Communications

To the Editor,

In his review (JER, vol. 28, Fall 2008, 511–17) of my book, Bonapartists in the Borderlands (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2006), Dr. Timothy M. Roberts claims that I argue that the U.S. government supported the establishment of a small French settlement (the Vine and Olive colony) in the Alabama territory as “a front for covert military operations against the Spanish Empire” (514). He criticizes this view as both “unpersuasive” and “not plausible” (Roberts, 514). I agree that such an explanation is unconvincing. But it is not the one I advance in my book.

What I actually argue is that, to the extent the colony served a military purpose at all, that purpose was defensive and dissuasive—“to act as a barrier against cross-border raids” mounted by Seminoles, escaped slaves, and others from the territory of Spanish Florida (Blaufarb, 53). But an even more important American aim in backing the colony was “to put additional pressure on Spain to resume negotiations for the sale of Florida” by demonstrating that “the prevailing demographic trends [in the Gulf Coast region] made it inevitable that the United States would eventually absorb Florida” (Blaufarb, 56). I elaborate at some length upon President Madison’s original idea “that Spanish Florida could be obtained through the weight of demography alone” and also upon his efforts to bring the bellicose General Andrew Jackson around to his point of view (Blaufarb, 56). None of this suggests that the U.S. government contemplated using the Vine and Olive colony for military action against Spanish Florida. Rather, I explicitly argue that the U.S. proceeded cautiously in this part of the world out of fear that too aggressive a policy toward Spain would provoke British military intervention—“renewed conflict with Great Britain was the last thing the United States needed” (Blaufarb, 71)

Dr. Roberts also takes me to task for supposedly ignoring the fact that, after 1815, the U.S. government sought to “distance the country officially from assistance to Latin American independence and in particular to filibustering” (Roberts, 514). Roberts seems to have overlooked what I wrote on this matter. “Before 1815 first Jefferson and then Madison had come close to proffering recognition and even sponsored filibustering expeditions against Spanish provinces. . . . But after the return of peace to Europe and the United States after 1815, a note of hesitation began to color American policy. President Madison signaled this shift with a proclamation delivered on 1 September 1815 prohibiting ‘illegal expeditions’ against the Spanish domains . . . Despite the difficulties experienced by the government in enforcing American neutrality, even within its own ranks, the fact that violations were increasingly exposed and sometimes prosecuted underlines the growing determination of the administration to proceed cautiously after 1815” (Blaufarb, 70–71).

Dr. Roberts is right to question the notion that the Vine and Olive colony was founded as a filibustering base. But he is in error when he attributes such an interpretation to my book.

Rafe Blaufarb

To the Editor,

I stand by my view that in his book, Bonapartists in the Borderlands, Rafe Blaufarb overemphasizes the purpose of the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive to solve Americans’ inability to intimidate Spain into conceding Florida. He writes, “By early 1817 the [U.S.-Spanish] negotiations had clearly reached a deadlock. . . . [I]n this ‘thickening atmosphere’ of diplomatic stalemate over Florida, Congress approved the Vine and Olive grant. . . . [T]he French settlement on the Tombigbee was intended to put additional pressure on Spain to resume negotiations for the sale of Florida. . . . [Andrew] Jackson approved wholeheartedly of these views” (56, 57).

There was little sense in the Madison or Monroe administrations, however, that failure to achieve Spanish concessions represented a deadlock or stalemate soluble by taking land obtained from the Creek Indians out of the market for purchase by American citizens and giving it to French and Haitian Creole refugees. General Jackson supported the policy of President-elect Monroe of white settlement of this land, but merely reiterated his position at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, that American security would be enhanced...