Napoleon Hits CTRL+Z

Kevin: April tenth, eighteen ⁓ three. It's Easter Sunday at the Palace of Saint Cloud, just outside Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte is thirty-three years old and the ruler of France. He calls two of his ministers into a room. France owns a colony in North America called Louisiana. In a Dutch harbor called Helvoetsleis, twelve ships and more than three thousand soldiers are waiting to sail for the colony. Ice has held them there all winter, and the harbor has only just thawed. Britain is 38 days away from declaring war on France, and Napoleon and his ministers know it's coming. The Treasury Minister, Barbé-Marbois, tells him to sell. War with England is certain, he says, and France can't hold a colony in ocean away against the Royal Navy. The other minister tells him to keep the colony and give word to send the ships. They argue so far into the night that both men sleep at the palace. At a port on the Normandy coast called Le Have, an American named James Monroe is setting out for Paris. He has orders from President Thomas Jefferson to buy the city of New Orleans, with about $10 million to spend. Napoleon has two orders to choose from: sail the ships and keep the colony, or sell it. At daybreak on April 11th, he calls Marbois back in and says, I renounce Louisiana. Marbois and the Americans sign the treaty on April 30th. The US pays $15 million, but nearly doubles in size. Britain declares war on France 18 days after the signing. But what if Napoleon doesn't sell? What if he listens to the other minister and holds on to Louisiana? Let's hit Ctrl Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50-50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, we try it the other way, and see what changes. In 1802, the United States ends at the Mississippi River. Everything the country grows west of the Appalachian Mountains has to float down that river to reach the sea. Flour from Kentucky and cotton from the Natchez County go down on flat boats to New Orleans, where ocean ships pick the cargo up. Spain owns New Orleans, and under a treaty signed in 1795, it lets American boatmen land their goods there without paying a duty. In April of 1802, Thomas Jefferson describes the arrangement in a letter to his minister in Paris, Robert Livingston. There is on the globe one single spot, he writes, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market. He's writing because the owner is about to change. In October of 1800, Napoleon got the King of Spain to hand Louisiana back to France in a secret treaty. The price was a small kingdom in Italy for the Spanish royal family's son in law. France last owned the colony in 1762. Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, has argued since 1797 that a French Louisiana would stop the Americans at the river and keep them out of Spanish Mexico. The plan behind the treaty depends on the Caribbean. France's richest colony is San Doming, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, where Haiti is today. A revolt of the enslaved has been going on there since 1791 under a former slave named Toussaint Louverture. Napoleon means to take the island back and put its sugar plantations to work again. Louisiana is supposed to feed them, with flour and lumber sent down the Mississippi. In December of eighteen ⁓ one, He sends his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, with about 20,000 soldiers to retake the island. Leclerc gets Toussaint arrested and shipped to a prison in France, and then the yellow fever season arrives. By November of 1802, Leclerc himself is dead of the fever, along with thousands of his men. Instead of a pacified base for taking Louisiana, the island is now in open revolt again. The Louisiana expedition itself never gets out of Europe. Napoleon names General Claude Victor captain general of the colony and gathers twelve ships and three thousand men for him in the Dutch harbor of Hellvutzleis. The harbor freezes in the winter of eighteen ⁓ two with the fleet still inside it. On january seventh, eighteen ⁓ three, with the ice still in, Napoleon gets the news of Leclerc's death. On january twelfth, a member of his council, named Roder, hears him say Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies. The Americans are angry before any of that reaches them. On October 16, 1802, the Spanish Crown's finance officer at New Orleans, Juan Ventura Morales, posts a proclamation ending the American right to land cargo in the city. Within two days, a pair of flatboats loaded with flour arrive from upriver, and his officers refuse to let them unload. In Washington, the Secretary of State James Madison demands an explanation from the Spanish minister who Who swears the king knew nothing about the order? The Federalists are the opposition party in the Senate, and they want to take the city. In February of 1803, a senator from Pennsylvania named James Ross moves to give the president 50,000 militia and five million dollars to seize New Orleans, but the Senate votes him down 15 to 11. But what he doesn't know is that Jefferson has already decided to buy instead. Congress has secretly approved $2 million. The former governor of Virginia, James Monroe, is about to sail for France with orders to buy New Orleans and the Floridas for up to about $10 million. If Paris says no, he has orders to go on to London and talk about an alliance. At New Orleans, the French administrator has already landed. The man France has sent ahead to run the colony's civil government, Pierre Clement Delosa. comes ashore on March twenty sixth with his family and four officers of Victor's staff. He settles in to wait for the troops. Livingston has spent a year in Paris hearing no from the French. When he offered to buy the colony with money France already owed American merchants, Talleyrand told him that none but spendthrifts pay their debts by selling their land. He added that Louisiana wasn't even France's to give. Then comes Easter Sunday at Saint Clou. And the argument that goes on past midnight. On April 11th, Talleyrand asks Livingston what the United States would give for the whole of Louisiana. Livingston says 20 million francs, provided France pays the American claims. Talleyrand tells him that's too low, but to think it over until tomorrow. In those same days, Napoleon's brothers Joseph and Lucien walk in on him and his bath at the Tuileries Palace to tell him the legislature will never consent. He tells them he'll do without the legislature and throws himself back so hard that the bathwater soaks Joseph, who has to go home and change. Monroe reaches Paris on April 12th. At midnight on the 13th, Livingston comes home from the Treasury Minister's house and sits down to write to Madison before he forgets what was said. Napoleon wants 50 million francs at least, and Marbois has opened at 100. They settle on 80 million francs. Which is equal to about $15 million. Of that, 60 million goes to France in bonds, and the other 20 million settles old debts to American shipowners. The treaty is dated April 30th. When they signed it, Livingston says they have lived long, but this is the noblest work of their whole lives. Napoleon says something different to Marbois afterwards. I have just given to England a maritime rival, he says, that will sooner or later humble her pride. Britain declares war on May 18th, but the money still comes from London and Amsterdam. The United States has nothing like $15 million, so it sells bonds. The London Bank of Bering and the Amsterdam Bank of Hope buy them and hand Napoleon his cash in installments. The British government lets the money through Because it would rather have the Americans on the Mississippi than the French. Napoleon gets 52 million francs of the 60 because the bankers buy the bonds at a discount. Lossa gets the news in New Orleans and doesn't believe it at first. His own phrase for it later is a bolt out of the blue. The Senate ratifies the treaty 24-7 in October. On November 30th, Losa receives the colony from Spain in the Cabildo, the old government house on the main square. He hands it to the United States in the same room twenty days later. That same month, the last French soldiers in Saint Doming surrender to a British blockade, and on january first, eighteen ⁓ four, the island declares itself the independent nation of Haiti. Merriweather Lewis and William Clark leave St. Louis, the river town at the mouth of the Missouri, for the Pacific the following May. With interest, the The United States pays a little over twenty three million dollars for the land by the time the Treasury retires the last bond in eighteen twenty three. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. It's daybreak on Monday, april eleventh, eighteen ⁓ three, at Saint Cloud, and Napoleon has changed his mind overnight. He calls Marbois in and gives him a different job. Pay the Americans what France owes their merchants and offer them the deposit at New Orleans under a French guarantee. The rest of the colony isn't for sale. A courier leaves for his Navy minister, Denis Ducres, with one instruction. Victor sails as soon as the wind allows. Monroe reaches Paris the next day and hears the offer from Talleyrand. He follows his orders. On may third, he's on the road to Calais, where the boats for England leave, carrying the alliance proposal. Victor's ships leave the Dutch coast on april twenty seventh with about three thousand men aboard. His chief of staff, Andre Burt, keeps the lists. Britain declares war on France three weeks later. And this time, Monroe is in London when it happens. The Prime Minister, Henry Addington, and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, tell him what they've already told Rufus King, who was the American envoy in London. If the Royal Navy takes New Orleans, Britain will hand the city to the United States. Munro writes Madison that the Navy will do what the Senate refused to fund in February. On July 9th, the fleet comes up the river to New Orleans after 10 weeks at sea. Losa has been waiting for three and a half months with four officers and no soldiers, and he meets the captain general at the landing. On August 14th, Spain hands the colony to France in the council room of the Cabildo. The governor, Manuel de Salcedo, and the King's Commissioner, the Marquis of Casacalvo, sign the transfer because the officer the royal order names is standing right in front of them. Yellow fever season starts two weeks later. By October, the fever has killed a third of Victor's men. The chief engineer, Major Antoine Joseph Vinache, spends the autumn laying out a line of earthworks on the Chalmay Plain below the city. Earthworks is a defensive wall of packed dirt with a ditch in front of it. It's intended to serve as a makeshift temporary wall for soldiers to duck behind and fire from. Between the water and the swamp at Chalmay, there's only one river road, and the earthworks cut across it. At the end of November, at Cap Francais on the north coast of Saint Domingue, General Rochambeau surrenders the last French army in the Caribbean to a British blockade. He's the son of the general who fought beside George Washington at Yorktown. The commander of the British squadron at Jamaica, Sir John Duckworth, takes his surrender. By December, Duckworth has seven ships with nothing left to blockade. The dispatch from London that reaches him that month is gives him his new assignment, New Orleans. Duckworth comes at the city from the east by way of the lakes. On february eleventh, eighteen ⁓ four, he lands eighteen hundred soldiers from the Jamaica garrison on the shore of Lake Bourne, the shallow bay east of the city. They march up a channel called Bayou Bienvenue and come out on the river road below Vinash's line. Victor has fewer than fifteen hundred men to hold it. On february fourteenth, He signs a surrender that lets his men march out with their flags. His survivors board a British ship bound for France. Britain sends a governor in March. The new governor is a French speaking officer named Sir George Prevot, who ran the island of Saint Lucia after Britain took it. He posts his first proclamation in both languages on the Cabildo door. The American deposit is open again on the terms of the 1795 Treaty. The American flatboats begin coming down that spring. In London, the government that promised to give the city away falls on May 10th, and William Pitt comes back as Prime Minister. But Pitt's cabinet won't hand a conquered province to a neutral in the middle of a war. The cabinet keeps the deposit open by order of the governor, but refuses to put it in a treaty. The American flatboats land at New Orleans at the pleasure of the king. Jefferson has an election in the fall and votes moving again on the Mississippi. He accepts the arrangement, but files the protest anyway. He sends Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri River. Lewis carries a letter asking the governor at New Orleans for a pass, and Provost grants it. In May of 1804, his keelboat leaves St. Louis with a British custom stamp on its papers. Jefferson wins reelection that November, helped in part by the Western counties who vote for him. because their flower is selling in New Orleans again. This arrangement holds for eight years. The Kentucky flower goes down the river to a British customs house, and the Federalist newspapers in Boston print that the country got the port opened without paying a dollar or firing a shot. Then the Royal Navy starts taking sailors off American ships, and Congress declares war on Britain on june eighteenth, eighteen twelve. The Speaker of the House, Henry Clay of Kentucky, names two objects for the war, Canada and New Orleans. The gallery cheers the second one, much louder. The first American try comes in April of eighteen thirteen. The American commander in the Southwest, General James Wilkinson, marches about twelve hundred soldiers down from Natchez and finds Vinash's old earthworks line on the Chalmey rebuilt in brick and manned by British regulars. He turns around and marches them right back to Natchez. The peace talks open in the Flemish city of Ghent on August eighth, eighteen fourteen. The British commissioners read out their demands on the first day, and one of them is a permanent Indian country under the Crown's guarantee along the West Bank of the Mississippi. The head of the American delegation, John Quincy Adams, argues against every demand except that one, because the land the British want to set aside is already theirs. The treaty they sign on Christmas Eve puts the map back the way it was before the war. One added article gives the United States free navigation of the Mississippi to the sea and a duty-free deposit at New Orleans in perpetuity. Nobody in Louisiana knows about the treaty for weeks. On the morning of January 8, 1815, the Major General of the Tennessee militia, a man named Andrew Jackson, lines up about 5,000 men from his state and Kentucky on the Chalmay Plains. He sends them at the British line behind the Rodriguez Canal, a drainage ditch that runs from the river to the swamp. He is forty-seven years old, and the spring before he broke the Creek Nation at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. The Duke of Wellington's brother in law, Sir Edward Pakenham, holds the line with regulars who fought in Spain. The Tennesseans reach the ditch twice, but fall back up the river road both times. By eight in the morning, Jackson is writing for Natchez with the survivors. He takes the militia home to Nashville and blames Madison's War Department for the next ten years. In November of 1815, the restored King of France, Louis XVIII, signs the treaty that ends Napoleon's wars for good. In it, he gives up every French claim in Louisiana to Britain. Spain asks for the province back under the promise Napoleon signed in 1802. But the Foreign Office in London tells the Spanish ambassador that Britain was never party to the promise. From St. Louis to the Gulf, the West Bank of the Mississippi belongs to the British Crown. The United States only has a treaty that lets it use the water. In eighteen nineteen, Britain and Spain sit down in Madrid and draw the line between Louisiana and Texas. It follows the Sabine River up from the Gulf. From there, it turns west along the Red River toward the mountains. Two years later, Mexico wins its independence and the customs post on the western bank of the Sabine changes flags. The colony has two capitals by then. The governor sits in New Orleans, the And his deputy runs the upper country from St. Louis, where the fur traders still speak French. The American flatboats pay nothing at the Customs House on the strength of a United States consul's certificate. Andrew Jackson runs for president in 1828, with the river as his primary issue. He tells the crowds in Tennessee and Kentucky that the King's flag on the West Bank should have come down in 1815 and that he will take it down. He beats the sitting president John Quincy Adams in November and takes office in March of 1829. Instead of marching on New Orleans, though, he signs the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830. The Act sends the tribes of the South to lands west of the Mississippi, but the only government that can grant title to that land is in London. In 1832, Jackson's envoy and the Foreign Office in London signal. Convention. Under it, the Crown takes the five Southern nations, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, as protected peoples on the Arkansas River. It's the same model Britain used for the Mohawks on the Grand River in Upper Canada after they lost their homes fighting for the King in the Revolution. Britain fills the Indian country it asked for at Ghent with the very people Jackson sends west. On August 28, 1833, the king gives his assent to an act of parliament abolishing slavery in every British colony and paying the owners 20 million pounds. Longtime listeners will recognize this from a previous episode. The sugar planters of Louisiana send a delegation to London that winter and come home with 20 million pounds worth of their share. On August 1st, 1834, The governor stands on the steps of the Cabildo and reads the act to the crowd in the Place des Armes, in French and then in English. Every enslaved child under six in the colony is free as of that morning, but everyone older owes the former owner four more years of work as an apprentice before they are free as well. At the St. Louis landing the same morning, a nineteen-year-old deckhand named William hears a clerk read the proclamation from the customs house steps. He was born enslaved in Kentucky and brought to the Missouri country as a baby by his owner. Since he was a boy, the owner has hired him out to steamboat captains. In our timeline, he slips off a steamboat at Cincinnati on New Year's Day in 1834 and becomes the writer William Wells Brown. In this one, he's free by act of parliament, and so is his mother, sold down the river to New Orleans two years earlier by the same man. The slave ships from Virginia stopped. Coming to New Orleans. The trade that carries people from the worn-out tobacco farms of Virginia and Maryland to the cotton country goes to Mobile instead on the Alabama coast. By 1840, Mobile holds the largest slave government in North America, and the auction block stands at the foot of Government Street by the wharves. The Cherokee Cross in the winter of 1838. Their principal chief, John Ross, Brings about 15,000 people over the Mississippi at Memphis in December and up the Arkansas River toward Fort Smith. A British Indian agent meets them there with the surveyed grant on the model of the Grand River. The winter kills thousands on the road. Even so, on the far bank, Ross signs for the land as the head of a nation under the Crown's protection. An enslaved person who reaches the West Bank is free the moment his feet touch it. And the cotton fields of Mississippi run right down to the water. In November 1841, a steamboat carrying forty enslaved people down from Memphis to a plantation near Nachez runs aground on the West Bank. A British magistrate from the nearest landing declares every person aboard free under the Act of 1833. The American consul in New Orleans demands the forty people back. But the Foreign Office in London answers that the Crown does not recognize property in people. The following summer, the American Secretary of State Daniel Webster, negotiates a treaty with the British envoy Lord Ashburton. They sign on august ninth, eighteen forty two. The article on extradition lists seven crimes for which either country will hand a man over, and escape is not one of them. The senators from the cotton states vote against it for that reason, but it passes anyway. Through the 1850s, the state of Mississippi runs an armed patrol on the river and pays $100 for every person its boats catch. The Republican Party forms in 1854 to fight slavery, and its first platform says that no state may send its agents across the river after a human being. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenges the sitting senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, in seven debates across the state, and the question they argue Is whether a man who reaches the West Bank of the Mississippi is free. Both of them say yes, but Lincoln adds that the country should be ashamed of the answer. Lincoln wins the presidency in November of 1860. South Carolina leaves the Union on December 20th, and seven states follow it. The Confederacy that fires on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 has only eight states. And its whole western edge is a foreign country where slavery has been abolished for 27 years. Britain declares neutrality and keeps the river open to Union boats under the Treaty of 1814. The Confederacy's cotton is now forced to go out through Mobile and Charleston, but the Union Navy closes both of those ports by the end of 1861. The Union Army takes Vicksburg in the spring of 1863. While British customs officers watch closely from the Louisiana Bank. With no moves left to make, the Confederate government surrenders that summer, two full years earlier than in our timeline. For 30 years, the line between slavery and freedom in North America is the Mississippi River, and it runs past Natchez and Memphis. The Thirteenth Amendment ends slavery in the United States in December of eighteen sixty-five, but on the British bank, the customs officers just go back to Stamping Flower. For thirty years, the colony was the place enslaved people ran to. Now it's simply the west bank of a river, with a governor in New Orleans and a deputy in St. Louis. London starts asking what the colony is for. On july first, eighteen sixty seven, Four British colonies in the north joined together as the Dominion of Canada with its capital at Ottawa. They are Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The same year, Russia sells Alaska to Britain for seven million dollars. Remember that in this timeline, the United States has no Pacific coast to attach it to. In eighteen sixty nine, the Hudson Bay Company sells the northern prairie it's owned for two hundred years to the Crown. For 300,000 pounds. Canada takes the landover the following summer. A colonial office in London writes one memorandum that year about Louisiana. A Canada that reaches the Gulf of Mexico has a port that never freezes and a border the United States can never cross. It also has two more provinces that speak French, and the French members in Ottawa want them in. On July 20, 1871, British Columbia joins the Dominion from the Pacific side. On the same day, Louisiana and Missouri join it from the south as two provinces. New Orleans is the capital of the first, and St. Louis the capital of the second. The first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, sends his Quebec partner, Georges Étienne Cartier, to negotiate the terms. He promises the two provinces a railway from Montreal to New Orleans within 10 years. And he writes French into their charters as an official language. The French-speaking members in Parliament now come from three provinces. The railway opens in 1882. A freight car of Manitoba wheat leaves Winnipeg and reaches a Canadian wharf on the Gulf of Mexico without crossing any borders. In winter, when the St. Lawrence River freezes and Montreal's harbor closes, the country's exports go out through New Orleans. The Acadians, the French farmers Britain expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755, settled the Louisiana Bayous a generation later. Now, their descendants are British subjects again, followed by Canadians. The Cherokee hold their treaty land on the Arkansas River as a nation under the crown, and when the Dominion takes over the West, the agreement transfers to Ottawa. New Orleans in nineteen hundred is the largest city in Canada. It has a black population that has been free for three generations and a French speaking majority that sends its own members to Ottawa. The music that comes out of its black wards in the first years of the new century goes north on the railway to Montreal, where a studio makes the first recordings of it in nineteen seventeen. The United States stops at the Mississippi River. Mexico keeps Texas in California, and the gold a millwright turns up in the Sierra foothills in eighteen forty eight. belongs to Mexico. Oregon is British from the start. In 2026, the American Republic has 26 states, all of them east of the Mississippi, and its western border is the river. Today, the Mississippi is an international border for its entire length. The bridge at Memphis carries a Canadian customs port at its western end. Illinois corn and Ohio wheat still go down the river to the Gulf of Mexico. although maybe the Gulf of Canada in this timeline, through a foreign port called New Orleans. The right to do that is an article written at the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Canada runs from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans is its largest port and its most French city. The provincial legislature sits in the Cabildo, the building where Spain handed the colony to a French general in August of 1803. The square in front is still the Place des Armes, and the flag flying over it is the maple leaf. Napoleon told Marbois he was giving England a rival. In the alternate timeline, he keeps the colony for 10 more months and England ends up with it instead. American schools teach the Louisiana Purchase as a real estate deal. The price was $15 million for 828,000 square miles, which is about three cents an acre. But the money didn't just buy land, it bought the Royal Navy's absence from the river. France knew it couldn't hold Louisiana against the Royal Navy, and Britain proved that by taking St. Lucia and Tobago from them within six weeks of declaring war. The British Prime Minister had already said that if his Navy took New Orleans, he would hand the city to the Americans. But Jefferson paid so that nobody would have to find out whether or not that promise would hold. Everyone in the story assumed the Mississippi Valley would end up American. One, because the Americans were already there, and two, because nobody else could hold it. Napoleon assumed it, and so did the British cabinet that promised to give the city away. But in the alternate timeline, the power that stops the Americans at the river is the one with the fleet. The sale was Napoleon's way of making sure that fleet never got the chance. The United States doubled in size in 1803 with money the Treasury borrowed from a London bank. A British cabinet. Let the loan go through because it preferred an American Louisiana to a French one. The continent went to the Americans because Napoleon sold it before the Royal Navy sailed for it. President Jefferson wrote in 1802 that there was one spot on the globe whose owner would be the country's natural enemy, and he named New Orleans. He was thinking of France. In the alternate timeline, the owner of that spot is Britain and then Canada. The country that grows up beside it. Has 26 states and stops at the water. In our timeline, the Mississippi runs through the middle of the United States, and the Customs House at New Orleans flies the same flag as the boats, the one with the stars and the stripes. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. And if you like it, tell a friend or two. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting. Control Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on Patreon. That's CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.