Episode 5.5 The Continent Beckons Once More

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.

Episode 5.5 The Continent Beckons Once More

We left off last week in the latter part of 1800. Elizabeth and James had just lost their second-born child, and only son, to whooping cough in September.

In December, James delivered a “state of the state” address to the Virginia legislature. The idea was obviously modeled on the state of the union that the president sent to Congress each December, but this was the first time a governor of Virginia had done such a thing. He had already been re-elected as governor earlier in the month, so he also used the address to lay out his goals for the next year. 

Meanwhile, as we learned in seasons 2 and 3, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for first place with 73 electoral college votes apiece in the 1800 election. When Congress convened in early 1801 to read out the electoral count vote and then start voting in the House of Representatives to choose a president, it took 36 votes before Jefferson finally prevailed on February 17.

Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, and as we learned in season 4, he named James Madison as Secretary of State. It’s not 100% clear why Jefferson didn’t offer Monroe a cabinet position. Maybe he thought James was too busy as Virginia governor (but as we’ll see later, that won’t stop him from joining the Madison Administration). Maybe he thought James was still grieving the loss of baby James and it was better for him to remain in Virginia. Who knows. But Monroe and Jefferson stayed in close contact by letter throughout Jefferson’s presidency.

Elizabeth and Eliza did not join James in Richmond for the majority of his second term as governor. By now, they were calling their Charlottesville property Highland, and they remained there, with James joining them for visits when he could. By the summer of 1801, they knew that Elizabeth was pregnant again. The short span of time between her pregnancy with baby James and this new pregnancy seems to indicate that she must have had pregnancies in between Eliza’s birth and baby James, we just don’t know about them because they did not result in children.

James was reelected to a third and final term as governor in December 1801, and then Elizabeth gave birth to another daughter in April 1802. They named her Maria Hester (but Maria was spelled like Maria, as usual). In October 1802, James’s sister Elizabeth, the one who had taken over managing the household after both their parents died, also died, leaving behind a useless husband and several children.

And now we’re going to cover something that we talked about last season, but we probably won’t cover it in quite as much detail, since we did that last season. The Louisiana Purchase. If you haven’t listened to season 4, you should go back and do that. It’s a long one, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. 

As you probably remember from last week, when James was recalled as minister to France, he was replaced by Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. When Jefferson was elected in 1801, he wanted to replace Pinckney with a Republican, and he chose Robert Livingston in October 1801. Livingston arrived in France in 1802.

In January 1803, just after finishing his third term as Virginia governor, James was preparing to go back into private law practice and was also planning a trip to his remaining Kentucky lands to survey them in advance of a sale. But he never got a chance to do either, because he received an urgent note from Jefferson on January 10. Jefferson wrote, 

“We have great reason to fear that Spain is to cede Louisiana and the Floridas to France. I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which the western mind is thrown…threatens to overbear our peace. In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs. I shall tomorrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France, and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline; because the whole public hope will be rested on you.”

Thomas Jefferson, master of overreacting.

Little did he know that Spain had already returned the Louisiana Territory to France, via a secret treaty in 1800. We discussed this, and the history of Louisiana’s back-and-forth volley between France and Spain, last season.

There can be no doubt that James Monroe literally could not afford to return to France. He still hadn’t been paid for expenses incurred in his official capacity during his last sojourn as minister. But there was also no doubt that he would accept the appointment if he was approved. There was a bitter fight in the Senate over his nomination, but in the end he was approved 15 to 12 on a straight party vote.

James and Elizabeth packed up their children and took a coach to Washington, where Elizabeth dropped off James and then continued on to New York with her daughters. James spent several weeks in Washington conferring with Jefferson and Madison. Securing American rights to navigation on the Mississippi had been James’s overarching wish for more than two decades, and now he finally had a chance to make it happen.

Jefferson also named James as minister to Spain, with the mission of purchasing the Floridas from Spain if he was successful in getting New Orleans from the French. Sources are conflicted as to how much Monroe was authorized to spend on New Orleans and the Floridas. Some say $5.6 million, some say $9 million. Either way, as we know, he ended up spending a lot more, but also getting a lot more.

Despite the fact that Maria was not yet a year old and Elizabeth had developed rheumatism, there was apparently no question of them staying behind. Elizabeth and James were devoted to each other, and could not bear to be parted for some indeterminate amount of time. So despite the risks of a March Atlantic crossing, they decided to go as a family.

Before they left the country again, the Monroes sold most of their household goods to the Madisons, needing to raise money to pay off some debts. James promised Elizabeth they could purchase new furnishings once they arrived in Paris. If this sounds like insanely bad fiscal management to you, I agree!

The Monroe family booked passage on a ship called Richmond, departing from New York and headed for Hamburg, but James was able to convince the captain to drop them off at Le Havre along the way. They departed on March 6, but a fierce blizzard forced them back into port. A few days later, they finally departed New York Harbor under clear skies.

They once again had a fairly easy crossing—no winter storms and no attack by ships of any country. There was more sea sickness on this voyage than on the first one. Elizabeth and 16-year-old Eliza were confined below decks for most of the voyage due to sickness. It was pouring rain when they arrived in Le Havre on April 8, so a smaller vessel with protection from the elements was dispatched to bring them from the Richmond to the shore. A welcoming salute was fired from the nearby fort, and a 50-man guard escorted them to their quarters. There was no confiscation and rifling through luggage this time.

They spent a day in Le Havre before setting out for Paris by coach. They stopped in Saint-Germain to once again install Eliza at Madame Campan’s boarding school. Some of her friends from the 1790s were still there, but Hortense de Beauharnais was not among them. By now her mother Josephine was married to Napoleon, who was First Consul of France. Hortense was about to marry Napoleon’s younger brother Louis Bonaparte. So Louis went from being Hortense’s step-uncle to being her husband, and Louis was both Josephine’s brother-in-law and her son-in-law. It’s just too creepy.

When the Monroes arrived in Paris, they were greeted not by Robert Livingston but by Fulwar Skipwith. You may recall that Skipwith served as James’s temporary secretary during his first stint in Paris, and he had also been the host of the infamous Fourth of July party where the Americans came to blows over whether or not to toast President Washington.

Skipwith had remained in France the entire time, and prepared James for a frosty reception from Livingston, who felt undermined by James’s appointment. Skipwith said that Livingston was “mortified…and pressing the gov’t on every point to shew [sic] he had accomplished what was wished without [Monroe’s] aid.”

In fact, Livingston had been endlessly frustrated with the non-answers and non-committal responses he had been getting from Foreign Minister Talleyrand and First Consul Bonaparte for more than a year. He complained to Secretary of State James Madison, “The Minister will give no answers to any inquiries I make. There never was a government in which less could be done by negotiation than here. There is no people, no legislature, no counselors. One man is everything. He seldom asks advice, and never hears it unasked. His ministers are mere clerks.” 

Napoleon had not yet declared himself Emperor, but he certainly did act like one.

Furthermore, Napoleon did not entirely trust his foreign minister (which was wise, because Talleyrand was about as slippery and devious as they come). He had entrusted dealings over New Orleans and Louisiana to his finance minister, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois. Just as James was arriving into Paris, Napoleon was telling Barbé-Marbois that he renounced Louisiana and wanted to sell it in its entirety to the Americans.

I could probably spend the rest of today’s episode detailing the petty squabbles between Livingston and Monroe over who would get credit for the purchase of this huge tract of land, the behind-the-scenes machinations of Talleyrand, and the weeks of negotiating over the purchase terms, but I don’t think that’s the best use of our time. Ultimately, neither Livinsgton nor Monroe would have been able to pull this off if Napoleon hadn’t already decided that he wanted to sell. No one could talk Napoleon into doing anything he didn’t want to do. Monroe’s mission would have failed, were it not for things that had happened before he even arrived.

But in the end, they did negotiate the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory, doubling the size of the United States. The purchase did not include the Floridas, specifically, West Florida, which James was instructed to acquire. But technically the Floridas were not France’s to sell, and James was also appointed as minister to Spain, so he figured he could work out a deal for West Florida with them. Barbé-Marbois indicated that France would be willing to intercede with the Spanish on America’s behalf.

So the purchase treaty was signed, the details were sent off to Jefferson and Madison, Congress debated and then ratified the treaty, and the Louisiana Territory was now part of the United States.

It wasn’t all business in Paris. The Monroes were greeted back to France enthusiastically by the locals. La Belle Américaine was especially welcomed. The Monroes spent many evenings at the theater, the opera, or private parties. The orchestra at one performance even launched into a rendition of Yankee Doodle as the Monroes took their seats.

Elizabeth also spent her time shopping for new furniture and items for their Highland home back in Virginia. What was she using for money? Beats me. The Monroes were perpetually in financial straits. James’s farms never made as much money as he thought they would. He was constantly taking out loans either from banks or from friends. As I mentioned earlier, it made absolutely no sense for them to sell their existing furniture, which had already been paid for and shipped home, just to replace it with new items that would probably cost more, and would need to be shipped home all over again. Fiscal management was absolutely not one of James or Elizabeth’s strong suits.

The Monroes were happily reunited with the Lafayettes on this second trip to Paris. After facilitating Adrienne’s release from prison, James had also acquired passports for her and her daughters to leave the country. They originally intended to go to America, but only made it as far as Denmark. They also ended up living in the same Austrian prison as the Marquis for several years, just so they could be together. The entire Lafayette family was released from prison in September 1797, and they lived in exile in Hamburg, Germany for a while. By the time the Monroes returned to Paris, the Lafayettes had been fully repatriated by France. They were once again French citizens, and they had some of their lands restored to them. But they were quite broke, and heavily in debt.

When the Monroes and the Lafayettes were reunited, James was able to deliver the happy news that Congress had assigned tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio Territory to Lafayette as payment for his service during the American Revolution. The Lafayettes were able to use those lands as collateral for loans from English banks to repay all their debts. Granted, paying off debts with more debts is less than ideal, but if the bank ultimately seized their collateral, it made little difference to them, because land in America was not super useful to them.

Once the treaty for the purchase of Louisiana was complete, James was ready to travel to Madrid to begin negotiations with Spain for West Florida. But before he could set out, he received a letter from Madison in June that had been sent in April. The ambassador to Great Britain, Rufus King, had left the country without appointing a chargé d’affaires, meaning no one was present in that country to represent America. Madison informed Monroe that he was to leave immediately for London to replace King.

While Elizabeth made arrangements to ship all their new purchases to London, James made the diplomatic rounds to take leave of Paris. They took a coach from Paris to Calais, and then on July 17, 1803, boarded a ship to cross the English Channel. As Tim McGrath puts it in his book, James Monroe: A Life, “Twenty-seven years after one of George III’s mercenaries nearly killed him, James Monroe was about to meet his former king.”

And you won’t be surprised to hear that James’s main assignment in dealing with Britain was the issue of impressment. We talked at length about this last season, so I won’t belabor it again. Suffice it to say that American ships were constantly being accosted by British ships, and Americans were being dragged off those ships and impressed into service in the Royal Navy. America wanted it to stop. We know full well that it won’t. But let’s hear about James’s efforts anyway.

James was pleasantly surprised to be warmly welcomed to Britain. His report to Madison after meeting King George III said, 

“I informed his Majesty that I was instructed…to express in strong terms the desire of the President to maintain the best understanding between the two nations and his intention to cultivate it…His Majesty replied that nothing was more reasonable…that since our revolution he had taken an interest in our welfare and wished our prosperity: that the motives to a sincere and constant friendship were many and strong, such as having the same origin, speaking the same language, great commercial intercourse, etc.”

I believe the King gave the same song and dance to John Adams in 1783 when he was appointed as the first ever minister to Great Britain from the United States.

James also informed Madison, “I took the occasion to intimate, that some outrages had been committed by the impressment of our seamen, which I was persuaded the government would see the propriety of enquiring into, and would give such orders as would prevent the repetition of. Those gentlemen assured me that their government was disposed to do everything in its power to satisfy our just claims…I am assured…that orders have been issued for the admiralty in conformity with the sentiments which they thus expressed.”

Oh, James. And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

Upon arrival in London, the Monroes were greeted by Thomas Sumter, Jr., who had found a house for them to rent in the West End. He also obtained a carriage and some servants for them. The family was not excited to be in London. Eliza had not wanted to leave Madame Campan’s school, and Elizabeth found the damp, foggy London weather very disagreeable. They would have rather stayed in Paris.

Things did not improve for the Monroes once word of President Jefferson’s etiquette blunders made their way across the Atlantic. You’ll recall from last season that Dolley Madison did her best to keep Jefferson in line when it came to established protocols like escorting honored guests into dinner, but Jefferson refused. The kerfuffle caused when he left the British ambassador’s wife unattended into dinner extended all the way across the ocean.

When the Monroes invited British government officials to dinner, they declined. When Elizabeth paid social calls to various ladies, the calls were not returned. When the Monroes attended dinners, they were openly snubbed, and Elizabeth was pointedly unescorted into dinner as retribution for the snub of the ambassador’s wife in Washington. People whispered behind their backs, and even the Queen brushed past them without noticing them at a formal gala. It got to the point where they stopped extending invitations and mostly declined attending state functions. If James felt attendance was necessary to serving America’s interests, he would attend alone to spare Elizabeth the discomfort of being snubbed.

It didn’t help that at least one member of the Monroe family was sick at any given time, thanks to London’s awful air quality and weather. Harlow Giles Unger paints a grim picture in his book, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness:

“[T]he girls constantly succumbed to illnesses of one sort or another during London’s dark winter months, when the ever-present drizzle transformed factory fumes and chimney smoke into a thick, toxic, opaque muck that filled every alleyway, made breathing difficult, and left Londoners coughing, eyes tearing, and, in the case of children, pale, weak, often gasping for air, and in tears. Monroe had to hospitalize Maria Hester after one such attack.”

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Elizabeth was also suffering from attacks of what was then called rheumatism but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, an auto-immune disorder where the immune system mistakenly attacks the lining of the body’s joints. It causes pain, swelling, extreme fatigue, and fever. Elizabeth would suffer from this her entire adult life.

After spending more than a year in London, James had accomplished nothing. The British government continued to stonewall him on the impressment issue, and now that Britain was back at war with Napoleon and France, the issue had gotten even worse. James told Madison, “I now consider these concerns as postponed indefinitely.”

Since he was getting nowhere in London, James decided to go to Spain to see if he could make any headway with acquiring West Florida. He did not intend to leave his family in London to suffer through another winter though. They could no longer travel directly between England and France because of the war, so in October 1804, they boarded a ship bound for Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They traveled by coach through several towns in present-day Belgium before crossing into France. 

Eliza was once again dropped off at Madame Campan’s school. Maria Hester was still only about 2 ½ at this point, so she stayed with Elizabeth. Rather than renting accommodations, the family stayed as guests of the Skipwiths. 

By this point, the French (by which I mean Napoleon) had reneged on their earlier hints that they would assist the Americans in acquiring West Florida from Spain. James knew his chances of achieving his goal were slim, but in an effort to not alienate France further, he stayed in Paris long enough to attend Napoleon’s self-coronation as Emperor of the French on December 2, 1804. 

I say “self-coronation” because although technically Pope Pius VII was presiding, he droned on for so long that Napoleon became impatient and crowned his wife, Josephine, and then himself as soon as the Pope had anointed him.

James needn’t have bothered sticking around for the coronation. At first, he wasn’t even invited. And then when he mentioned to Barbé-Marbois that he had yet to receive an invitation, the Marquis made sure that two invitations were delivered for James and Elizabeth. But they were gallery seats. They didn’t even have real seats, they were just sitting on a bench. And they could hardly see anything, because their view was mostly obstructed. It was a telling sign of the amount of respect Napoleon had for America.

With the coronation out of the way, James headed to Spain. It took him a week to get to Bordeaux by coach, but that was the easy part. Crossing the Pyrenees into Spain hadn’t gotten any easier since John Adams did it way back in 1779. He hired a relay of mules and traveled with a servant and two armed soldiers dressed in plain clothes. He also carried a pair of pistols on his own person, just in case. 

I really should say he carried a “brace” of pistols, but that requires explaining what a brace of pistols means. I’ve seen this phrase a lot in the course of my research for this podcast, usually in the context of duelling pistols. I finally decided to look it up to see what that means. It turns out that a brace is a pair of identical pistols. Not just the same make and model, but twins of each other that fire exactly the same way. The point is that if one of them malfunctions on you, you have a backup pistol that will behave just like you’re used to. It also means you can poach parts from one to fix the other, if necessary. It’s just another one of those arcane expressions that has no meaning to us today. So there’s our fun fact for this episode. Now, back to Spain.

The accommodations hadn’t improved since John Adams’s voyage either. After one day of travel through Spain, James wrote this about the tavern they encountered:

“I entered the best tavern, with our mules, the ground floor of which was given up to them. I ascended to the second, thro a mass of filth on the stair case, into an apartment that exhaled a flavor that was hugely offensive. In the apartment were six or eight young men of different nations…who had been detained there sometime…on account of the yellow fever, which was at Cadiz & some other posts. I felt an inexpressible desire to get out of the house and procure other lodgings as soon as possible.”

Luckily for James, the Danish ambassador to Madrid appeared and took James and his party to his house where he and some other ministers and fellow travelers enjoyed a fine meal and a decent bed. They pushed on the next day, and after a few weeks of wretched travel, arrived in Madrid on New Year’s Eve, 1804.

James was no more successful in Madrid than he had been in London. The current ambassador to Spain was Charles Pinckney. Unlike his cousin Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles Pinckney was a Republican, and had helped get Jefferson elected in 1800, for which he was rewarded with the diplomatic post to Madrid. 

Monroe was not there to replace Pinckney. Much like with Livingston in France, Monroe was an additive, not a replacement. As a special minister, he had one specific task: acquiring rights on the Mississippi. He and Livingston had accomplished most of that task with the Louisiana Purchase, but they had thought their purchase included Florida. After finding out that it did not, the new task was to acquire Florida from Spain.

Pinckney had been working on that goal for years, without success. Now he and James continued the effort for another six months, also without success. One of the government representatives they met with chided James for not just entering the word “Florida” into the Louisiana Purchase treaty, claiming that would have “[settled] the whole business.” If only.

By June, realizing their efforts were futile, the two ministers gave up, and James returned to Paris. He collected his family, and they reluctantly returned to London. Around the time the Monroes returned to London, the British government was reactivating an issue that had been avoided in the Jay Treaty of 1795—the Rule of 1756, which we discussed last season in the lead-up to the War of 1812.

A specific Boston ship had been seized by the British while it was on its way to France carrying cargo from the French West Indies. The British Admiralty court had just ruled that the seizure was lawful under the Rule of 1756. And this was the beginning of a slew of seizures of American vessels by the British, and eventually by the French as well, under Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan Decrees, which we also discussed last season.

If you haven’t listened to last season, I highly encourage you to go check it out. It sounds like dry material, and admittedly, it does get confusing, but it’s hugely important background information to the War of 1812, and I don’t want to spend time going over all the details again this season.

As the London winter descended with its fog, rain, smog, and smoke, the Monroes all became ill again. The doctor advised them to get out of London, so James took Elizabeth and the girls to Cheltenham, a health spa about 100 miles from London. He reluctantly left them there to return to London alone to continue pushing his boulder uphill.

In January 1806, James read in a newspaper the very sad news that his uncle Joseph Jones had died, peacefully in his sleep at home in Fredericksburg. Uncle Joseph had been a surrogate father to James, and it was no doubt distressing to him that he hadn’t been there for his uncle’s final days, and had instead been wasting his time on useless diplomatic missions.

James had been pressing Jefferson and Madison to allow him to return home, but then there was a change in the British government, and the new Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were much more pro-America than the old ones had been. So James decided his luck might be about to change, and wrote to Madison that he wished to stay. But Jefferson and Madison had already decided to send an additional minister to Britain, not to replace James outright, but to assist him. 

Thanks to the slowness of the ships carrying letters and the briskness with which newspapers were able to cross the Atlantic, James read the news in the paper a week before he received the official letter from Madison. In his letter, Madison failed to tell Monroe that the new minister was added at the insistence of Congress, not because Jefferson and Madison had lost faith in James. 

If Madison had clarified that, it would have prevented the falling out between them that led to Monroe challenging Madison for the Republican nomination for the 1808 election. We covered that last season, but we’ll be covering it again soon this season.

The man chosen to come to London to help James was William Pinkney. As a reminder, this is the Pinkney from Maryland, and he was not related to Charles Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney from South Carolina.

Pinkney arrived in London in summer 1806, and James was determined not to treat him as shabbily as Livingston had treated him upon his arrival in Paris back in 1803.

Next week, we’ll pick up with the rest of the Monroe family’s sojourn in London and their return to America for the final time.

Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matt Dull.