Despite his inferior position, Cruzat was also the gatekeeper to this mighty empire. He had decided Wilkinson’s letter deploring the seizure of Spanish vessels was significant enough to send on to Natchez, and thus he was prepared to let its writer land at St. Louis. The good impression created by the letter, however, was nothing compared to the effect of the present Wilkinson brought with him, two Virginia thoroughbred horses. And if the American’s ease and polished manners had the same effect on the lowly commander as they did on his superiors, Cruzat must have been overwhelmed. Certainly he provided Wilkinson with an official passport as far as Natchez, together with an effusive letter of recommendation to its commandant, Grand-Pré. Once inside the empire, Wilkinson’s preparations and personality became irresistible. At Natchez, Grand-Pré was especially grateful for the warning against Thomas Green, who claimed that the settlement was really part of Georgia. When Wilkinson arrived armed with Cruzat’s recommendation, Grand-Pré not only received him warmly but sent him on to New Orleans with an even more supportive document addressed directly to Miró. By the time his cargo reached the dockside there on the last day of June, a cascade of approval ensured that Wilkinson would at least be listened to by the man who controlled the Mississippi.
He was escorted to Government House by the corporal of the guard and presented to Esteban Miró and his intendant, or chief financial officer, Martín Navarro. Both were men of exceptional quality. Each had risen through the service on merit alone— Miró as a soldier and Navarro as an accountant—and together were engaged in a concerted drive to change Spain’s existing strategy of limiting the movement of goods and people in North America.
What drove Spanish policy was the need to protect Mexico’s rich silver mines in Zacatecas and the northern province of Nueva Vizcaya. Their output was worth as much as seventeen million dollars a year, according to the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, the largest source of silver in the world and almost half the total value of the empire’s exports. The only purpose of Louisiana, along with Texas and New Mexico, was to provide a barrier against any threat to Mexico from the north. Consequently, entry had been denied to all but approved immigrants, and trade was restricted to what was required by the direction of the captain general in Havana. It cost about five hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain Louisiana, a colony that had fewer than thirty thousand inhabitants, but the silver justified the outlay.
Until 1783, the only attacks came from marauding Comanches, and the occasional incursion by British smugglers and adventurers, but American in-de pendence and the flood of migrants across the Appalachians changed the equation. Within five years, an estimated fifty thousand settlers had poured into the Ohio Valley and the western lands, and Spain’s near empty colony was no longer a protection but an incitement to land-hungry pioneers.
Navarro, the older of the two Spaniards and, according to his colleague, “a man of talent, active, disinterested and popular,” took the lead. Not only was he one of the wealthiest merchants in New Orleans, he was the originator of a policy of free trade and relaxed immigration for Louisiana put forward in a pamphlet as early as 1780. Under “a sovereign whose laws were not opposed to a system of free trade,” he wrote, Louisiana would develop “a numerous population and large commerce [and become] one of the most useful and best established provinces in America.” As the tide of American settlers swept over the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains, it became increasingly urgent for Louisiana to match them in wealth and population.
In February 1787, months before Wilkinson’s arrival, Navarro had bluntly repeated his message to Madrid: “The only way to check them [the Americans] is with a proportionate population, and it is not by imposing commercial restrictions that this population is to be acquired, but by granting a prudent expansion and freedom of trade.” For someone as alert as Wilkinson, it would not have been hard to sense the drift of Navarro’s ideas, since it harmonized so closely with his own.
Nevertheless, the important bond he formed was with his fellow soldier Miró, who had joined the army at the age of sixteen and invariably addressed the American as “brigadier.” The title emphasized their similarities and pleased Wilkinson, who even as a trader never ceased to see himself as a soldier. In subsequent reports, he would address Miró as “my dear friend” and, as he had in writing to Gates, ask to be excused his bluntness on the grounds that he wrote “out of friendship.” It had taken Miró thirty-five years to reach the rank of brigadier, but he would eventually end his career as a field marshal, the highest rank in the Spanish army, having worked his way to the top by unremitting energy and competence. Although the senior as governor, he and Navarro worked as equals. They were in complete harmony about the need to strengthen Louisiana by encouraging immigration and promoting trade.
In their joint report to Madrid, the two Spaniards recorded their favorable impressions of the American: “He is a young man of about thirty-three years of age, although he looks older; of exceedingly agreeable appearance, married, with three small children. In his manners and address, he shows that he has had a very good education which his uncommon talents have taken advantage of.” In an epoch when years and seniority were synonymous, the mistake about his age evidently arose from his air of authority, and nothing that they learned from him over a long, hot summer shook their confidence in his ability to give a lead to Kentucky opinion.
After their first meeting, they had other interviews, often with interpreters, occasionally by themselves, since Navarro spoke excellent English and Miró a little. Ostensibly they were discussing Wilkinson’s wish to sell the goods he had brought with him to New Orleans. In the long term, the American made it clear, he wanted to extend the list to include “Negroes, live Stock, tobacco, Flour, Bacon, Lard, Butter, Cheese, tallow, Apples, to the amount of fifty or sixty thousand Dollars.” But once each side discovered the overlap in their interests, their discussions took on a different dimension.
According to Miró and Navarro, after ten or twelve days Wilkinson announced that he had a “project of great importance to propose,” and having heard what he had in mind, they asked him to write it down. By then, all three must have clearly understood what each wanted. On August 8, Miró signaled their good intentions by granting a permit to “the American Brigadier Don James Wilkinson . . . to direct or cause to be brought into this country by inhabitants of Kentucky one or more launches belonging to him, with cargoes of the productions of that country.” Since only Madrid could authorize an exception to the ban on trade, this meant less than it appeared, but with the governor’s backing it could become reality, giving Wilkinson a monopoly of trade into New Orleans, worth tens of thousands of dollars. In return, Wilkinson delivered on August 21 a 7,500-word report that became known as his “First Memorial.”