1801 - Napoleon's Grand Design
When First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte won the retrocession of the Louisiana Territory in 1801, he had every intention of reestablishing the French North American empire that had been destroyed decades earlier. The crown jewel of Napoleon's Grand Design for the Americas was Mexico. Napoleon's grand design was to obtain once more the ancient colonial domains of France was to re-establish French influence on the American continent, and make a Latin counterpoise against Anglo-Saxon ambition in the New World.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris divided Louisiana into a British zone to the east of the Mississippi River and a Spanish zone west of the river, but it did not eliminate French influence in the region. Because France and Spain were allied under the same Bourbon dynasty, Spanish authorities did not challenge French interests in Louisiana. Despite some initial resistance to Spanish rule by local Creoles in 1768, Spanish policy toward Louisiana’s French inhabitants was largely tolerant and French communities continued to grow and flourish.
With the founding of the United States, it was inevitable that Americans, like the British and French before them, would seek to inhabit and control Louisiana. By the 1790s settlers from the east were teeming across the Appalachians into the Cumberland Valley and the Northwest Territory, which was established in 1787 and was bounded on the south by the Ohio River and on the west by the Mississippi. American merchants were eager to extend their trade networks to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi. In 1795 American and Spanish diplomats negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo, by which Spain recognized U.S. sovereignty over territory east of the Mississippi, agreed to open the Mississippi to American traffic, and granted U.S. merchants the right to warehouse goods at New Orleans.
Tender associations still clustered about Louisiana, whose very name preserved the recollection of French colonial sovereignty, – certainly, a wilderness still, for the most part, but which yet presented clear rallying-points for Gallic domination in those two symbolical centres of population, New Orleans and St. Louis. The sons of France still marched to glory; and glory's constant environ is illusion. Hence the various attempts, in the days of the French republic, and before the strains of the Marseillaise had become a mockery, to recover from Spain that vast domain at the heart of North America which France in the day of calamity had consigned to her.
The French were never fully reconciled to the loss of Louisiana, however, and were determined that, at a minimum, Spanish Louisiana not fall into the hands of the British. As early as 1796 the French authorities sent a secret expedition to map the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, in preparation for the possible retrocession of Louisiana to France. In 1800 First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) regained control of Spanish Louisiana, including New Orleans, through a secret agreement with Spain, known as the Treaty of San Ildefonso.
The Treaty of San Ildefonso was only part of Napoleon’s plan for a revived French-American empire, to be based on the export of such slave-produced commodities as sugar, coffee, and cotton. Consisting of the Floridas, French Guiana (on the northern coast of South America), the West Indian islands, and Louisiana (with the latter providing foodstuffs and lumber for the Caribbean plantations), this new empire would challenge Britain’s growing dominance in international trade.
Napoleon III, attempted to inaugurate in later times under cover of the Maximilian invasion, the first projector found himself very quickly compelled to postpone to the more immediate and pressing scheme of reconstructing the kingdoms of Europe. Louisiana was, in 1802, to have been colonized by a band of Frenchmen under military auspices upon the reduction of St. Domingo and Guadaloupe by Le Clerc.
Napoleon’s “Western Design,” as he called this plan, hinged, however on the restoration of France’s authority in its most prized colony, Saint-Domingue (Haiti). In 1802 Napoleon took advantage of a truce in the war with Britain to obtain permission from both Britain and the United States to mount a military expedition to bring Haiti back under French control. The expedition, which eventually totaled more than 60,000 troops, ultimately was defeated by the guerilla tactics of the Haitians and the yellow fever that raged through the French ranks. Napoleon abandoned his efforts to subdue the former colony and on January 1, 1804, the independent Republic of Haiti was born.
Napoleon’s decision to sell Louisiana to the Americans was a direct result of the French disaster in Saint-Domingue. A flourishing population on the west bank of the Mississippi, alien to the American republic, would be sure to antagonize its rising interests. Under decaying Spain the Americans could afford to bide our time; but France, ardent, aggressive, energetic, with a strong ruler who meditated universal empire, must find her hostile enterprise nipped before it could blossom. And thus did Jefferson reason. "The possessor of the mouth of the Mississippi", he wrote Livingston, "would of necessity become the natural and habitual enemy of the United States.”
In March 1803 Napoleon received reports of the deteriorating situation on the island. By April it became clear that war between France and Britain would quickly resume and thus prevent Napoleon from sending reinforcements to the Caribbean. By the time that James Monroe (1758-1831) arrived in France on April 12 to support the diplomatic efforts of Robert R. Livingston (1746-1813), Napoleon had already determined to sell all of Louisiana. On May 2, 1803, negotiations over the sale of Louisiana to the United States were completed and the entire territory that France had received from Spain in 1800 passed to American hands.
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