Then Turreau, for the information of Talleyrand, drew a portrait of the military commander of Upper Louisiana, who had his headquarters at St. Louis, and whose influence on future events was to be watched.
“General Wilkinson is forty-eight years of age. He has an amiable exterior. Though said to be well-informed in civil and political matters, his military capacity is small. Ambitious and easily dazzled, fond of show and appearances, he complains rather indiscreetly, and especially after dinner, of the form of his government, which leaves officers few chances of fortune, advancement, and glory, and which does not pay its military chiefs enough to support a proper style. He listened with pleasure, or rather with enthusiasm, to the details which I gave him in regard to the organization, the dress, and the force of the French army. My uniform, the order with which I am decorated, are objects of envy to him; and he seems to hold to the American service only because he can do no better. General Wilkinson is the most intimate friend, or rather the most devoted creature, of Colonel Burr.”
Talleyrand had become acquainted with Burr in the United States, and needed no warnings against him; but Turreau showed himself well-informed:
“Mr. Burr’s career is generally looked upon as finished; but he is far from sharing that opinion, and I believe he would rather sacrifice the interests of his country than renounce celebrity and fortune. Although Louisiana is still only a Territory, it has obtained the right of sending a delegate to Congress. Louisiana is therefore to become the theatre of Mr. Burr’s new intrigues; he is going there under the ægis of General Wilkinson.”
Perhaps Turreau received this information from Derbigny, which might account for his estimate of the young man. Certainly Derbigny knew all that Turreau reported, for in an affidavit[303] two years afterward he admitted his knowledge.
“In the winter of 1804–1805,” Derbigny made oath, “being then at Washington City in the capacity of a deputy from the inhabitants of Louisiana to Congress, jointly with Messrs. Destréhan and Sauvé, he was introduced to Colonel Burr, then Vice-president of the United States, by General Wilkinson, who strongly recommended to this deponent, and as he believes to his colleagues, to cultivate the acquaintance of Colonel Burr,—whom he used to call ‘the first gentleman in America,’ telling them that he was a man of the most eminent talents both as a politician and as a military character; and ... General Wilkinson told him several times that Colonel Burr, so soon as his Vice-presidency would be at an end, would go to Louisiana, where he had certain projects, adding that he was such a man as to succeed in anything he would undertake, and inviting this deponent to give him all the information in his power respecting that country; which mysterious hints appeared to this deponent very extraordinary, though he could not then understand them.”
What Derbigny in 1807 professed not to have understood, seemed in 1804 clear to Turreau and Merry as well as to others. Turreau closed his catalogue by the significant remark: “I am not the only person who thinks that the assemblage of such men in a country already discontented is enough to give rise to serious troubles there.” The treasonable plans of Burr and Wilkinson were a matter of common notoriety, and roused anxious comment even in the mind of John Randolph, who was nursing at home the mortification of Judge Chase’s acquittal.[304] Randolph complained of “the easy credulity of Mr. Jefferson’s temper,” which made the President a fit material for intriguers to work upon. Certainly at the close of his first administration Jefferson seemed surrounded by enemies. The New England Federalists, the Louisiana creoles, Burr and his crew of adventurers in every part of the Union, joined hands with the ministers of England and Spain to make a hostile circle round the President; while the minister of France looked on without a wish to save the government whose friendship Bonaparte had sought to obtain at the cost of the most valuable province and the most splendid traditions of the French people.
CHAPTER XVIII.
After aiding to negotiate the Louisiana treaty at Paris, in April and May, 1803, Monroe, as the story has already told, being forbidden by Bonaparte to pursue his journey to Madrid, followed his alternative instructions, to take the post which Rufus King was vacating in London. King left England in the middle of May, 1803; Monroe arrived in London July 18, when the war between England and France was already two months old.
The mild Addington ministry was still in power, and nothing had yet happened to excite Monroe’s alarm in regard to British policy in the United States. On the contrary, the ministry aided the Louisiana purchase with readiness that might reasonably have surprised an American minister, while the friendliest spirit was shown by Lord Hawkesbury in all matters of detail. Except the standing dispute about impressments, every old point of collision had been successfully removed by King, whose two conventions,—the one for discharging British debts recognized by treaty, the other for settling the boundaries of New England and of the northwest territory,—seemed to free the countries for the first time from the annoying inheritance of disputes entailed by the definitive treaty which closed the Revolutionary War in 1783. The calm which seemed to prevail throughout England in regard to her relations with America contrasted sharply with the excitement shown by the English people in all their allusions to the Corsican demon, as they thought him, whose regiments, gathering at Boulogne, they might expect to see at any moment encamped at Hastings, where no hostile camp-fire had burned since the night, seven hundred years before, when the body of an English king, hedged about with the dead bodies of a whole English aristocracy, lay stiff and stark on the bloody hillside, victims of another French adventurer. England was intent on her own imminent dangers; and under the strain which the renewal of her painful efforts brought with it, she was glad to leave America alone.