Editor’s note: This article includes excerpts from the introductory chapter of “Serpent In Eden” by Tyson Reeder and published by Oxford University Press in the U.S. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
In late November or early December 1811, Paul-Émile Soubiran wandered the deck of the Boston-bound New Galen. Years of shady escapades and double-dealing had finally caught up with the French con artist, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s police had chased him out of Europe. Fleeing first to England, he had boarded the New Galen for Boston in November. Among the other passengers, he masqueraded as the Count Edouard de Crillon. Meanwhile, he schemed for a way back into Napoleon’s good graces.
While he strolled through the night air on the ship’s deck, Soubiran happened to encounter a man named John Henry, another dejected traveler and, unbeknown to Soubiran, a former British spy. He had met Henry before and noticed that the Irishman usually dined alone and shot pistols on deck to while away the voyage.
As the pair talked in the darkness, Henry confided in Soubiran. Two years earlier, Governor General James Craig of British Canada had employed Henry as a secret agent in America. He had commissioned Henry to determine whether President James Madison’s political opponents — the Federalists — might consider severing their stronghold of New England and seceding from the United States. Federalist New England might then become a British ally in the war against Napoleon’s France — an idea the staunchly anti-British Madison would never entertain.
Henry had felt slighted when in exchange for his work he received a paltry compensation. The former spy traveled to Britain to seek a more substantial sum or at least a government appointment for his services. He failed. Embittered and impoverished, he boarded the New Galen for his return to America.
Henry told Soubiran about some documents he had retained from his secret mission. Soubiran recognized a chance at redemption in France and formulated a plan. Still acting as the Count de Crillon, he proposed that they cooperate with the French government to sell the papers to the Madison administration. He guessed that the president would pay handsomely for documents that detailed a secret British mission to conspire with his political opponents. Henry could exact revenge on the British, Soubiran could impress French officials, and they both could swindle the U.S. government.
Though anything involving Soubiran exists in the realm of a John le Carré novel, that seems a probable reconstruction of what happened aboard the New Galen. Once in the United States, Soubiran and Henry related their plan to Louis Sérurier, the French envoy in Washington. Sérurier cautiously advanced the scheme in hope that it would alert Madison to Governor Craig’s intrigues and push the United States closer to war with Britain. Careful not to dirty his own hands, he used Soubiran as his proxy.
Soubiran and Henry managed to see President Madison and convinced him that the documents in their possession would prove a conspiracy between Federalists and Britain. Intrigued, the president purchased the stash for $50,000 of public money, an incredible expense. He could have built a warship for about the same amount. To his own embarrassment, he learned that although the papers revealed British connivance, they contained no incriminating information about his political opposition.
Once it all became public, Federalists riddled Madison with charges of misconduct for using public funds to purchase documents meant to discredit their party. Madison countered that the British had employed Henry to subvert the U.S. government and dismember the union. It was an act of war.
All the players in this tawdry episode — John Henry, Paul-Émile Soubiran, James Craig, Louis Sérurier, and even President Madison— participated in a destructive cycle that plagued the early republic: Foreign powers meddled in U.S. politics; U.S. partisans accused each other of colluding with foreign powers; those accusations deepened party animosity; that animosity made it easier for foreign powers to meddle in U.S. politics.
Though not indisputably the early republic’s most egregious scandal of the kind, the Henry-Soubiran incident crystallizes the malicious harmony between foreign meddling and partisan hostility. To Federalists, Soubiran was a French serpent who had beguiled the administration, while Republicans described Henry as a British serpent who tempted their opponents to treachery. Each side was convinced that the other imperiled their republican paradise.
Yet the United States was no Eden. After independence, it was a war-torn land with a floundering economy and an uncertain future. The new republic didn’t leap onto the world stage as a major player; it limped on as a European pawn. The expansive nation boasted the “trunk and limbs of a Giant,” quipped one foreigner, but the “muscles of an infant.” Unlike their grandchildren, who would embrace Uncle Sam as a symbol of American virility, early Americans usually represented their republic as a fair woman — precious but vulnerable.
As a party system developed in the United States, dominated by Federalists on the one hand and Republicans on the other, policy disagreements descended into factional tribalism. Mistrust led each side to accuse the other of foreign collusion. Partisans sometimes indulged in the very behavior they denounced, recruiting foreigners to counter the purportedly corrupt, foreign-backed ambitions of their political opponents. The path was well trodden by the time Madison paid Henry and Soubiran. As early as 1789, when Alexander Hamilton feared that the French stoked Madison’s anti-British legislation, he opened secretive, unauthorized backchannels with a British agent to counter the effort. Across more than two decades, the nation spiraled into a destructive symbiosis between foreign meddling and partisan politics.
Tyson Reeder teaches history at Brigham Young University and taught previously at the University of Virginia, where he was an editor of “The Papers of James Madison.” He is the author of “Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution” (2019) and editor of the “Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations” (2021), in addition to numerous articles and book chapters. This latest book, “Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America,” is being released this summer.
