The Fabric of America (21 page)

In the spring of 1797, the river overflowed its banks, astonishing Ellicott by rising fifty-five feet and spreading out across the country to create a slow-flowing ooze that by April was thirty-seven miles across, and it did not completely return to its old course until September. But he also understood why it made the land beside it so attractive to settlers. “The Mississippi is a wonderful river,” he told Sally, and the silt it deposited was “uncommonly fertile.” Most of the large plantations grew tobacco as their main crop, although others were turning to cotton, and a few specialized in sugar. The owners
raised cattle and hogs, grew their own corn, and could produce with little effort exotic fruits such as peaches, figs, and apricots. From his 250,000-acre plantation, Anthony Hutchins reckoned on harvesting no fewer than thirty thousand pounds of tobacco a year as well as four thousand bushels of corn, with enough pasture left over to feed four hundred head of cattle.

Such wealthy owners had, Ellicott noted, “a natural turn for mechanics, painting, music and the polite accomplishments,” although being the man he was, he could not help pointing out one major failing. “Their system of education is so extremely defective that little real science is to be met with among them.” More serious in his eyes was that the plantations depended on slave labor, and slaves made up about 40 percent of Natchez's population.

The majority of the white inhabitants, however, were either small farmers with few slaves, or storekeepers, craftsmen, and stevedores in Natchez itself. Some were on the run from the law or from creditors, such as Ebenezer Dayton, a shoemaker, generally known to Natchez citizens as “Diving” Dayton, who had faked his own suicide by pretending to drown himself in the Connecticut River after running up huge debts. Two thirds were British or American Tories who had fled the United States because of “their monarchical principles or treasonable practices.” Their unofficial leader was Hutchins, who had come to Natchez as a British officer in the 1770s, and since he was the brother of Ellicott's old colleague Thomas Hutchins, the commissioner was prepared to trust him.

By extraordinary coincidence, Ellicott had a still closer connection to Gayoso's second-in-command, Captain Esteban Minor. Twenty-six years earlier his name had been Stephen Minor, and he had grown up close to the Ellicotts' mills in Maryland. Now a Spanish citizen, Minor owned a plantation in Natchez, and his divided allegiance could have served as a paradigm for most American-born settlers. As fort commander, he remained loyal to Spain, but he was ready to see the settlement become American so long as his ownership of the plantation was not endangered.

There was no guarantee that the hearts and minds of this expatriate, multinational population would belong to the United States. In 1763, when the east bank of the Mississippi ceased to be French, the land around Natchez became British and remained so until Spain acquired it in 1783. There was no strong desire to become part of the United States. The settlement's only experience of American power, a destructive raid in 1778 led by
James Willing from Pittsburgh, did not encourage friendly feeling. Willing's band of marauders shot and looted their way from Walnut Hills to Baton Rouge—“All was fish that came into their nett,” William Dunbar, a prominent cotton planter, recalled. “They took blankets, pieces of cloth, sugar, silver ware, all my waring apparel, bed and table linen: not a shirt was left in the house.”

Nevertheless, under U.S. jurisdiction every male landowner would enjoy three freedoms denied to him under Spanish rule: he could vote for his own government, express his opinions openly, and be free of the risk of arbitrary arrest, an important consideration since Governor Hector de Carondelet had recently exiled to Cuba several inhabitants of New Orleans, for no other crime than expressing what he called “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality.” The United States also offered a double guarantee against the loss of property. The Bill of Rights declared that property could never be taken except “by due Process of Law,” and the Constitution prohibited governments from passing “a Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This last was especially attractive to those who feared that the Spanish authorities might find grounds to cancel land grants made simply on the basis of a royal proclamation.

In reports to Pickering, Ellicott estimated that these considerations might persuade most landowners—”

Having Wilkinson on his side transformed Gayoso's position. From the Gulf to Illinois, Spanish forces amounted to fewer than one thousand regular
troops and slightly more than five thousand militia, scattered by Gayoso's policy in forts along the whole length of the river. Recognizing Spain's military weakness, Ellicott appealed directly to Wilkinson and with increasing urgency for more U.S. forces to be sent to Natchez. The general repeatedly promised to send reinforcements, but none arrived. Blandly and affably, Wilkinson assured Ellicott, “You have a warm place in my heart,” and offered his personal support—“I trust in heaven the execution of the treaty may follow to avert consequences painful to contemplate”—yet not a soldier moved south. Gayoso could be confident that with Wilkinson in command there would be no military pressure from the United States.

Unaware of his general's treachery, the new president, John Adams, told Congress in June 1797 that he had reluctantly decided “
to leave it to the discretion of the officers of His Catholic Majesty when they withdraw his troops from the forts within the territory of the United States.
” Congress showed itself still less inclined to act. Ignoring the president's request to create a framework government for the Natchez district in readiness for Spain's eventual withdrawal, the legislature went into recess, leaving Ellicott to cope unsupported. But more than one man's betrayal lay behind the United States' inability to force the Spanish out of Natchez. It was too weak even to keep the states out of federal territory.

The most forceful attempts at seizure were made by Georgia. Alone among the states, it maintained its claims to western lands based upon its royal charter and did not give them up until 1802. In 1789 it created the largest county in American history, Bourbon County, to administer the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and in 1795 its heavily bribed legislature sold almost forty million acres, most of modern Alabama and Mississippi, to a syndicate of land companies in what became known as the Yazoo Land Fraud. Georgia had some constitutional grounds for its land grab, but the plans of William Blount, once governor and now senator of Tennessee Territory, depended upon pure expediency.

As he foolishly explained in a letter in March 1797, Blount planned to seize Spanish-occupied territory, including the Natchez area, by force, keeping some for himself and leaving the rest to British control. The plot hung on the war in Europe: under pressure from France's citizen armies, Spain had
declared war on her former ally, Britain, in 1794, a development that created the serious possibility of a retaliatory British attack on the Floridas and New Orleans. Blount needed the land to rescue the Blount Land Company from bankruptcy, and conspiring with a foreign power to take U.S. territory was not a crime that weighed heavily with him or, as it transpired, with the people of Tennessee. “[I] probably shall be at the head of the business,” he boasted to a friend, “on the part of the British.”

Unfortunately for Blount, the letter was stolen while its recipient was drunk, and its contents became public knowledge. Presented with evidence of his treachery, the Senate voted twenty-five to one for his expulsion and arrest on the charge of “high misdemeanour inconsistent with public trust and duty.” But, when Blount fled back to Tennessee, the United States proved powerless to compel his return despite the constitutional obligation on states to send back fugitives from justice. Tennesseans demonstrated their own opinion of his offense by electing him to the state legislature, where he served as speaker until his death.

Left to fend for himself by a government that was too weak to help, either militarily or politically, Ellicott immediately had to deal with the reverberations of Blount's conspiracy. Fear of British participation prompted Gayoso to issue a warning that martial law might have to be imposed. The settlers reacted with fury, egged on by Blount's chief lieutenant in Natchez, Anthony Hutchins, the silver-haired planter who was the recognized leader of Natchez's large contingent of British-born settlers. Gayoso should be kidnapped, he told Ellicott, and taken into the prairie on the other side of the Mississippi to be dealt with by the Chickasaw. By early June the state of public opinion in Natchez, Ellicott told Pickering, “might be compared to flammable gaz; it wanted but a spark to produce an explosion!”

In this complex and unstable situation, Ellicott was inexorably drawn from his role as boundary commissioner to act as the representative of the United States. An attack by the settlers on the Spanish garrison might trigger a wider conflict with Spain and would certainly kill the already shaky Treaty of San Lorenzo. Given the hostility of the Spanish government, the incapacity of the U.S. government, the treachery of its senior general, and the influence of a British planter over American settlers, Ellicott's actions
over the following weeks entitle him to most of the credit for ensuring that the treaty was finally enacted.

His critical achievement came in late June after Gayoso ordered the arrest of a drunken Baptist preacher named Hannah. This was the spark that produced the explosion. Infuriated by the thought of a Protestant being imprisoned by a Catholic governor, the settlers rioted and threatened to attack the fort. The Spanish artillery, usually trained on the river, was now aimed at the town, except for one cannon sighted on the boundary commissioner's tent. In an attempt to calm the tension, Ellicott issued a proclamation telling American sympathizers to refrain from violence. He urged them instead to sign a petition pledging their support for the United States, and to register with Lieutenant Pope to form a militia in case of Spanish attack. This message was repeated in person at a bellicose meeting in a nearby farmhouse, where Ellicott pleaded with the settlers not to risk their lives by attacking the fort, “but to make a formal declaration of their being, by the late treaty, citizens of the US—that they might have some claim to protection— but to act upon the defensive only.”

Using Minor as a go-between, Ellicott maintained contact with Gayoso inside the fort. When the settlers called another conference following an exchange of shots between a Spanish patrol and the newly formed American militia, Ellicott sent the governor an urgent request for a meeting. On June 22, Gayoso stole out of the fort, taking, as Ellicott remembered, “a circuitous route on foot thro' a cornfield to the back of [Minor's] house and entered the parlour undiscovered where I joined him.”

There Ellicott offered him a deal—that the settlers would refrain from violence provided the day-to-day running of Natchez was handed over to an elected committee of inhabitants. Gayoso could remain as governor, but Spanish laws should be applied “with mildness and moderation.” Facing insurrection as the alternative, Gayoso accepted, although, as Ellicott noted, “the humiliating state to which he was reduced by a people whose affection he had courted made a visible impression upon his mind and countenance.”

Hurrying to the settlers' conference, Ellicott found to his surprise that Hutchins, the leader of the war party, was also urging restraint. Exploiting the change of mood, Ellicott begged the meeting to accept the peace plan he had made with Gayoso, adding a pledge that the U.S. government would soon formally include Natchez within the Union—“a free government
[would be] extended to them and that without any tumult, or risk of expense.” In a fateful gesture, he offered himself as a personal guarantee, promising to help maintain peace and order until Congress had appointed its own official representative. With that offer he ceased to be merely the commissioner for the boundary and became instead the de facto U.S. representative in the territory.

When he sat down, the “large and respectable meeting of gentlemen of property and influence in the country” voted against an attack on the fort, and for the peace plan. Detailed consideration of the deal was left to a group of leading citizens who would also arrange the election of a council, with Ellicott and Pope as ex officio members, to administer the territory until the United States took over. In his report to the secretary of state, Andrew Ellicott ended optimistically with Gayoso's public acceptance of the deal, “which gave general satisfaction and once more restored tranquillity to the district.”

Hutchins's unexpected support for peace, however, was merely temporary, an attack on the fort, as Ellicott discovered, “being either premature or not in unison with Mr Blount's plans.” What Hutchins wanted was to provoke enough disorder to justify British intervention from Canada. Ellicott's promise to oversee the peaceful transition of the territory into the Union frustrated that outcome, but undeterred, Hutchins set out to undermine the U.S. commissioner.

The most combustible issue in the settlement was the ownership of land. Settlers who had taken advantage of the Spanish promise of free land feared that a U.S. government would make them pay for their farms. Others, who had bought plantations under British or Spanish rule, worried that their title might be overturned by American courts. And everyone wondered how an American regime would dispose of the huge territory that had not yet been settled. The importance of the issue led Bernard Lintot to warn Ellicott that he had to dispel any doubts about “the Distribution of Land” in order “to encourage the settlement of Families attached by principle to the [United] States, and to Grant the Vacant Lands on terms that will prevent their passing to the Spanish side.”

Hutchins played on these fears by spreading rumors that the commissioner was in fact both a land speculator himself and the agent for Atlantic coast speculators. If Major Ellicott had his way, Hutchins asserted, the whole region around Natchez would be measured out and administered by
the same constitution that Congress had enacted in 1787 for the Northwestern Territory. This would mean not only dividing up the vacant land in square tracts of 640 acres for sale at $2 an acre, thus restricting it to the wealthiest purchasers, but making slavery illegal.