To James Madison from George W. Erving, 10 August 1816
From George W. Erving
Private & confidential
Madrid August 10th 1816.
Dear Sir
The matter which follows in Cypher I received yesterday in the strictest confidence; but have finally obtained permission to communicate it to you in Cypher; what is personal in it is known only to the principal party, to my informant & to myself; it may become, if no accident or caprice, or change of policy or of personal credit intervenes of very great importance to the United States.
My informant is an old friend very much attached to me & on whom I can rely & he is interested in ascertaining & in stating to me the truth.
I have used the cypher last sent to me (by Mr Smith) it has several errors which may give some trouble in the decyphering if the original has the same faults as my copy; but I have been very careful in Examing on both sides of the cypher the numbers contained in this letter & trust that there is not any mistake in it.
In a private letter of the 31st. August to Mr Monroe1 I said that
The next expedition from this country would probably be to Mexico. That which is now fitting out as is pretended for Buenos Ayres is to go to Mexico. It is to be commanded by General ODonnell Count of Abispal.2 He has planned the expedition himself. Two millions of dollars are appropriated and are prepared for the expedition].3 It will sail in the month of November. He is to take with him but one division but he takes officers of his own selection for an army of fifty thousand men. Among those officers all his male relations. He takes also a great quantity of military stores.
This ODonnel (there is another general or two of the name) is one of the first officers in Europe, but he is of a violent impetuous proud vindictive temper. He is the marshal Ney of Spain and he is acting very much the part that Ney acted in the year 1815. The king on account of his great merits and his peculiar services in the restoration made him Captain General of andalusia and then always fearing him took away the employ in this way he considers himself aggreived and vows vengeance and being a man of strong natural talents and shrewdness has finally succeeded in getting into a position where he may be able to execute his purpose. He says that he regrets even having drawn his sword for Ferdinand who is the greatest rascal for so great a fool that he even knew & that he will be revenged] on him. This he said to my friend yesterday and he told him that the United States shoud have no difficulty with him about boundaries. He is very much attached to America hates most cordially the English. The king proposed to him to accept the vice royalty but he answered that he was nothing but a soldier and did not know how to govern civil affairs so he goes as general in chief with unlimited powers & I am persuaded goes to make himself King of Mexico. Dear Sir With the most sincere respect & attachment your very obliged & obt St
George W Erving
RC, two copies (MHi: Winthrop Family Papers). First RC in Erving’s hand. Second RC in a clerk’s hand, except for Erving’s mark “Duplicate,” complimentary close, signature, and postscript, which reads: “PS. Tho the above is in the hand writing of my Secretary, he is not informed of its contents. GWE.” Unless otherwise noted, italicized words in the first RC are written in a State Department code used on a number of occasions after 1800 and interlinearly decoded here by a State Department clerk (see Weber, United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 155–56, 194, 455–66).
1. Erving’s 31 Aug. 1816 partly coded, “private & confidential” letter to James Monroe contained no such description of an expedition to Mexico (DNA: RG 59, DD, Spain). In an earlier letter to Monroe, dated 30 July 1816, also marked “private & confidential,” Erving stated that there was “no possibility” of Spain sending “more than 10 or 12.000 men to the colonies” (NN: Monroe Papers). He repeated this information in his 29 Aug. 1816 dispatch to the State Department, adding that it was “scarcely worth mentioning” and “when if ever it can sail it is impossible to say” (DNA: RG 59, DD, Spain).
2. Of Irish descent, Enrique Jose O’Donnell (1769–1834) entered the military service of Spain in 1793 and won major victories over French forces at the Battle of La Bispal (1810) and at the siege of Pamplona (1813), for which he was created conde de La Bispal and later appointed captain-general of Andalusia in 1814. He commanded Spanish troops in the unsuccessful expedition to the Río de la Plata in 1818, after which he was dismissed by Ferdinand VII in 1819. He subsequently broke with the king over the use of French troops to restore royalist authority in 1823 and retired to France (Germán Bleiberg, ed., Diccionario de historia de España, 2nd ed. [3 vols.; Madrid, 1968–69], 3:80–81; Timothy E. Anna, Spain & the Loss of America [Lincoln, Neb., 1983], 202–3, 210, 219–20).
3. Encoded “expence,” decoded “expedition.”