by Jon Kukla
The legislature shall have no authority to dispose of the lands of the province otherwise than as hereinbefore permitted, until a new Amendment of the constitution shall give that authority. Except as to that portion thereof which lies South of the latitude of 31 degrees; which whenever they deem expedient, they may erect into a territorial Government, either separate or making part with one on the eastern side of the river, vesting the inhabitants thereof with all the rights possessed by other territorial citizens of the U.S.
2. About July g, 1803, after reviewing Jefferson’s draft, James Madison offered him this alternative amendment.2
Louisiana as ceded by France is made part of the U. States. Congress may make part of the U.S. other adjacent territories which shall be justly acquired.
Congress may sever from the U.S. territory not heretofore within the U. States, with consent of a majority of the free males above 21 years, inhabiting such territory.
3. On July g, 1803, after reviewing Jefferson’s draft, Navy Secretary Robert Smith offered Jefferson the following draft:3
Louisiana being in virtue of the Treaty etc incorporated with the United States and being thereby a part of the Territory thereof Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the same as fully and effectually as if the same had been at the time of the establishment of the Constitution a part of the Territory of the U. States: provided nevertheless that Congress shall not have power to erect or establish in that portion of Louisiana which is situated North of the Latitude of /32/ degrees any new State or territorial government nor to grant to any citizen or citizens or other individual or individuals excepting Indians any right or title whatever to any part of the said portion of Louisiana until a new Amendment to the Constitution shall give that authority.
4. After July g, 1803, Jefferson prepared this second draft amendment.4
Louisiana, as ceded by France to the U.S. is made part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous situations. Save only that as to the portion thereof lying North of an East and West line drawn through the mouth of Arkansa river, no new State shall be established, nor any grants of land made, other than to Indians in exchange for equivalent portions of land occupied by them, until authorized by further subsequent amendment to the Constitution [which] shall be made for these purposes.
Florida also, whenever it may be rightfully obtained, shall become a part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall thereupon be Citizens and shall stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous situations.
5. On August 24, Jefferson enclosed his last draft in a letter to James Madison stating that upon “further reflection on the amendment to the constitution necessary in the case of Louisiana,” he had decided that “it will be better to give general powers, with specified exceptions, somewhat in the way stated below.”5
Louisiana, as ceded by France to the U.S., is made part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous situations.
Save only that as to the portion thereof lying North of the latitude of the mouth of Arcansa river, no new state shall be established, nor any grants of land made therein, other than to Indians in exchange for equivalent portions of land occupied by them, until an amendment to the Constitution shall be made for these purposes.
Florida also, whensoever it may be rightfully obtained, shall become a part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall thereupon be citizens, and shall stand as to their rights and obligations on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous circumstances.
A Note on Texts and Translations
This book relies heavily on documentary sources, both from manuscripts and from the variety of comprehensive editions that have become hallmarks of modern American scholarship. Based on the canons of modern documentary scholarship, so-called accidentals are handled consistently in quotations from all documentary sources. Terminal periods in abbreviations are omitted unless retained in modern usage, thus, James Monroe’s wold, is presented as wo[u]ld but Mr. remains Mr. Superior letters are brought to the line of the text. Ampersands and &c are generally spelled out, and Jefferson’s frequent use of it’s for its is silently corrected. Jefferson and his contemporaries invented many ways to spell Mississippi; I employ the single modern spelling. When quoting from a modern documentary edition, I generally suppress the editorial apparatus used to identify interlineations, passages written in code or cipher, or readings supplied by a reliable editor. When it is important for the reader to be aware of the original orthography, I comment upon it in the text or notes. Underscored words from manuscript sources are set in italics, and italics are retained when they were used for emphasis rather than typographical decoration in printed sources. The notes identify those few instances in which I employ italics to convey my own emphasis within a quotation (e.g., when Rufus King wrote of his “particular country” in 1786), and the notes also indicate those few occasions when an author underscored the entire quoted passage for emphasis. When quoting from older translations of primary sources (principally the WPA-era Spanish Despatches), I have corrected obvious typographical errors and rendered a few awkwardly translated phrases into idiomatic English. For liturgical texts familiar in Latin to eighteenth-century men and women, I have used translations that echo the sturdy language of American hymns and liturgy.
All my interpolations in quoted passages are presented within brackets, including the occasional substitution of a noun for a pronoun (e.g., Madison’s (or his) or a third-person for a first-person pronoun (e.g., her for my). The notes direct anyone to my original sources. With few exceptions, the notes refrain from comment about historiographical debates, nor are they intended as a complete bibliography of works consulted. Information from the Dictionary of American Biography, American National Biography, Biographical Directory of the American Congress, Hornbook of Virginia History, and other standard reference works is used without citation.
SHORT TITLES
AHR American Historical Review
Dangerfield, Livingston George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1813 (New York, 1960)
HAHR Hispanic American Historical Review
JAH Journal of American History
Jefferson Papers Julian P. Boyd, Charles Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara Oberg et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, 1950-)
Letters of Delegates Paul H. Smith, Ronald M. Gephart et al., eds., Letters of the Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, D.C., 1976–2000)
LH Louisiana History
LHQ Louisiana Historical Quarterly
Madison Papers William T. Hutchinson, William M. E. Rachal, Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., Papers of James Madison (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962-)
Madison Papers: State Robert J. Brugger, Mary A. Hackett, David B. Mattern et al., eds., Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series (Charlottesville, 1986-)
MVHR Mississippi Valley Historical Review
Robertson, Louisiana James Alexander Robertson, Louisiana Under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, 1785–1807 (New York, 1910–1911)
Schama, Citizens Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989)
Spanish Despatches Despatches of the Spanish Governors (Works Progress Administration typescripts, 1937–1938), Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University
State Papers and Correspondence State Papers and Correspondence Bearing upon the Purchase of the Territory of Louisiana (Washington, D.C., 1903)
Territorial Papers Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 9, Territory of Orleans, 1803–1812 (Washington, D.C., 1940)
VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Washington Papers W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds., Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series (Charlottesville, 1992–1997)
Notes
TRIBUTARIES
1. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954), 7–10.
2. Led to the headwaters of the Mississippi River by an Anishinabe guide named Ozawindib, the pioneering ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft gave Lake Itasca its name in 1832, a coinage from portions of the Latin words for truth and head: verITAS CAput. Statements of the length of the Mississippi River vary from 2,340 to 2,552 miles, in part because the river is constantly extending its delta into the Gulf and altering its course with bends and cutoffs. I have my parents’ photographs of my sister Connie and me playing at the headwaters of the Mississippi on a 1953 excursion from Verndale, Minnesota, about seventy miles south of the little lake. The river left no lasting impression in my memory, but the steam locomotives and their coaling towers in Wadena did, as did the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, at a park in Bemidji, a few miles north of Lake Itasca.
CHAPTER ONE: PIECE BY PIECE
1. Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 1786, Jefferson Papers, 9: 217–19.
2. Thomas Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay January 25, 1786, Jefferson Papers, 9: 219–22.
3. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, April 18, 1790, quoted in James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2d ser. (Princeton, 1997), 771.
4. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, 432–33, 713–14; Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993), 18–28, 103, 350–63, 370, 428–33; Edward T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York, 1952), 131–91.
5. Howard C. Rice, L’Hôtel de Langeac: Jefferson’s Paris Residence, 1785–1789 (Paris and Monticello, 1947); Stein, Worlds of Thomas Jefferson, 18–28; interview with Susan R. Stein, December 1, 1999.
6. Interview with Lucia C. Stanton, December 6, 1999; Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, October 1, 1785, in Richard Alan Ryerson et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence: vols. 5 and 6, October 1782-December 1785 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 6: 396, cf 391.
7. Stanton interview; Abigail Adams to Elizabeth Cranch, September 5, 1784, Adams Family Correspondence, 5: 433; Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, 567.
8. George Green Schackelford, Jefferson’s Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1848 (Lexington, Ky, 1993), 13–132; Jon Kukla, “Flirtation and Feux d’Artifices: Mr. Jefferson, Mrs. Cosway, and Fireworks,” Virginia Cavalcade 26 (Autumn 1976): 52–63.
9. Family details are from Dumas Malone, Thomas Jefferson and His Time (6 vols., Boston and New York, 1948–1981); Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Flemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, 1997); Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Flemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, 1999); and my conversations with Lucia C. Stanton and Diane Swann-Wright, November-December 1999. Genealogical charts are found in Malone, Jefferson, 1: 426–34, and Lewis and Onuf, Hemings and Jefferson, xii. The articles in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly 89, no. 3 (September 2001): 165–237, provide a reliable summary of the evidence about Jefferson and Hemings.
10. Malone, Jefferson, 1: 366.
11. Jefferson to Adams, September 25, 1785, Adams Family Correspondence, 6: 391; Jefferson to Monroe, May 20, 1782, Jefferson Tapers, 6: 185.
12. Martha Jefferson’s recollections, Jefferson Tapers, 6: 199–200.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Jefferson to Chastellux, November 26, 1782, Jefferson Tapers, 6: 203.
18. The correspondence about Polly Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s voyage is collected in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Fetters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1959), 178–86.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. “Not until the summer of 1787 was the circle of his little family completed,” Dumas Malone wrote in his monumental biography of Jefferson, “and not until then did the American Minister become fully reconciled to life in France” (Malone, Jefferson, 2: 12). Ironically, exactly fifty years after the publication of this statement, DNA evidence regarding Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’s children amplified Malone’s statement in ways that the admiring biographer never intended (“Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature 396 [Nov. 5, 1998]: 27–8; Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “Founding Father,” ibid., 13–14).
23. Jefferson’s correspondence of January 25–26, 1786, is published in Jefferson Papers, 9: 215–22.
24. Randolph C. Dowries, “Trade in Frontier Ohio,” MVHR 16 (1930): 469–71.
25. Stuart to Jefferson, October 25, 1785, Jefferson Papers, 8: 644–47.
26. B. L. Rayner, Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson, with Selections of the Most Valuable Portions of His Voluminous and Unrivaled Private Correspondence (New York, 1832), 524; Fiske Kimball, The Capitol of Virginia: A Landmark of American Architecture, ed. Jon Kukla (Richmond, 1989), 12–13.
27. Kimball, Capitol of Virginia, 12–13, 22.
28. Ibid., 18, 58–59.
29. Ibid., 22–23.
30. Ibid., 25, 59, 60.
CHAPTER TWO: CARLOS III AND SPANISH LOUISIANA
1. The earl of Bristol to William Pitt, August 31, 1761, quoted in Sir Charles Petrie, King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot (London and New York, 1971), 96–97.
2. Petrie, Charles III of Spain, 164–65.
3. Ibid., 165.
4. The original 1786–1788 portrait is owned by the duquessa de Fernán de Núñez in Madrid; four replicas hang in the Prado and other collections; Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson, The Life and Complete Works of Francisco Goya (Paris, 1970; New York, 1971), 31, 78, 95; OED, s.v cordon.
5. Petrie, Charles III of Spain; John D. Bergamini, The Spanish Bourbons: The History of a Tenacious Dynasty (New York, 1974), 83–101; Marcel Brion, Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Glory and the Grief (New York, 1 960), 38–59; Joseph Jay Davis, The Town of Hercules: A Buried Treasure Trove (rev. ed., Malibu, Calif, 1995), 37–49.
6. A. P. Whitaker, “James Wilkinson’s First Descent to New Orleans in 1787,” HAHR 8 (1928): 82–97; Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2 (1984), 34.
7. Anthony H. Hull, Charles III and the Revival of Spain (Lanham, Md., 1981), 403.
8. Bergamini, Spanish Bourbons, 86.
9. Hull, Charles III, 304.
10. Eleta’s first name is mentioned in W N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley Eighteenth-Century Spain, 1700–1788: A Political, Diplomatic and Institutional History (Totowa, N.J., 1979), 115; Petrie, Charles III of Spain, 229.
11. Bergamini, Spanish Bourbons, 101.
12. Records and Deliberations of the Cabildo, Book no. 3, from January 1, 1788, to May 18, 1792; City Archives, New Orleans Public Library 55–57.
13. Jacques Marquette, “The Mississippi Voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, 1673,” in Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699 (New York, 1917), 256.
14. Henri de Tonty “Memoir on Pa Salle’s Discoveries, by Tonty, 1678–1690,” in Kellogg, Early Narratives of the Northwest, 302; Francis Park-man, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston, 1903), 308.
15. D. A. Brading, “Mexican Silver-Mining in the Eighteenth Century: The Revival of Zacatecas,” HAHR 50 (1970): 665–81; D. A. Brading and Harry P. Cross, “Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru,” HAHR 52 (1972): 545–79; Herbert S. Klein, The American Finances of the Spanish Empire: Royal Income and Expenditures in Colonial Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, 1680—1809 (Albuquerque, 1998), 15–29.
16. Several eyewitness accounts of this fire are extant. On
e unofficial account dated March 26 was printed in The London Chronicle on August 19, 1788. Another composed ca. April 1 was published in the Gaceta de Mexico on May 6, 1788. Both are reprinted in Lauro A. de Rojas and Walter Pritchard, eds., “The Great Fire of 1788 in New Orleans,” LHQ 20 (1937): 578–89, along with secondary accounts by Charles Gayarré, Alcée Fortier, and others. At its meeting on November 18, 1896, “President Fortier entertained the [Louisiana Historical] society by translating a valuable French document, published at Cap Français, and giving an account of the great fire of 1788 in New Orleans”; Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 1, no. 4 (1896): 10–11. The official report dated April 1, 1788, exists in at least two versions. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) translation from Legajo 1394 is preserved in the Spanish Despatches. A shorter version, dated April 1, 1788, was published with Gilbert Pemberton’s quirky “‘Noblesse Oblige’: Why New Orleans Can Always Come Back,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 8 (1914–1915): 56–63. The subject warrants an authoritative documentary edition, for substantial differences between the WPA transcription and Pemberton’s text suggest the existence of multiple versions of the report. The WPA translation is a long report signed by Miró that mentions the death of the “sick negress.” Pemberton’s translation is half as long, lacks many details including any mention of deaths, and is presented as a report from Miró and Navarro.