A Wilderness So Immense

by Jon Kukla

  As the astonishing news spread, letters of congratulations poured into the White House. “It has the air of enchantment,” seventy-five-year-old General Horatio Gates wrote from his home at Rose Hill, New York, “as the greatest and most beneficial event that has taken place since the Declaration of Independence.” An admirer from Tennessee, David Campbell, wrote that “in its magnitude it approaches to a second Declaration of Independence.” So common was the analogy between the Louisiana Purchase and independence that even the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón, described the transaction as “the greatest achievement in the history of the United States since their independence.”7

  Ohio senator John Smith voiced the other common comparison. The “permanent and exclusive” control of the Mississippi was the greatest contribution toward “peace and harmony among ourselves,” Smith wrote, “since the establishment of the federal constitution.” For the moment at least, as Pichón reported to Talleyrand, “the enemies of the President seem to be truly stupefied.”8

  Jefferson’s “hourly expectation of the treaty by a special messenger” was too optimistic by more than a week. Livingston and Monroe had sent copies by three different messengers. The fastest courier delivered the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the two conventions, and their cover letter to the president on Thursday evening, July 14—Bastille Day.9

  Despite their achievement, Livingston and Monroe adopted an almost apologetic tone in their letter transmitting the text of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty to Jefferson and Madison. “An acquisition of so great an extent was, we well Know, not contemplated by our appointment,” they wrote,

  but we are persuaded that the Circumstances and Considerations which induced us to make it, will justify us, in the measure, to our Government and Country.

  “Before the negociation commenced,” they wrote, “the first Consul had decided to offer to the U[nited] States by sale the whole of Louisiana, and not a part of it.” As their discussions continued they had discovered “that Mr. Marbois was absolutely restricted to the disposition of the whole” as well, and “that he would treat for no less portion, and … that it was useless to urge it.”10

  Had Bonaparte been willing to sell only New Orleans, they admitted, acquiring possession of the east bank of the Mississippi River would have fulfilled their instructions. But in time “a divided Jurisdiction over the River” was certain to “beget jealousies, discontents and dissentions which the wisest policy on our part could not prevent.” By acquiring both banks of “this great River and all the streams that empty into it… the apprehension of these disasters is banished for ages.”11

  They saw many advantages in the acquisition of the entire Louisiana territory. The purchase bolstered American neutrality. “We separate ourselves in great measure from the European World and its concerns, especially its wars and intrigues.” It was a step toward economic self-sufficiency—“a great stride to real and substantial independence … in all our foreign and domestic Relations.” They hoped that it might cement “the Bond of our Union … by the encreased parity of interest” between west and east, south and north. And finally, on the world stage, “without exciting the apprehensions of any Power,” it gave the young American republic “a more imposing attitude, with respect to all.”12

  With the text of the treaty at last in hand, Jefferson summoned his cabinet to meet on Saturday, July 16, to plan their next steps. At Bonaparte’s insistence, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty set an October 30 deadline for ratification. Jefferson’s first question to the cabinet was, “Shall Congress be called, or only Senate and when?” Their unanimous recommendation was to convene both houses of Congress on October 17. In preparation, Secretary of State Madison would send copies of the treaty to the senators and congressmen with a letter explaining “that the call 3 weeks earlier than they had fixed was rend[ere]d necessary by the treaty, and urging a punctual attendance on the 1st day”13

  Jefferson and his cabinet also decided that “the substance of the treaty [should] be made public, but not the treaty itself.” They wanted Daniel Clark, the American consul at New Orleans, to turn “his attention to the public property [to be] transferred to us” including “archives, papers and documents.” In case the Spanish reacted angrily, Jefferson and his cabinet resolved to send William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the Mississippi Territory, to take possession of New Orleans “and act as Governor and Intendant under the Spanish laws, leaving every thing to go on as heretofore [and] making no innovation, nor doing a single act which will bear postponing.” Two companies of troops would be put on alert at Fort Adams, which commanded the Mississippi River at the American boundary, midway between Natchez and Baton Rouge. Jefferson wanted to “get the Spanish troops off as soon as possible.”14

  After considering the domestic implications of the treaty, the cabinet turned its attention to Livingston and Monroe, voicing unanimous approval for “their having treated for Louisiana and the price given.” Jefferson, Madison, Dearborn, and Smith agreed to inform their diplomats that they saw “no reason to doubt ratification of the whole.” Mr. Gallatin, the president noted, had scruples about the separation of powers and “disapprove[d] of this last as committing members of the Congress. All the other points unanimous.”15

  As the meeting drew to a close, Jefferson and his cabinet addressed one last concern. Ever since Juan Ventura Morales had precipitated the Mississippi crisis on October 16, 1802, Jefferson and his friends had been proclaiming the critical importance both of New Orleans and the Floridas. His ministers had accomplished vastly more than anyone expected. Still, if measured against the letter of their instructions, they had sent home only half a loaf. How important were the Floridas?

  In light of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the cabinet’s answer was a frugal and resounding shrug. “We are more indifferent about the purchase of the Floridas,” Jefferson noted, “because of the money we have to provide for Louisiana.” Their indifference was also rooted in a typically Jeffersonian anticipation of the future—“because we think they cannot fail to fall in our hands.” Westerners immediately agreed. “As to the Floridas,” Senator John Breckinridge wrote from Lexington, Kentucky, “I really consider their acquisition as of no consequence for the present. We can obtain them long before we shall want them, and upon our own terms.”16

  Although the success of Jefferson’s emissaries astonished the entire nation, the president’s political adversaries did not remain “stupefied” for very long. Indeed, the first Federalist criticisms of the Louisiana Purchase came ashore with Rufus King. Ten weeks at sea gave King ample time for reflection upon the implications of the Louisiana Purchase. As to the western territory, King’s opinions dated back to his flirtation with New England separatism during the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786. Once again, as King was preparing for his departure from London in May 1803, Americans there heard him complain that the Louisiana territory “will be too extensive” and “impossible to govern.”17

  James Monroe and his friend Fulwar Skipwith warned the administration of King’s hostile opinions (and of the political ambitions that led to his candidacy for the vice presidency in 1804), but George William Erving was more blunt about his colleague the ambassador. Educated in England but a staunch republican from King’s adopted New York, Erving had been sharply attacked by the Federalist press when his appointment as the American consul in London displaced Timothy Pickering’s nephew, Samuel Williams, “a favorite child of the Essex tribe.” Erving was “an offensive aristocrat in manners and habits,” the New-England Palladium sneered from Boston, “but a jacobin in principle.”18

  Ambassador King, Erving warned Secretary of State Madison, was “a very artificial and dangerous character—a man with two faces.” He was “a sort of Janus in his common intercourse with the world,” Erving contended, “and he would be a Sejanus in certain political circumstances”—an allusion to the ambitious praetorian guard Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who had poisoned the son of the Roman emperor Tiber
ius while plotting to place himself on the imperial throne.19 Madison and Monroe had their own misgivings about the returning ambassador, for each had witnessed Rufus King’s duplicity firsthand during the congressional intrigues over the Mississippi River in the 1780s.

  While nay-saying New England Federalists fumed about the Louisiana Purchase, Alexander Hamilton’s immediate reaction—an intricate blend of realism, partisanship, and regional pride—influenced his compatriots in the middle states, the south, and the west. The Louisiana Purchase was beneficial, Hamilton announced in an unsigned New-York Evening Post editorial published on July 5, just days after the news reached America, not because it expanded American territory but because it “was essential to the peace and prosperity of our Western country,” and because it opened “a free and valuable market to our commercial states.” So long as the price was not “too dear,” Hamilton condoned the “exultation which the friends of the administration display, and which all Americans may be allowed to feel.”20

  “This purchase has been made during the period of Mr. Jefferson’s presidency,” Hamilton had to admit,

  and will, doubtless, give éclat to his administration. Every man, however, possessed of the least candour and reflection will readily acknowledge that the acquisition has been solely owing to a fortuitous concurrence of unforeseen and unexpected circumstances, and not to any wise or vigorous measures on the part of the American government.

  “The real truth is,” Hamilton continued after several paragraphs about Spain and France and St. Domingue, “Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled … to relinquish his darling plan of colonizing the banks of the Mississippi.” This alone enabled Jefferson’s administration to achieve “what the feebleness and pusillanimity of its miserable system of measures could never have acquired.” Moreover, “after making due allowance for great events,” if Hamilton were to assign credit for the Louisiana Purchase to anyone, “the merit of it… [was] due to our ambassador Chancellor Livingston [of New York], and not to the Envoy Extraordinary” from Virginia, James Monroe.21

  Louisiana’s immense acreage was “extremely problematical” for Hamilton. New Orleans would have been “perfectly adequate to every purpose,” he thought, “for whoever is in possession of that, has the uncontrouled command of the river.” Perhaps in time the United States might barter the Louisiana territory “for the Floridas,” which Hamilton regarded as “obviously of far greater value to us than all the immense, undefined region west of the river.” Calculating that only one sixteenth of American territory east of the Mississippi was “yet under occupation,” Hamilton regarded expansion west of the river as “too distant and remote to strike the mind of a sober politician with much force.”22

  Hamilton saw the dangers of the Louisiana Purchase as readily apparent. America was sure to suffer “all the injuries of a too widely dispersed population”—and worse. “By adding to the great weight of the western part of our territory,” Hamilton predicted, the Louisiana Purchase “must hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the Government.” And finally there was the existing population. “How they are to be governed is another question,” Hamilton wrote. “Whether as a colony”—with the risk of transforming the American republic into an empire—“or … an integral part of the United States”—despite differences of language, culture, religion, and ethnicity. “The probable consequences” of the Louisiana Purchase, Alexander Hamilton concluded,

  and the ultimate effect it is likely to produce on the political state of our country, will furnish abundant matter of speculation to the American statesman.

  In a parting shot at the president, Hamilton attributed all credit for the treaty to his fellow New Yorker, Chancellor Livingston. “The cession was voted in [Bonaparte’s] Council of State on the 8th of April,” Hamilton wrote (adopting a chronology that must have been supplied by Rufus King), “and Mr. Munro did not even arrive till the 12th.”23

  A week after Hamilton’s unsigned editorial appeared in New York, more strident opinions began to fill New England’s Federalist newspapers. On Thursday, July 13, a letter in Boston’s Columbian Centinel opened the litany of complaint. The author, who identified himself as Fabricius, was none other than the High Federalist of Dedham, Massachusetts, Fisher Ames. Forced into retirement in 1797 by the lung disease that would claim his life at the age of fifty on the Fourth of July 1808, Ames had led the Federalist party in the House of Representatives during the Washington administration. Through his brilliant newspaper essays and an extensive private correspondence, this self-described leader of the Essex Junto retained an influence among New England Federalists rivaled in 1803 only by Hamilton’s.24

  Louisiana, Ames declared, was “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” Although the exact figure had not yet been announced, Fabricius reckoned that the price was too high: “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much.” Fresh land in the west was sure to “drain our people away from the pursuit of… manufactures and commerce.” Worst of all, the watershed of the Mississippi “may be cut up into States without number, but each with two votes in the Senate.” Supported by their vassals in the west, the slaveholders of the Old Dominion would dominate the enlarged nation—“imperial Virginia, arbitress of the whole.”25

  Fisher Ames and his Federalist friends regarded Virginia’s lust for possession of the Mississippi watershed—dating back to the congressional dispute over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786—as proof of the Old Dominion’s malevolent passion for preeminence in national politics. “The great state,” Ames wrote Timothy Dwight, editor of the Hartford Courant and the Connecticut Mirror, “has the ambition to be the great nation.” While New Englanders “make turnpikes and busy ourselves with local objects,” Ames complained to Rufus King, “Virginia rides the great horse.” The Old Dominion, Ames fretted in an essay published after his death, was large enough to subvert the American republic into an imperial monarchy. By expanding the nation into the “unmeasured world beyond that river,” he lamented to Boston Federalist Christopher Gore, the republic was rushing

  like a comet into infinite space. In our wild career, we may jostle some other world out of its orbit, but we shall, in every event, quench the light of our own.

  “Is Virginia to be our Rome?” Ames asked, as he projected Jefferson into the role of Caesar or the Emperor Bonaparte. “Why should it be supposed,” he wondered,

  that the Northern States, who possess so prodigious a preponderance of white population, of industry, commerce, and civilization over the Southern, will remain subject to Virginia?26

  Race and ethnicity—as well as calculations of regional self-interest—figured prominently in Federalist attitudes. “Virginia holds her preponderance, as mistress of the Union,” Ames complained in an essay for the Repertory that was reprinted in the Boston Gazette, because the three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the south an advantage in congressional representation and the Electoral College. “Without the black votes, Mr. Jefferson would not have been president,” Ames wrote, referring not to black voters but to the extra weight that the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution added to the votes of their masters. In order to terminate an “inequality [that] will be still more extended by the acquisition of Louisiana,” Timothy Pickering introduced a constitutional amendment to compute state representation solely on the basis of free population—but it died on the table in the United States Senate. Decisions about America’s future, Fisher Ames wrote in the New-England Palladium, were being decided by “three fifths of the ancient dominion, and the offscourings of Europe.”27

  Federalists regarded the residents of Louisiana with similar disdain and Article III of the treaty with disgust. “Having bought an empire,” Ames asked, “who is to be emperor? The sovereign people? and what people? all, or only the people of the dominant states?” Otters, he fumed, were more capable of se
lf-government than Louisiana’s

  Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers, whose pure morals are expected to sustain and glorify our republic. Never before was it attempted to play the fool on so great a scale.

  “New Orleans,” a meandering Federalist reported to Alexander Hamilton from the relative safety of Natchez, is

  a place inhabited by a Mixture of Americans, English, Spanish, and French and crouded every year … with two or three thousand boatmen from die back country, remark[able] for their dissipated habits, unruly tempers, and lawless conduct… and where die white population bears so small a proportion to die black … [that] die Blacks have already been guilty of two or three insurrections within a few years back.

  “Should this precious treaty go into operation,” warned Josiah Quincy, a future president of Harvard College, “I doubt not [that] thick skinned beasts will crowd Congress Hall, Buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and Alligators from the Red River.” The size of Louisiana and the diversity of its population were threats to the republic. “In a territory so extensive as the United States, comprising within its limits … peoples whose sentiments, habits, manners, and prejudices, are very different, and whose local interests and attachments are various,” a Fourth of July orator reminded the citizens of tiny Conway Massachusetts, in 1804, “it is not strange that the seed of division should exist.”28