Jefferson received his visitor with the usual hospitality, and said not a word on the subject. Being obliged to return to Washington, the President left Yrujo, two days later, under the protection of his daughter Mrs. Randolph, and set out to meet his Cabinet on the last day of the month at the Federal city. Madison was delayed at Montpelier, and could not attend the Cabinet meeting, but wrote a few days afterward:[175]—
“Jackson, I find, has lost no time in giving publicity to the affair between him and Yrujo. What course the latter will take, remains to be seen. Should circumstances of any kind be thought to urge a close of the business with him, or any other arrangement with respect to it, why might not one of the other secretaries, or even Mr. Wagner, be made a channel of your sentiments and determinations?... Should the door be shut against further communication [through] Yrujo, and Pinckney’s situation at Madrid not be contradicted, a direct communication with Cevallos appears to be the next resource.”
Already Madison flattered himself with the hope that he was to be relieved from relations with the Spaniard, whose continuance at Washington he had asked as a favor from Don Carlos IV. only three years before.
Jefferson’s delicacy and hospitality were worthy of a great lord of Spain, and did honor to his innate kindliness; but they put Yrujo in an attitude so mortifying, that when he returned to Washington and learned what had taken place in his absence, he was overcome with shame at finding himself charged with calumniating his host at the moment of claiming his hospitality. He immediately prepared a counter-statement and took it to the President, who replied that the matter was one which should properly belong to Madison. Yrujo then printed his letter in the “National Intelligencer,” where Madison first saw it. For the moment the matter went no further; but Madison was fixed in his purpose of effecting Yrujo’s recall, and when in the following spring he instructed his minister at Madrid to ask this favor, he alleged the affair of Jackson among the reasons which justified his request.
Pichon, who was in charge of the French legation, cordially disliked Yrujo, and did nothing to help him against Madison, although the relations between Spain and France were those of close alliance; but Madison next suffered a severe loss in the removal of Pichon, and in the arrival, Nov. 23, 1804, of the first minister sent by France to the United States since the departure of Adet in President Washington’s time. The new appointment was not a happy one. Pichon had carried friendliness so far as on several serious questions to take sides with the United States government against his own, and had fallen into disfavor with Napoleon in consequence. The new minister was little likely to repeat this blunder. Napoleon liked military discipline in all things; and he sent as his minister to Washington a former general of the Republic, Louis Marie Turreau, best known for the extreme severities he was charged with having inflicted on the Vendeans in 1794. Like most of the republican generals, including even Moreau and Bernadotte, Turreau accepted the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire, and was for private reasons anxious to obtain some position far removed from France. According to his own story, he had during the Vendean war been so unfortunate as to be saved from death, in a moment of extreme danger, by a woman’s self-sacrifice. In token of his gratitude he married his preserver; but from that time his life became a long regret. His wife’s temper was terrible; his own was querulous and morbidly depressed. Although he could speak no English, had no diplomatic experience and little taste for general society, he sought the post of minister resident at Washington in order to escape his wife. To his extreme annoyance, she followed him to America; and Washington resounded with the scandal of their quarrels, which reached the extremity of pitched battles. He wrote to his friends in the French Foreign Office that he was almost mad with mortification and despair.
Such a minister was not happily chosen for the difficult task on hand; but Bonaparte loaded him with other burdens, of a kind even more embarrassing to a diplomatist. At best, the position of a French minister in America was not agreeable. The mere difference in habits, manners, amusements, and the want of a thousand luxuries and pleasures such as made Paris dear to every Frenchman, rendered Washington a place of exile. Perhaps nothing but fear of the guillotine could have reconciled even republican Frenchmen to staying in a country where, in the words of Talleyrand, there was no Frenchman who did not feel himself a stranger; but if this were true while France was a republic fighting the battles of American democracy, it became doubly true after Bonaparte had crushed French liberties and made himself the foremost enemy of republican ideas. Turreau arrived at Washington about six months before Bonaparte took the title of Emperor; and he found that as representative of Napoleon I. he could never hope for a friend in the United States, unless it were among a few bankrupt adventurers, who to retrieve their broken fortunes would have liked to see an 18th Brumaire at New Orleans, which should give an imperial crown and the mines of Mexico to Aaron Burr and his troop of embryo dukes and marshals.
As though to embarrass his representative to the utmost, Bonaparte deprived him of the only means by which he could win even the venal respect of a money-making people. At one stroke the First Consul had annulled and sent to protest all the drafts drawn under Rochambeau’s orders by the fiscal administrator of St. Domingo.[176] His avowed reason was that every bill of exchange or draft on the public treasury which did not purport to rest on the authority of a letter from the minister authorizing the expenditure, should not be paid. The true reason was that he had determined to waste no more money on St. Domingo, but to sacrifice his army there under cover of a war with England, which required all the means then at his disposal. Rochambeau’s expenditures were becoming wild; but thus far his drafts on the Treasury were regularly drawn. They had been taken in good faith throughout the West Indies and in every commercial city on the American seaboard; they rested on the national credit of France, and their repudiation destroyed French credit in America, public and private. Before Turreau sailed for his post, the credit of his Government was at an end in the United States. Not only had the drafts drawn in St. Domingo been refused payment, but Pichon’s had also suffered the same fate; and neither the new minister nor his consuls could find a man in Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York to advance money on their official signatures. Turreau complained bitterly to Talleyrand of the penury and mortification to which he was condemned. In one of his despatches[177] he reported that at a tavern in Baltimore one of the French agents, not known to be such, was offered French government paper at fifty per cent discount, and at the same time five per cent premium for drafts on the British government. “In short, we are brought to such a state of affairs that private discredit follows the discredit of the nation, and I experience it for my own individual drafts.”
Owing to these circumstances, Turreau declared that his position was hardly tolerable; but even apart from such matters, he found a formidable legacy of diplomatic difficulties left by Pichon to be settled. The question of trade with St. Domingo, of boundary on both sides of Louisiana, the Spanish imbroglio, the unpaid claims on France, and the repudiated drafts negotiated by Pichon in the United States, were all matters which Turreau was required to master and manage; but none of them gave him more trouble than the personal quarrel between his colleague Yrujo and the Secretary of State.
Yrujo’s affair with Major Jackson occurred in September, 1804, and Turreau, reaching Washington in the following November, was soon obliged to take part in Yrujo’s feuds. Not only the tone of his instructions, but the increasing certainty that Spain must side with France in the war against England, obliged him to make common cause with the Spanish minister, who came from Philadelphia to Washington in order to invoke his services. The result was told in a despatch to Talleyrand:[178]—
“Following your instructions and the request of M. d’Yrujo, I consented to an interview with him at Mr. Madison’s.... I had no trouble in perceiving from the outset of the conversation that Mr. Madison and M. d’Yrujo cordially detested each other, and in the discussion that their passions took the place of reason and law.”