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61 The Grand Enterprise Collapses As the eighteenth century progressed, the politics of the greater Mississippi River valley became increasingly complicated, and in the decade preceding the Louisiana Purchase they were as intricate as they would ever be. In the final stages of the French and Indian War, France had cut away the albatross of Louisiana from its own neck and hung it around that of Spain (secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, November 13, 1762). The province had never paid its own way, and the Bourbon government of King Louis XV hoped that the Borbón government of King Carlos III could prevent Louisiana from falling into British hands—the worst of all possibilities from the French perspective. Spain in turn had accepted the lands of the Mississippi Valley to provide a buffer of safety for its North American territories in the Southwest. After the American Revolution, however, Spanish officials in Upper Louisiana were feeling pressure from four quarters: American threats from right across the Mississippi River; British commercial incursions from outposts like Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Prairie du Chien, places that Great Britain had not yet relinquished to the United States; the indomitable Osages to the immediate west, who were never pacified during the colonial era; and finally Revolutionary France’s aspirations, which included the irredentist impulse to repossess Louisiana. Spanish officials took all of these threats seriously, which is why the rampant rumors of a Franco-American invasion caused so much consternation in the Illinois Country during the autumn of 1793 and the early winter of 1794. Fortifications were hurriedly begun at New Madrid, southern gateway to Spanish Illinois;a fort was built at Ste.Genevieve on the hill overlooking South Gabouri Creek; a river war galiot, La Flecha (The Arrow), was dispatched 5 62 A French Aristocrat in the American West to cruise the Mississippi River between Natchez and New Madrid; and spies were posted at Vincennes on the Wabash and at the Falls of the Ohio. The Spanish colonial regime in Louisiana was fragile and ultimately would not survive, but most of the officers and administrators of this regime were serious , sober, capable men. If George Rogers Clark had ever mounted an expedition against Spanish Illinois, he would have had his hands full, for Lieutenant Governor Zénon Trudeau in St. Louis was fully capable of organizing a general defense of his colony. And at the local level, the males in the de Luzières family would have gladly manned the parapets of Ste. Genevieve’s stockaded fort against a mob of Americans who were seen as uncouth and unclean, drunken and violent, Protestant and dangerous, possessing no civilized, or civilizing, virtues whatsoever. The Indians of the Ohio River valley and the white colonists (French, French Canadian, Spanish, Creole) who inhabited Upper Louisiana were of one mind when it came to Americans—the very best Americans were dead Americans. But the much-vaunted invasion never amounted to anything more than wild rumors. American possession of the trans-Mississipian West was to be acquired through inexorable pressure generated by weight of numbers, by a veritable demographic revolution, rather than by armed conquest. French minister Genêt’s agents in the Ohio River valley,Auguste la Chaise and Charles de Pauw, simply did not have the resources to gin up an invasionary army, and President Washington’s government in Philadelphia was adamantly opposed to all such hare-brained schemes.Washington had made many French friends when Louis XVI’s army, commanded by General Rochambeau, helped him defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, effectively ending the American Revolution . But Washington was not at all keen about the French Revolution, and when the reserved American president finally met Genêt he thought the fiery Frenchman was a person of such levity and impetuosity that he demanded he be replaced as minister to the United States. In the meantime, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby, warning him about the French agents and expressing hope that“the citizens of Kentucky will not be decoyed into any participation in these illegal activities.” Jefferson even provided physical descriptions of La Chaise (5’5” [French measure] in height, long face, well built) and De Pauw (5’9” in height, a bit blond, pale faced), for whom Shelby was to be on the lookout should they gain any traction in raising an American army to invade Spanish Louisiana.1 Jefferson used even stronger language face to face with 1. See Jefferson’s...

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