Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2017 Bonaparte's Dream: Napoleon and the Rhetoric of American Expansion, 1800-1850 Mark Ehlers Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ehlers, Mark, "Bonaparte's Dream: Napoleon and the Rhetoric of American Expansion, 1800-1850" (2017). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4277. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4277 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. BONAPARTE’S DREAM: NAPOLEON AND THE RHETORIC OF AMERICAN EXPANSION, 1800-1850 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Mark Frederick Ehlers B.S., James Madison University, 2004 M.A., James Madison University, 2005 May 2017 DEDICATION For Leigh. Who read every word. Twice. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like any writer of history, I owe much to many people. First and foremost, I must thank Nancy Isenberg for her critical eye and patience with my project as it developed over the years. As any advisor knows, it is difficult enough to supervise the projects of a graduate student while continuing to teach and conduct your own research. This is exponentially more difficult when your advisee lives almost 1000 miles away and works full time. Professor Isenberg did this and more without batting an eye. The other readers on my committee—Andrew Burstein, Charles Shindo and Leonard Ray deserve thanks as well. Their advice was unfailingly helpful and undoubtedly made this a better project. In addition, I had a small army of colleagues and friends who made my work better. In particular, thanks to Rob McDonald and Sam Watson of the United States Military Academy for patiently offering suggestions and challenging my ideas. Thanks to my officemates, Andy Forney, Danny Sjursern, and Amanda Boczar who listened to my gripes and offered sage advice on a daily basis. My parents read drafts of the manuscript from start to finish and never questioned my sanity. For this I am eternally grateful. Thanks especially to my friend, Shauna Hann, who taught me to enjoy good coffee, pretzel buns, bunnies, and who was a light to me in dark places. Finally, I owe an unquantifiable and completely unpayable debt to my two girls: Leigh and Anna. Without them, this project would have been completed much faster, but with them, my life is complete. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...…………………………………………………………………… ii LIST OF FIGURES ..……………………………………………………………………………. iv ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………….……. v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE AMERICAN PROTEUS ……………………………....…… 1 2. ANCIENT LIMITS AND NATURAL BOUNDARIES: THE MISSISSIPPI CRISIS …...……………………………………………………………………...…………...….. 20 3. THE COSTS OF PEACEFUL EXPANSION: THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE …….. 59 4. ALLIES AND ANNEXATIONISTS: FLORIDA AND THE WAR OF 1812 ………… 97 5. SEIZING BONAPARTE’S DREAM: THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR ……….. 153 6. CONCLUSION: THE GLORY THAT WAS NAPOLEON ………………...………. 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………...…………………………………………………………………... 217 VITA ……………………………………………………….…………………………………. 237 iii LIST OF FIGURES 1. James Akin, “The Prairie Dog Sickened at the Sting of the Hornet,” 1806 …………... 107 2. E.B. and E.C. Kellog, “Napoleon,” 1842-1848 ……………………………………….. 154 3. William Charles, “Louis XVIII climbing the Mât de Cocagne” (Detail), 1815 ………. 165 iv ABSTRACT Between 1800 and 1850, the United States built a continental empire that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. As scholars have come to realize over the past three decades, this expansion was not a peaceful movement of American settlers into virgin wilderness. Instead, it involved the conquest and subjugation of diverse peoples in Louisiana, Florida and the northern provinces of Mexico, and forced the United States to interact aggressively with the European empires of Great Britain, France, Spain, and eventually Mexico. My work helps to explain how Americans in the early republic reconciled this militant expansion with their professed democratic and republican values. By studying the rhetoric of American expansion, I found their justifications rooted in the unexpected person of Napoleon Bonaparte. Americans often saw similarities between continental expansion in the old and new worlds. Both the United States and Bonaparte’s France started as republics, and both actively expanded beyond their borders during the first decades of the nineteenth-century. Even after the expansion of Bonaparte’s France was halted prematurely after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, Americans continued to use him debate the merits of an imperial republic. In other words, they asked if a nation could retain its republican principles and still engage in continental conquest. In the early era of American expansion—between about 1800 and 1820, Napoleon served as a bogeyman, a negative example, which first expansionists and then anti-expansionists both used to justify their positions. But by the 1820s, as more sympathetic material flooded American print culture, his image changed. By the end of the Mexican American War in 1848, Bonaparte had been elevated into the perfect prototype for Americans to follow in their quest for continental domination. Bonaparte had largely become a positive symbol of military and national greatness. v CHATPER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE AMERICAN PROTEUS In 1797, the most popular article regarding the new republican hero of France was the extract of a letter that ran in newspapers from New Hampshire to Georgia. Though we cannot be certain, it was probably read by tens of thousands of Americans anxious for news from war-torn Europe. In this article, a “gentleman” in Paris identified only as “C” wrote excitedly to his friend in Philadelphia. “C” explained that he had enclosed two copies of the latest portrait of General Napoleon Bonaparte and then provided what he knew was stunning, and what he hoped was joyful news. Napoleon was not, as first reported, from the French held island of Corsica. No, said “C,” the promising general was, in fact, an American from Middletown, Connecticut! Bonaparte was an assumed name; his given family name was Shaler.1 The Philadelphia newspaper where this story first appeared added that this was “doubtful.” Regardless, the story was reprinted up and down the eastern seaboard and according to at least one newspaper, it produced, “no small degree of curiosity.” Only several months later did a few retractions start to appear. These, however, never came close to rivaling the number of times the story had been printed. Even the retractions that did make it into print were disappointed rather than apologetic in tone. The New Jersey Journal took an entire column to carefully explain that while the original letter from Paris had been authentic, Americans unfortunately could not, in fact, “claim the honor of having produced the great Buonaparte.”2 1 “Buonaparte,” The Argus (New York, NY), December 29, 1796; also see titles of the same headline in, The Philadelphia Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), December 31, 1796; The Federal Gazette (Baltimore, MD), January 3, 1796; The Centinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ), January 4, 1797; The New Jersey Journal (Elizabethtown, NJ), January 4, 1797; The Connecticut Courant (Hartford, CT), January 9, 1797; The Connecticut Journal (New Haven, CT), January 11, 1797; The Political Gazette (Newburyport, MA), January 13, 1797; Woods Newark Gazette (Newark, NJ), January 18, 1797; other commentary on the letter can be found in, Loudon’s Register (New York, NY), February 1, 1797. 2 Ibid; “Buonaparte from the Albany Register,” The New Jersey Journal (Elizabethtown, NJ), February 8, 1797, similar edited articles were printed in The Argus (New York, NY), February 3, 1797; and The Weekly Oracle (New London, CT), February 18, 1797. 1 As this story shows, even early in Napoleon’s career, Americans could make the general turned consul turned emperor into whatever they wanted him to be—even an American from Connecticut. And they did. Napoleon’s name—which Americans could not even agree how to spell—and his image appeared in paintings, books, cartoons, wax museums, speeches, toasts, busts, pillows, cake decorations, and hundreds of other items from the late 1790s to his death in 1821.3 Even after his death, Bonaparte lived on. Some of this was simple hero worship; some was that morbid fascination with the lives of the rich and famous which continues in our own day. Often enough, Napoleon was used consciously as rhetorical device to define certain American qualities, which may sound odd to modern Americans who think of our identity as inherently unique. Napoleon was equally a symbol of military genius and political tyranny, depending on how politically-motivated Americans appropriated his image to address a wide range of issues during the antebellum period. In this work, I am going to explain how Americans refashioned Napoleon to fit their ideas about national expansion and empire between about 1800 and 1850. In a simplistic way, Americans often saw similarities between continental