Jefferson and His Colleagues: A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty

by Allen Johnson

By what process of reasoning had Livingston and Monroe reached this satisfying conclusion? Their argument proceeded from carefully chosen premises. France, it was said, had once held Louisiana and the Floridas together as part of her colonial empire in America; in 1763 she had ceded New Orleans and the territory west of the Mississippi to Spain, and at the same time she had transferred the Floridas to Great Britain; in 1783 Great Britain had returned the Floridas to Spain which were then reunited to Louisiana as under French rule. Ergo, when Louisiana was retro-ceded "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it," it must have included West Florida.

That Livingston was able to convince himself by this logic, does not speak well for his candor or intelligence. He was well aware that Bonaparte had failed to persuade Don Carlos to include the Floridas in the retrocession; he had tried to insert in the treaty an article pledging the First Consul to use his good offices to obtain the Floridas for the United States; and in his midnight dispatch to Madison, with the prospect of acquiring Louisiana before him, he had urged the advisability of exchanging this province for the more desirable Floridas. Livingston therefore could not, and did not, say that Spain intended to cede the Floridas as a part of Louisiana, but that she had inadvertently done so and that Bonaparte might have claimed West Florida, if he had been shrewd enough to see his opportunity. The United States was in no way prevented from pressing this claim because the First Consul had not done so. The fact that France had in 1763 actually dismembered her colonial empire and that Louisiana as ceded to Spain extended only to the Iberville, was given no weight in Livingston's deductions.

Having the will to believe, Jefferson and Madison became converts to Livingston's faith. Madison wrote at once that in view of these developments no proposal to exchange Louisiana for the Floridas should be entertained; the President declared himself satisfied that "our right to the Perdido is substantial and can be opposed by a quibble on form only"; and John Randolph, duly coached by the Administration, flatly declared in the House of Representatives that "We have not only obtained the command of the mouth of the Mississippi, but of the Mobile, with its widely extended branches; and there is not now a single stream of note rising within the United States and falling into the Gulf of Mexico which is not entirely our own, the Appalachicola excepted." From this moment to the end of his administration, the acquisition of West Florida became a sort of obsession with Jefferson. His pursuit of this phantom claim involved American diplomats in strange adventures and at times deflected the whole course of domestic politics.

The first luckless minister to engage in this baffling quest was James Monroe, who had just been appointed Minister to the Court of St. James. He was instructed to take up the threads of diplomacy at Madrid where they were getting badly tangled in the hands of Charles Pinckney, who was a better politician than a diplomat. "Your inquiries may also be directed," wrote Madison, "to the question whether any, and how much, of what passes for West Florida be fairly included in the territory ceded to us by France." Before leaving Paris on this mission, Monroe made an effort to secure the good offices of the Emperor, but he found Talleyrand cold and cynical as ever. He was given to understand that it was all a question of money; if the United States were willing to pay the price, the Emperor could doubtless have the negotiations transferred to Paris and put the deal through. A loan of seventy million livres to Spain, which would be passed over at once to France, would probably put the United States into possession of the coveted territory. As an honest man Monroe shrank from this sort of jobbery; besides, he could hardly offer to buy a territory which his Government asserted it had already bought with Louisiana. With the knowledge that he was defying Napoleon, or at least his ministers, he started for Madrid to play a lone hand in what he must have known was a desperate game.

The conduct of the Administration during the next few months was hardly calculated to smooth Monroe's path. In the following February (1804) President Jefferson put his signature to an act which was designed to give effect to the laws of the United States in the newly acquired territory. The fourth section of this so-called Mobile Act included explicitly within the revenue district of Mississippi all the navigable waters lying within the United States and emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi—an extraordinary provision indeed, since unless the Floridas were a part of the United States there were no rivers within the limits of the United States emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi. The eleventh section was even more remarkable since it gave the President authority to erect Mobile Bay and River into a separate revenue district and to designate a port of entry.

This cool appropriation of Spanish territory was too much for the excitable Spanish Minister, Don Carlos Martinez Yrujo, who burst into Madison's office one morning with a copy of the act in his hand and with angry protests on his lips. He had been on excellent terms with Madison and had enjoyed Jefferson's friendship and hospitality at Monticello; but he was the accredited representative of His Catholic Majesty and bound to defend his sovereignty. He fairly overwhelmed the timid Madison with reproaches that could never be forgiven or forgotten; and from this moment he was persona non grata in the Department of State.

Madison doubtless took Yrujo's reproaches more to heart just because he felt himself in a false position. The Administration had allowed the transfer of Louisiana to be made in the full knowledge that Laussat had been instructed to claim Louisiana as far as the Rio Bravo on the west but only as far as the Iberville on the east. Laussat had finally admitted as much confidentially to the American commissioners. Yet the Administration had not protested. And now it was acting on the assumption that it might dispose of the Gulf littoral, the West Florida coast, as it pleased. Madison was bound to admit in his heart of hearts that Yrujo had reason to be angry. A few weeks later the President relieved the tense situation, though at the price of an obvious evasion, by issuing a proclamation which declared all the shores and waters "lying Within the Boundaries of The United States" * to be a revenue district with Fort Stoddert as the port of entry. But the mischief had been done and no constructive interpretation of the act by the President could efface the impression first made upon the mind of Yrujo. Congress had meant to appropriate West Florida and the President had suffered the bill to become law.

* The italics are President Jefferson's.

Nor was Pinckney's conduct at Madrid likely to make Monroe's mission easier. Two years before, in 1802, he had negotiated a convention by which Spain agreed to pay indemnity for depredations committed by her cruisers in the late war between France and the United States. This convention had been ratified somewhat tardily by the Senate and now waited on the pleasure of the Spanish Government. Pinckney was instructed to press for the ratification by Spain, which was taken for granted; but he was explicitly warned to leave the matter of the Florida claims to Monroe. When he presented the demands of his Government to Cevallos, the Foreign Minister, he was met in turn with a demand for explanations. What, pray, did his Government mean by this act? To Pinckney's astonishment, he was confronted with a copy of the Mobile Act, which Yrujo had forwarded. The South Carolinian replied, in a tone that was not calculated to soothe ruffled feelings, that he had already been advised that West Florida was included in the Louisiana purchase and had so reported to Cevallos. He urged that the two subjects be kept separate and begged His Excellency to have confidence in the honor and justice of the United States. Delays followed until Cevallos finally, declared sharply that the treaty would be ratified only on several conditions, one of which was that the Mobile Act should be revoked. Pinckney then threw discretion to the winds and announced that he would ask for his passports; but his bluster did not change Spanish policy, and he dared not carry out his threat.

It was under these circumstances that Monroe arrived in Madrid on his difficult mission. He was charged with the delicate task of persuading a Government whose pride had been touched to the quick to ratify the claims convention, to agree to a commission to adjudicate other claims which it had refused to recognize, to yield West Florida as a part of the Louisiana purchase, and to accept two million dollars for the rest of Florida east of the Perdido River. In preparing these extraordinary instructions, the Secretary of State labored under the hallucination that Spain, on the verge of war with England, would pay handsomely for the friendship of the United States, quite forgetting that the real master of Spain was at Paris.