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American front in France’s centuries-old struggle against Britain, but after he lost an army to yellow fever in St. Domingue (Haiti), he reconsidered and in 1803 sold Louisiana to the surprised Thomas Jefferson, who had sent envoys to Paris to purchase merely New Orleans. At the time, the confusion that had started with La Salle still surrounded the southwestern border of Louisiana, and neither Napoleon nor his foreign minister, Talleyrand, did anything to dispel it. “If an obscurity did not already exist,” Napoleon remarked to an aide, “it would perhaps be good policy to put one there.” Talleyrand enigmatically congratulated his American interlocutors: “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
    In fact, the American government made less of the Louisiana bargain, as it touched Texas, than did certain Americans acting on their own. Aaron Burr, already notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the New Jersey shore, compounded his notoriety by fleeing west and conniving to become master of some portion of the land between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. Over whiskey and maps, Burr and James Wilkinson, Moses Austin’s bête noire, evidently discussed detaching portions of Louisiana and Texas from the United States and Mexico to create an empire of the Southwest. Burr had little difficulty finding followers among the land-hungry, Indian-fighting populations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where Hamilton’s death was generally applauded. Andrew Jackson, a veteran duelist himself, contributed cash and moral support to the Burr cause; men of lesser means signed on for the prospect of winning farms and plantations in Louisiana and Texas.
    During the summer of 1806 the West bubbled with Burr’s plotting. Volunteers mustered along the Ohio; boats were secured and supplies purchased for the journey to the front. But the plotting got away from Burr. Newspapers picked up the story and circulated it east. Federalists demanded that Jefferson act to suppress the patent separatism; a Federalist prosecutor in Kentucky charged Burr with treason. He dodged this charge but in the process lost whatever cover his conspiracy had retained. He was arrested by federal agents in Mississippi territory, then jumped bail and fled toward Spanish Florida. He was rearrested in Alabama territory and dispatched to Virginia for trial.
    The case became a landmark in American legal history when Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall defied Jefferson and held the court to the strict constitutional standard of proof of treasonous acts, and Burr was acquitted. But the enthusiasm with which American frontiersmen had embraced the idea of invading Texas and making it their own augured ill for the tranquillity of New Spain’s northeastern province.

    What augured worse was the continuing weakness of Spain itself, which was the reason the Spanish had lost Louisiana to the French in the first place. Historically an ally of France, Spain became Napoleon’s pawn in the wars that convulsed Europe during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. The wars bled Spain financially, and as part of their effort to raise money, Spanish authorities extorted loans from landholders in New Spain. The loans forced the sale of holdings among elites who had been a mainstay of loyalty to the Spanish crown; many of these elites, observing the prosperity of the United States after thirty years of independence, pondered whether independence might suit them too.
    Dissatisfaction grew after the French invasion of Spain in 1808, which led to the deposing of King Ferdinand VII in favor of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte. As Spain rose in rebellion against the usurper and demanded restoration of the lawful monarch, Spanish America did likewise, although the sentiment
against
France was stronger than sentiment
for
Ferdinand. In 1810 a priest in the