bonaparte sent a special courier to Spain to demand—the word is hardly too strong—the retrocession of Louisiana.
It was an odd whim of Fate that left the destiny of half the American continent to Don Carlos IV, whom Henry Adams calls "a kind of Spanish George III "—virtuous, to be sure, but heavy, obtuse, inconsequential, and incompetent. With incredible fatuousness the King gave his consent to a bargain by which he was to yield Louisiana in return for Tuscany or other Italian provinces which Bonaparte had just overrun with his armies. "Congratulate me," cried Don Carlos to his Prime Minister, his eyes sparkling, "on this brilliant beginning of Bonaparte's relations with Spain. The Prince-presumptive of Parma, my son-in-law and nephew, a Bourbon, is invited by France to reign, on the delightful banks of the Arno, over a people who once spread their commerce through the known world, and who were the controlling power of Italy,—a people mild, civilized, full of humanity; the classical land of science and art." A few war-ridden Italian provinces for an imperial domain that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior and that extended westward no one knew how far!
The bargain was closed by a preliminary treaty signed at San Ildefonso on October 1, 1800. Just one year later to a day, the preliminaries of the Peace of Amiens were signed, removing the menace of England on the seas. The First Consul was now free to pursue his colonial policy, and the destiny of the Mississippi Valley hung in the balance. Between the First Consul and his goal, however, loomed up the gigantic figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, a full-blooded negro, who had made himself master of Santo Domingo and had thus planted himself squarely in the searoad to Louisiana. The story of this "gilded African," as Bonaparte contemptuously dubbed him, cannot be told in these pages, because it involves no less a theme than the history of the French Revolution in this island, once the most thriving among the colonial possessions of France in the West Indies. The great plantations of French Santo Domingo (the western part of the island) had supplied half of Europe with sugar, coffee, and cotton; three-fourths of the imports from French-American colonies were shipped from Santo Domingo. As the result of class struggles between whites and mulattoes for political power, the most terrific slave insurrection in the Western Hemisphere had deluged the island in blood. Political convulsions followed which wrecked the prosperity of the island. Out of this chaos emerged the one man who seemed able to restore a semblance of order—the Napoleon of Santo Domingo, whose character, thinks Henry Adams, had a curious resemblance to that of the Corsican. The negro was, however, a ferocious brute without the redeeming qualities of the Corsican, though, as a leader of his race, his intelligence cannot be denied. Though professing allegiance to the French Republic, Toussaint was driven by circumstances toward independence. While his Corsican counterpart was executing his coup d'etat and pacifying Europe, he threw off the mask, imprisoned the agent of the French Directory, seized the Spanish part of the island, and proclaimed a new constitution for Santo Domingo, assuming all power for himself for life and the right of naming his successor. The negro defied the Corsican.
The First Consul was now prepared to accept the challenge. Santo Domingo must be recovered and restored to its former prosperity—even if slavery had to be reestablished—before Louisiana could be made the center of colonial empire in the West. He summoned Leclerc, a general of excellent reputation and husband of his beautiful sister Pauline, and gave to him the command of an immense expedition which was already preparing at Brest. In the latter part of November, Leclerc set sail with a large fleet bearing an army of ten thousand men and on January 29, 1802, arrived off the eastern cape of Santo Domingo. A legend says that Toussaint looking down on the huge armada exclaimed, "We must perish. All France is coming to Santo Domingo. It has been deceived; it comes to take vengeance and enslave the blacks." The negro leader made a formidable resistance, nevertheless, annihilating one French army and seriously endangering the expedition. But he was betrayed by his generals, lured within the French lines, made prisoner, and finally sent to France. He was incarcerated in a French fortress in the Jura Mountains and there perished miserably in 1803.