CHAPTER XXI
Napoleon and the United States
A Decisive Epoch — Britain Dominates the Sea — Napoleon's Policy — Trade and Western Empire — To the West Indies — Needs of the Empire — Great Britain's Sea Rival — The Imperial Policy Revealed — Tempestuous Times in the United States — Party Government — Livingston's Efforts — Louisiana Purchased — Effect on American Life — Change in Constitutional Attitude — The Kaleidoscope of Party Politics — Preponderance of the South and West — The Louisiana Purchase and the Nation.
A decisive epoch was that of the eighteenth-century revolutions, a crisis reached after long, slow preparation, precipitated by social and religious bigotry, dizzy in its consummation, wild and headlong in its flight, precipitous in its crash. Of this important time the results have been so permanent that they are the commonplaces of contemporary history; in what Carlyle called the revolutionary loom the warp and woof were spun from the past, and the fabric is that from which our working-clothes are cut. Within those years appeared the great dominating soul of modern humanity, who displayed first and last every weakness and every sordid meanness of mankind, but in such giant dimensions that even his depravity inspires awe. His virtues were equally portentous because they worked on the grand scale, with materials that had been threshed and winnowed in the theory and experience of five generations of mankind. It was well within this stupendous age and by the act of this representative man that Louisiana was redeemed from Spanish misrule and incorporated with the territories of the United States. Nor was this all. A careful examination of the general political situation at that time will exhibit the elemental and almost ultimate fact that the sale of Louisiana was coincident with the turn of the age.
The substance of the treaty of Amiens was that Great Britain ostensibly abandoned all concern with the continent of Europe, and that France, ostensibly too, should strictly mind her own affairs in her colonies and the remoter quarters of the globe. George III removed from his escutcheon the fleur-de-lis, and from his ceremonial title the style of king of France. Events narrated in another connection proved the whole negotiation to have been on both sides purely diplomatic, an exchange of public and hollow courtesies in order to gain time for the realities in the struggle for supremacy between the world powers of the period, a struggle begun with modern history, renewed in 1688, and destined to last until the exhaustion of one of the contestants in 1815. Neither party to the treaty had the slightest intention of observing either its spirit or its letter. While the paper was in process of negotiation Bonaparte was consolidating French empire on the Continent, and after its signature he did not pause for a single instant to show even a formal respect for his obligations. The reorganization of Holland in preparation for its incorporation into the French system, the annexation of Piedmont and the defiance to Russia in the matter of her Italian protégés, the Act of Moderation in Switzerland, and finally, the contemptuous rearrangement of Germany, were successive steps which reduced England to despair for her continental trade. To her it seemed as if there could be no question about two things: first, that the old order must be restored, in order to safeguard her commerce; and second, that her colonial policy must be more aggressive than ever.
It was Samuel Adams who first sneered at his fatherland as a people of shopkeepers. The winged word soon became a commonplace to all outsiders, but as it flew every nation that used the gibe girded itself to enter the struggle for the same goal. France above all was determined to be a nation of shopkeepers, and the First Consul of what was still a shaky experiment in government knew well that rather than abandon that ambition, he must sacrifice every other. After all, a colonial empire has value only as the home nation has accessible ports, manufactories for colonial products, and wares to exchange with the producers. France had neither factories nor manufactures, and was destitute of nearly the whole machinery of exchange. Her merchant vessels sailed only by grace of the British fleet. Her home market was dependent on British traders even in times of war. Bonaparte's foremost thought, therefore, was for concentration of energy. The sea-power of the world was Britain's, and her tyranny of the seas without a real check; even the United States could only spit out defiant and revengeful threats when her merchantmen were treated with contempt on the high seas by British men-of-war. Therefore with swift and comprehensive grasp he framed and announced a new policy. The French envoy in London was informed that France was now forced to the conquest of Europe—this of course for the stimulating of French industries—and to the restoration of her Occidental empire. This was most adroit. The embers of French patriotism could be fanned into a white heat by these well-worn but never exhausted expedients—a blast against perfidious Albion and a sentimental passion for the New France beyond the Atlantic. The motions were a feint against England by the formation of a second camp at Boulogne, where a force really destined for Austria was assembled, and the wresting of Louisiana from the weak Spanish hands which held it. As an incident of the agitation it seemed best that the French democracy should have an imperial rather than a republican title, and the style of emperor and empire was exhumed from the garbage heap of the Terror for use in the pageantry of a court.
In Europe thus, as in the neighboring continents, the rearrangement of politics, territorial boundaries, social, economic, and diplomatic relations, a change which has made possible the modern system, was really dependent on the events which led to the adoption of the policy just described. But this policy involved a reversal of every sound historical principle in Bonaparte's plans. For twelve years longer he was to commit blunder upon blunder; to trample on national pride; to elevate a false system of political economy into a fetish; to conduct, as in the Moscow campaign, great migrations to the eastward in defiance of nature's laws; to launch his plain, not to say vulgar and weak, family on an enterprise of monarchical alliances for which they had no capacity; to undo, in short, as far as in him lay, every beneficent and well-conceived piece of statesmanship with which he had so far been concerned. It has been well said that had he died in midsummer, 1802, his glory would have been immaculate and there would have been no spots on his sun. The Napoleonic work in Europe was destined to have its far-reaching and permanent results, but the man was ere long almost entirely eliminated from control over them. The very last of his great constructions was the sale of Louisiana. He needed the purchase-money, he selected his purchaser and forced it on him, with a view to upbuilding a giant rival to the gigantic power of Great Britain.
When we turn therefore to America, we shall at once observe on how slender a thread a great event may depend, how great a fire may be kindled by a spark adroitly placed. While yet other matters were hanging in the balance, he selected his own brother-in-law, General Leclerc, such was his deep concern, to conduct an expedition to the West Indies. There were embarked 35,000 men, and these the very flower of the republican armies, superb fighters, but a possible thorn in the side of a budding emperor at home. Their goal was San Domingo, where a wonderful negro, Toussaint Louverture, noting the attractive example of the benevolent despots in Europe, had, under republican forms, not only abolished slavery, but had made himself a beneficent dictator. The fine but delicate structure of his negro state was easily crushed to the earth, but the fighting was fierce and prolonged, the climate and the pest were enabled to inaugurate and complete a work of slaughter more baleful than that of war, and two-thirds of the French invaders, including the commander and fifteen of his generals, fell victims to the yellow fever. The French were utterly routed, the sorry remnant sailed away, and the blacks fell into the hands of the worthless tyrant Dessalines, whose misrule killed the germs of order planted by Toussaint. One of our historians thinks this check of France by black soldiers to have been a determinative factor in American history, for thereafter there could be no question of a Gulf and Caribbean empire for France. Louisiana, he indicates, became at once a superfluous dependency, costly and annoying. This is a far-fetched contention: great as have been the services of the negro to the United States since he first fought on the battle-field of Monmouth under Washington, the failure of France in San Domingo was not through the sword of the blacks, but was an act of God through pestilence.
The circumstances that forced Louisiana upon the United States, then a petty power with revenues and expenditures less than those of many among the single states which now compose the federation, arose from Napoleon's European necessities. The cession from Spain included all that Spain had received from France, the whole Gulf coast from St. Mary's to the Rio Grande, and the French pretensions not only northwestward to the Rockies but even to the Pacific. The return made to Spain was the insignificant kingdom of Etruria and a solemn pledge that, should the First Consul fail in his promise, Louisiana in its fullest extent was to be restored to Spain. France therefore might not otherwise alienate it to any power whatever. The exacting and suspicious spirit shown both by Charles IV and his contemptible minister Godoy, Prince of the Peace, had exasperated Bonaparte beyond endurance. The Spanish Bourbons were doomed by him to the fate of their kinsfolk in France; a pledge to a vanishing phantom of royalty was of small account. It was during the delay created by the punctilio of Godoy that the failure of the San Domingo expedition extinguished all hope of making Louisiana the sole entrepôt and staple of supplies for the West Indies. And simultaneously it grew evident that the truce negotiated at Amiens as a treaty could not last much longer, that either France must endure the humiliation of seeing her profits therefrom utterly withheld, or herself declare war, or goad Great Britain into a renewal of hostilities. This last, as is well known, was the alternative chosen by Napoleon.
Our government had been in despair. The establishment of French empire in the West Indies would have destroyed our lucrative trade with the islands. It was trying enough that a feeble power like Spain should command the outlet of the Mississippi basin, but intolerable that such a mastery of the continent should fall into the hands of a strong and magisterial power like France. We were in dismay, even after the departure of the French from San Domingo. Bonaparte, however, was scarcely less disturbed; for Jefferson, despite his avowed Gallicism, spiritedly declared both to the First Consul and to Livingston, our minister to Paris, that the occupation of Louisiana by the great French force organized to that end could only result in an alliance of the two English-speaking nations which would utterly banish the French flag from the high seas. Bonaparte preserved an outward calm for those about him and went his way apparently unperturbed. But inwardly his mind seethed, and without long delay he took his choice between the courses open to him. It was the first exhibition to himself and his family of the imperial despot soon to be known as Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. If Britain was the tyrant of the seas, he would be despot of the land. To French empire he would reduce Germany, Italy, and Spain in subjection, and with all the maritime resources of the Continent at his back he would first shut every important port to English commerce, and then with allied and dependent fleets at his disposal try conclusions with the British Behemoth for liberty of the seas and a new colonial empire. By the second camp at Boulogne and the occupation of Hanover, Napoleon threw England into panic, while simultaneously he began the creation of his grand imperial army and thereby menaced Austria, the greatest German power, in her coalition with Russia, Sweden, Naples, and Great Britain. The latter, he was well aware, could face a hostile demonstration on her front with courage, if not with equanimity; and he determined to add a double stroke—to gain a harvest of gold and on her rear to strengthen her exasperated transatlantic sea rival by selling Louisiana to the United States.