Free A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla

million pesos—living proof that, as he had advised the crown in 1780, “self interest and a bettering of one’s fortune overrides all inconveniences.” 23
    For all his enthusiasm about free trade, however, Navarro had never lost sight of the strategic importance that Carlos III attached to Louisiana. And despite his lucrative slave-trading partnership with Daniel Clark, an Irish-born, Eton-educated Pennsylvanian who was amassing great wealth as a shipping agent in New Orleans, Navarro regarded Americans as the emerging threat to the Spanish colony. The presence of Americans on the tributaries of the Mississippi, he had warned in 1780,
    gives us motive to reflect very seriously…. Although the English posts no longer exist, we must count on new enemies who are regarding our situation and happiness with too great jealousy. The intensity with which [the Americans] are working to form a city and establish posts, and their immediate proximity to our post of the Illinois may be harmful to us some day, unless we shelter ourselves in time by promoting a numerous population in this province in order to observe and even to restrain their intentions. … As soon as the population will have reached a respectable number, a barrier to the kingdom of Nueva España [or Mexico] will be fortified and assured. This will be able to oppose any attempt of the Americans already settled on the upper part of the river, and finally may … yield a profit in men, reinforcements, and royal duties. 24
    Navarro saw the hard truth that every American who crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle along the Ohio River and its tributaries weakened the buffer between the Spanish territories and the energetic republican neighbor.

— CHAPTER EIGHT —
Banners of Blood
    The weakness of the [French] government seems to allow anything…. People speak openly in the Palais-Royal of massacring us, our houses are marked out for this murder and my door was marked…. The Court expected, at any minute, to see itself attacked by forty thousand armed brigands who, it was said, were on their way from Paris…. The defection of troops is general and everything announces a great revolution…. The Estates-General of
1789
will be celebrated but by a banner of blood that will be carried to all parts of Europe.
    —Marquis de Ferrieres to Madame de Medel, June 28, 1789 1
    Let’s string up the aristocrats on the lampposts!
We will win, we will win, we will win.
We’ll string up the aristocrats!
Despotism will die, Liberty will triumph
We will win, we will win, we will win….
Equality will reign throughout the world….
We will win, we will win, we will win.
    —“Ça Ira,” 1790 2
    S OON AFTER the citizens of New Orleans finished mourning the death of Carlos III and celebrating the accession of his son to the throne of Spain, Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró received a troubling visit from an often troublesome Capuchin monk. The Reverend Father Francisco Antonio Ildefonso de Sedella—Pére Antoine as he was known with some affection long after the Louisiana Purchase—was born in the Spanish province of Granada. Conquered by the Saracens in the eighth century, the area was ruled by the Moors into the fifteenth century, and the young man who grew up in the shadow of their Alhambra had fervently embraced the religion of the Crusaders. At twenty-three Sedellahad joined the Capuchin order in Canada, and a decade later he had come to Louisiana in 1781. Pére Antoine affiliated himself with the priests of St. Louis Church (now Cathedral) on the Place d’Armes in the heart of New Orleans and always wore the
cappuccio,
or hooded robe, of the Capuchin order.
    At nine o’clock on April 28, 1790, Father Sedella rushed into Governor Miró’s office with all the impatient self-righteousness that fueled his life of recurrent conflict with civil and religious authorities. The Capuchinpresented the weary governor with a letter newly arrived from the inquisitor general of