“We Rush Like a Comet into Infinite Space!”
Prior to the American Revolution, few white men had seen what lay beyond the “endless mountains.”102 By 1800, the Great Migration had begun in earnest, and American settlers poured into and settled the trans-Appalachian West. Jefferson aimed to assist frontier immigrants by securing a free-trade route down the entirety of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, requiring the United States of America to purchase the port of New Orleans. Jefferson’s motives appeared solely economic, yet they were also based on strategic concerns and an overriding agrarian philosophy that sought new outlets for America’s frontier farmers. At the time, Jefferson sought to secure only the port of New Orleans itself. American purchase of all of the Louisiana Territory came as a surprise to nearly everyone involved.
Spain, ever fearful of the American advance, had returned the Louisiana Territory to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), then later made public. Napoléon Bonaparte, on his rise to become France’s post-Revolutionary emperor, promised the Spanish he would not sell Louisiana. He then immediately proceeded to do exactly that, convinced, after a revolution in Haiti, that he could not defend French possessions in the New World. The British, ever anxious to weaken France, made the information of the 1801 treaty available to the envoy to England, Rufus King, who hastily passed the news on to Jefferson. America’s minister to France, Robert Livingston, was quickly authorized to negotiate for the right of deposit of American goods in New Orleans. Livingston got nowhere, at which point Jefferson dispatched his Virginia friend, James Monroe, to Paris to assist in the negotiations.
Monroe arrived in Paris to parlay, whereupon he was astounded to hear Napoleon’s minister, Talleyrand, ask, “What will you give for the whole?” By “the whole,” Talleyrand offered not just New Orleans, but all of the remaining Louisiana Territory—that area draining the Mississippi River from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi—for $15 million, a sum that included $3 million in debts American citizens owed the French.103 The actual price tag of Louisiana was a stunningly low $11.2 million, or less than one-tenth the cost of today’s Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans!
The Jefferson administration, which prided itself on fiscal prudence and strict adherence to the Constitution, now found itself in the awkward position of arguing that Hamiltonian means somehow justified Jeffersonian ends. Livingston and Monroe never had authority to purchase Louisiana, nor to spend 50 percent more than authorized, no matter what the bargain. In the dollars of the day, the expense of Louisiana was enormous, and nothing in the Constitution specifically empowered the federal government to purchase a territory beyond its boundaries, much less grant American citizenship to tens of thousands of French nationals who resided within that territory. After a little hand-wringing and inconsequential talk of constitutional amendments, however, the administration cast aside its fiscal and constitutional scruples. Minority Federalists erupted over the hypocrisy of this stance, and one cried in protest over spending “fifteen million dollars for bogs, mountains, and Indians! Fifteen million dollars for uninhabited wasteland and refuge for criminals!”104
The Federalists no doubt appreciated the fact that this new land would also become a cradle for numerous Jeffersonian Republican senators and congressmen representing a number of new agricultural states. Jefferson typically framed the argument in more philosophical terms: Louisiana would become an “empire of liberty” populated by farmers who just happened to vote for his party. In the end, the majority Republicans prevailed and, of thirty-two U.S. senators, only six Arch-Federalists voted against the Louisiana Purchase. In a telling example of the self-destructive nature of old Federalism, Fisher Ames wrote gloomily, “Now by adding this unmeasured world beyond [the Mississippi] we rush like a comet into infinite space. In our wild career we may jostle some other world out of its orbit, but we shall, in any event, quench the light of our own.”105
Even before receiving senatorial approval for the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson secretly ordered a military expedition to explore, map, and report on the new territory and its borders.106 The president chose his personal aide, U.S. Army captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead the force, making sure that the captain was sufficiently attuned to the scientific inquiries that had captivated Jefferson his entire life. Lewis, a combat veteran and woodsman who possessed considerable intellect, went to Philadelphia for a crash course in scientific method and biology under Charles Wilson Peale prior to departure. For his coleader, Lewis chose William Clark, an affable, redheaded soldier (and much younger brother of Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark). The two spent the winter of 1803–04 encamped on the Mississippi at Wood River, directly across from French St. Louis. Official word of the Louisiana Purchase arrived, and in May of 1804, Lewis and Clark led their fifty-man Corps of Discovery across the Mississippi and up the Missouri River, bound for the unknown lands of the North American Great Plains.107
Lewis and Clark aimed to follow the Missouri River to its headwaters in present-day western Montana. While encamped near modern-day Bismarck, North Dakota, during the winter of 1804–5, they met and hired a pregnant Indian woman, Sacajawea, and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, to act as their translators and guides. After an arduous upriver journey, the corps arrived in the summer of 1805 at the Missouri’s headwaters, ending serious discussion of an all-water Northwest Passage route to Asia. Then the expedition crossed the Rocky Mountains, leaving the western bounds of the Louisiana Purchase. Near the western base of the Rockies, Sacajawea secured horses for the explorers, and they rode onto the Columbia Plateau in the late fall. Sailing down the Snake and Columbia rivers, Lewis and Clark arrived at the Pacific Ocean on November seventh, and promptly carved by land from the u. states in 1804 & 1805 on a tree. They wintered on the Oregon coast, then returned east, arriving to a hero’s welcome in St. Louis, Missouri, in September 1806.
Lewis and Clark’s great journey has become legendary, and a reading of the Lewis and Clark extensive journals today reveals not only Jefferson’s strategic and economic motives, but other, more idealistic, motives as well. President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west in search of scientific data to further man’s knowledge and, at the same time, to explore what he dreamed would become an expanded agrarian American Republic.
Other American adventurers headed west to explore the new Louisiana Territory. In 1806, U.S. Army captain Zebulon Pike led an official expedition up the Arkansas River to what is now Colorado, then attempted, but failed, to climb Pike’s Peak.108 Like Lewis and Clark’s, Pike’s expedition set out with keenly defined instructions for what the government sought to find, making it truly an exploration as opposed to a discovery expedition. Uncle Sam expected political, diplomatic, economic, and scientific fruits from its expenditures, and Congress routinely shared this information with the public in a series of some sixty reports. However, the most fascinating probe of the West in these early years came not from an official U.S. expedition, but from an illegal and treasonous foray into the West by none other than former vice president Aaron Burr.
The Cataline of America
John Adams, no friend of Burr’s, once wrote of him, “Ambition of military fame and ambition of conquest over female virtue were the duplicate ruling powers of his life.”109 A direct descendant of theologian Jonathan Edwards, Burr’s early military and political career seemed promising. As a patriot colonel, he heroically, though unsuccessfully, stormed the British garrison at Quebec; afterward he practiced law, espoused Anti-Federalism, and was elected a Republican senator from New York State. A relentless schemer, Burr entertained notions of getting New England to secede; when that went nowhere, he moved on to more elaborate and fantastic designs. As has been noted, he attempted to stab his running mate, Jefferson, in the back in 1800, ending his career in Washington, D.C., as soon as it began. He ran for the governorship of New York in 1804 while still serving as vice president. Thwarted in this attempt by his old rival Alexander Hamilton, Burr and Hamilton exch
anged heated letters. Neither would back down, and a duel ensued, at Weehawken, New Jersey, where dueling was still legal.
Dueling was common in Burr’s day. Some of America’s most respected early leaders were duelists—indeed, in some parts of the South and West, dueling had become an essential component of political résumés. Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph, Jefferson Davis, Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, and a score of other national leaders fought duels during the first half of the nineteenth century. Hamilton had slandered Burr on numerous occasions, once calling him the Cataline of America, in reference to the treacherous schemer who nearly brought down the Roman Republic.110
At Weehawken Heights in New Jersey in the late Autumn of 1804, the two scaled a narrow ledge more than 150 feet above the water. They prepared to duel in formal, time-honored tradition, pacing off steps, then turning to face one another. Two shots were fired, though historians know little else. Letters published later revealed that Hamilton had said he intended to throw away his shot. No one knows exactly what Hamilton had on his mind, though it appeared to one of the seconds that Hamilton fired first and that his shot went high and wide, just as he had planned. Whether Burr, as some suspect, was jolted into firing quickly, or whether he maliciously took his time, one thing is certain: only Colonel Burr left the field alive.
After winning his duel—and losing what little reputation, he had left—Burr continued his machinations without pause. He wandered west; in 1806, along with a hundred armed followers, Burr sailed in gunboats down the Ohio and Mississippi to Natchez, Mississippi, where he was arrested and marched to Richmond, Virginia, to stand trial for treason. Versions of Burr’s plans vary wildly, and he evidently told all of his confidants whatever they wanted to hear so long as they would lend him money.111 In court Burr claimed he was only moving to Louisiana to start a farm and perhaps begin political life anew. Others suspect he had formed a western U.S. secession movement. Jefferson learned of it from Burr’s coconspirator, U.S. Army general James Wilkinson. The president charged Burr with planning not only secession, but a unilateral war against Spain with the aim of bringing Spanish Texas under his own leadership.
The administration tried mightily to convict Burr of treason, but the former vice president had outsmarted everyone. The federal circuit court, presided over by the chief justice John Marshall, was quick to spotlight the weakness of the administration’s case, setting huge legal precedents in the process. When President Jefferson claimed executive privilege in refusing to supply the court with original documents as evidence, Marshall insisted on a compromise. As for treason, the court ruled that since the government could not prove that Burr had levied war against the United States, he was not guilty. Freed, Burr returned to New York City, where he practiced law, courted rich widows, and schemed and dreamed to no avail for three decades. He never again crossed the Hudson to visit New Jersey, where there was a murder warrant for him. Having extinguished his own career, as well as that of one of America’s brightest lights, Aaron Burr departed into infamy.
America’s First Preemptive War
Throughout the 1790s, Republicans had leveled a number of highly critical attacks at Federalist foreign policy makers. Now, at last, the party of Jefferson was free to mold its own foreign policy. Jefferson dealt with some of North Africa’s Barbary pirates, sea-going Muslim outlaws from Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli who regularly plundered 1790s American Mediterranean shipping. Washington and Adams had paid some small bribes at first—the trade was not sufficient to warrant a military expedition—and it could be rationalized as the way of doing business in that part of the world. But when the pasha of Tripoli chopped down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate there, it was a direct affront and an act of war. In 1801, Jefferson slowed down his mothballing of the naval fleet and sent ships to blockade the port. Operating only under a set of joint resolutions, not a declaration of war, Jefferson nevertheless informed all the Barbary States that the United States was at war with them. He sought to get an international coalition to help, but no European states wanted to alter the status quo. So, in 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur went ashore with eight U.S. Marines; set fire to a captured frigate, the Philadelphia; and through an expedition across the desert led by William Eaton and Greek mercenaries, organized locals who detested the pasha. The American desert army also threatened the pirates’ lucrative slave trade, and the presence of the powerful British fleet not far away put even more teeth into this threat. This stick, combined with a carrot of a small ransom for the Philadelphia’s crew, sufficed to force the pirates down, and after releasing the crew, they recognized American freedom to sail the high seas uninterrupted.112 By dispatching even such a small body of men so far to secure American national interests, Jefferson put the world on notice that the United States intended to be a force—if only a minor one—in world affairs. It was a remarkably brazen display of preemptive war by a president usually held up as a model of limited government, and it achieved its results. The United States squashed the threat of the Barbary pirates—alone. Yet these foreign policy successes only served as a prelude to a recurrence of America’s major diplomatic headache—continuing Anglo-French warfare during the rise of Napoleonic Europe. As before, American foreign policy became bogged down in this European morass; like his Federalist predecessors, Jefferson floundered in the high seas of European diplomacy.
Between John Adams’s conclusion of the Quasi War in 1799 and renewed attacks on neutral American commerce in 1806, New England traders had carried on a brisk trade with both France and Britain, earning an estimated $60 million annually. But Britain objected to a particularly lucrative aspect of this trade—Caribbean goods shipped to America in French vessels and then reshipped to France in neutral American vessels. Britain aimed to crush these “broken voyages” through the Orders in Council (1806 and 1807), prohibiting American trade with France and enforced by a British blockade. When Americans tried to run the blockade, the Royal Navy seized their ships and impressed (drafted) American sailors to serve His Majesty. Britain justified this kidnapping by insisting that all of the impressed sailors—ultimately numbering 10,000—were in fact British deserters. Americans once again found themselves treated like colonial subjects in a mercantile system, forced yet again to demand fundamental neutral rights and freedom of the seas. As tempers flared, the U.S. administration aimed its fury at Great Britain, whose strong navy represented a greater threat to American shipping than France’s. Jefferson’s old prejudices now resurfaced with dangerous consequences: failing to construct large warships as the Federalists had, Jefferson’s navy consisted of some two hundred, single-gun gunboats incapable of anything other than intercepting ill-armed pirates or the most basic coastal defense.
Jefferson avoided war for many reasons, not the least of which was that he had spent much of his administration dismantling the federal army and navy and now was in no position at all to fight on land or sea. Congress sought to accommodate his policies with the 1806 Nonimportation Act. Britain, however, was unfazed by the boycotts and continued to attack and seize shipping. An 1807 clash on the open oceans between the American ship Chesapeake and Britain’s Leopard resulted in four Americans dead, eighteen wounded, and four impressed. “Never since the battle of Lexington,” wrote Jefferson, “have I seen the country in such a state of exasperation.”113
In order to avoid the war that should have naturally followed the Chesapeake-Leopard duel, Jefferson combined nonexportation with nonimportation in the Embargo Act of December 1807. This law prohibited Americans from trading with any foreign countries until France and Britain buckled under to national and international pressure and recognized America’s free-trade rights. But the results of the Embargo Act were disastrous. Neither Britain nor France acquiesced and in blatant violation of federal law, New Englanders continued to trade with Britain, smuggling products along the rugged New England coast and through the ports of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. When Jefferson left office in 1809, the main resu
lts of his well-intentioned foreign policy were economic downturn, a temporarily revived Federalist opposition, and a perception by both France and England that the United States was weak and lacking in conviction.
Exit the Sage of Monticello
Former president Jefferson at last returned to his beloved Monticello in 1809. Appropriately, Monticello faced west, anticipating the future, not replaying the past. Jefferson’s record had, in fact, replayed some past mistakes too often. Republicans had undoubtedly reshaped the federal government in a democratic and leaner form. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition were nothing less than magnificent triumphs. But the (technically illegal) Louisiana Purchase had added more to the public domain than Washington or Adams had, requiring, even in minimalist Jeffersonian terms, a bigger army, navy, and federal bureaucracy to protect and govern it. The judiciary contests and foreign policy exercises, except for the decisive preemptive war against the pirates, had not advanced the nation’s interests. In losing the judiciary battles to Marshall, Jefferson’s obsolete agrarian Republic was scraped away to make room for a capitalist engine of wealth creation. Moreover, his years in office had done nothing to relieve his personal debts, rebuild his deteriorated friendship with Adams, or constrain the size of government. In some ways, the nation he helped found had, like an unruly teenager, grown beyond his ability to manage it in the way he had envisioned. His successor, fellow Founder James Madison, in many ways proved a far better father for the child.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 29