Having reached this point, Madison and Jefferson resolved to send their trusted friend Monroe to France to augment Livingston’s efforts to purchase New Orleans. Coordination between Washington and European capitals was difficult. Given the length of time required for transatlantic communication, the president and his secretary of state could not be certain that some intelligence might not arrive in the meantime that would end up redirecting their efforts. They had no greater priority and every reason to worry.72
Soon, however, they would find out that Napoleon had resolved to forgo further efforts to resecure St. Domingue. Another pending conflict with Great Britain made whatever vision he had of a North American empire appear impractical. Talleyrand, once (at the time of XYZ) and yet again the French foreign minister, approached Livingston with a proposition: selling not simply New Orleans but the entire Territory of Louisiana. Livingston and the newly arrived Monroe circumspectly regarded this unexpected opportunity. Unnecessarily, though understandably, the process was complicated by the New Yorker’s resentment that the Virginian, a far younger man, had arrived on the scene, at this pregnant moment, with diplomatic seniority over him.
The cast of characters in the Louisiana drama included the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, at whose behest Jefferson had written Notes on the State of Virginia and with whom Madison and Lafayette had once traveled at length through New York’s Indian country. Having since that time held a key post in St. Domingue, and having opposed the abolition of slavery there, Marbois had a unique perspective on current events. It was as a top aide to Napoleon that he visited with Livingston and Monroe and reconfirmed the offer, leaving the impression that Napoleon might change his mind if the United States delayed its decision. Despite their strained personal relations, which lasted for as long as both remained in Europe, Livingston and Monroe combined to complete the historic transaction.73
SIGNS OF A RESTLESS FUTURE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Embryo of a Great Empire
1803–1804
In the bickerings of party animosity Americans do not sufficiently value the unrivalled happiness they enjoy … Taxes are lighter than in any nation on earth, while labor is more productive.
—PRO-ADMINISTRATION NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER, MAY 30, 1803
The present government has long ago discarded the slavish principle of letting the people participate in a knowledge of our foreign relations.
—SARCASTIC COMMENT FROM THE FEDERALIST NEW-YORK EVENING POST, AFTER THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE, NOVEMBER 9, 1803
AT SOME POINT DURING 1802 AND CULMINATING AT THE START of 1803, President Jefferson resolved in his own mind to accelerate the policy of securing U.S. control over western territory. But he would have to be quite clever if he was to move in this direction without Federalist interference and without alerting European governments to his actual motives. He could not just outwait the British, French, and Spanish; he had to outwit them.
Even before the Louisiana Purchase was finalized, while French and British territorial claims still overlapped a good portion of the presumed route, Jefferson devised what became the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The young army captain from Albemarle, Meriwether Lewis, had been the president’s trustworthy private secretary; William Clark, Lewis’s old army buddy, was the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary War hero whose ambitions Jefferson had warmly supported.
The president had recently read Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal, in which the author-explorer openly appealed to Great Britain to invest more in strengthening its position in western North America. This could only have exacerbated Jefferson’s existing fears. So when he approached the British representative in America, Edward Thornton, and his French counterpart, Louis Pichon, he secured passports for his explorers by camouflaging his intentions and convincing both that the mission was scientific. It made perfect sense that the naturalist who had authored Notes on Virginia would want to mark his presidency by acquiring a better understanding of the continent’s plant and animal life.
In approaching Congress to fund a federal mission of discovery, Jefferson was more practical and honest. He confided that the explorers were principally meant to map a river route to the Pacific for the expansion of commerce and U.S. settlement. He slyly told Thornton and Pichon that he would have to emphasize commerce when he went to Congress or else face strong public opposition to so whimsical an expenditure as the one he had planned.1
At this time only Kentucky and Tennessee were considered western states and their populations were growing fast. Ohio attained statehood in 1803, its state seal featuring a rising sun, a sheaf of wheat, and a bundle of arrows. Within two decades the river city of Cincinnati would have a greater population than Washington, D.C. Jefferson, the son of a mapmaker, had grown up around the organizers of the Loyal Land Company in Virginia, which was small in scale next to what he now envisioned: the beginnings of a broad agricultural empire.
In April 1803 the quite sizable price tag of $15 million was agreed upon for Louisiana, encompassing the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Because the trans-Mississippi West was largely unmapped, Jefferson and most others imagined that the Rockies were far less formidable than they are, and that the Missouri and Columbia rivers joined in some way. The president was convinced that his explorers would find familiar settings matching the geography of western Virginia as well as pliant Indian tribes, curious new species of crops, and navigable waterways.2
If $15 million for an unknown land was a gamble, it was an irresistible one for Jefferson. Issuing instructions to Meriwether Lewis, he was not just fantasizing what the expedition would bring back; he was also thinking of domestic politics. “The acquisition of the country through which you are to pass,” he wrote the captain, “has inspired the public generally with a great deal of interest in your enterprize … The Feds. alone still treat it as philosophism, and would rejoice in it’s failure.” That “philosophism” was Jefferson’s acknowledgment that his enemies liked to portray him as a hopeless dreamer, and westward movement as a distraction from eastern commerce, the real lifeblood of the nation’s economy. Curiously, while Secretary Gallatin shared the president’s excitement over plans for the Lewis and Clark expedition, Secretary Madison added little to the president’s instructions to the two captains and remained largely uninvolved until the successful completion of their journey. But the trio was in the explorers’ minds when they named three rivers they discovered that branched off the Missouri: the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin.3
“The Rule of Nature”
Here is where theory informed practice. The acquisition of Louisiana accorded with the theory Jefferson had advanced in his Notes, that an agrarian empire supported a republican political economy better than the urban-dominated manufacturing alternative.
For as long as he owned land, Jefferson could not divorce himself from the culture of the earth. In Washington, D.C., as at Monticello, the president charted growing seasons and changes in the weather, literally tracking when various vegetables were picked and came to market. He luxuriated in this kind of thinking and planning, as though keeping tabs on the predictable and unpredictable would lead to a more appreciable control over the course of life.
That same mind-set magnified when he conceived the mission to settle the West. The creative possibilities in land organization and land cultivation stood in marked contrast to the sterile progress he associated with a manufacturing economy. His “Revolution of 1800” was meant to redirect the people’s energies and to make positive use of America’s most tangible asset—land. For someone who had earlier denied to Madison having any interest in land speculation, Jefferson was presiding over the greatest land speculation in American history.
Outside the context of America’s competition with European colonizers, westward expansion served other, equally critical purposes. Jefferson, who had fought to abolish entail and primogeniture, had never given up thinking about the tyranny of i
nheritance. A dozen years before, Madison had forced him to confront practical problems associated with his theory that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”—his ideal for canceling out debts to the past. But Jefferson continued to insist on the uniqueness of generational identity; he was persuaded that each generation needed a fresh start if it were to avoid being unjustly held back. He was not sure precisely what the West would look like in one or two or five generations, but he was convinced that it would be clay in America’s hands. He believed, as Benjamin Franklin had, that the strength of the continental nation could be measured by its fertility rate—presupposing, of course, that this growth took place in a healthy environment. The right thing to do was to grow the republic.
Attachment to a fertile, fruitful land was perhaps Jefferson’s strongest faith. America would be most peaceful and resilient as a breeder nation. The president’s political vocabulary was rich in allusions to affection, attachment, health, good air, natural abundance, and the almost hysterical rejection of bad blood. It all added up to propagation of a certain (white republican) species and the dissemination of those ideas that bred a healthy spirit of personal independence.
When the Louisiana Purchase became fact, the president decided that Indians would best breed west of the Mississippi. Here, he rationalized, they would find “asylum” from conflict with whites. Here, over time, they would develop “useful arts” and “civilized” habits. This convenient formula for producing assimilable “yeoman” Indians ignored what he already knew: that tribes south of the Ohio River were confirmed agriculturalists. From 1803 Jefferson’s salutations in letters addressed to tribal leaders changed from “Friends and Brethren” to “My children,” symbolizing a paternalistic turn. Indians could wait. White landed interests came first.
Cold and calculating as his policy was, he remained as convinced as he had been when writing Notes on Virginia that Indians were willing to accept instruction. They were prone to violence but easily weaned from it; they demonstrated a “natural” kindness toward strangers and a strong commitment to friendship. It was for those Indians who still needed time in the endless hunting lands of the trans-Mississippi frontier (for the “manly amusement” of the chase) that eastern Indians were to sacrifice their property that abutted white towns.
Only the timeline had changed. No one said it outright, but that was the effect of the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson’s earlier intellectualization of the Indian’s humanity in the tribute he paid to Indian eloquence yielded easily to practical concerns of land use and political reorganization. Indians might be physically and sexually suited to an amalgamation with the white race, but as an unlettered race they still lacked cultural complexity. The collection of Indian artifacts on the wall of the entry hall at Monticello represented objects of curiosity, not evidence of refinement. Indians lagged. They were now the virtual counterpoint to prevailing notions of social progress. It was a conclusion more easily arrived at because Federalists and Republicans alike believed it.4
Jefferson’s faith in republican empire did not reveal itself to him overnight. Persons and books not generally accounted for in modern histories influenced him. While he was living abroad, Jefferson had befriended Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a French official who subsequently emigrated to America in 1799. He and Jefferson remained regular correspondents for years. Du Pont was so trusted, in fact, that on a return visit to his homeland in 1802, he was the courier for private letters to America’s chief diplomats.
Du Pont was of the physiocratic school, which had flourished for a time in France and which had great appeal to Jefferson. The word itself meant “the rule of nature,” and the physiocrats considered theirs the science of nature. They extolled the productive class, the active agriculturalists, whom they ranked above the physically inactive (those whose “product” had no tangible value). They believed that farming’s contribution to society was far greater than that of the money-oriented occupations. In the larger cause of social justice, they approved of free trade and opposed taxes and monopolies. Jefferson’s vision of republican empire was an adaptation of physiocratic thought: an empire without a metropolis. In the city, disease festered, and the air became noxious. Expansion was healthy, compression unhealthy.5
William Coleman, editor of the New-York Evening Post, the long-running newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton, expressed full support for the Louisiana Purchase. “In future the navigation of the Mississippi will be ours unmolested,” he wrote with relief. But for the next year or more, he repeatedly mocked Jefferson’s fanciful assumptions about the region’s abundance. For instance, when the president informed Congress that the trans-Mississippi would yield “all the necessities of life and almost spontaneously,” Coleman jumped on the overconfident prose and took even greater literary license when he suggested that Jefferson meant to say that “not only salt, but bread and meat, and some other necessaries grow ‘of their own accord,’ in this vast garden of Eden … Methinks such a great, huge mountain of solid, shining salt, must make a dreadful glare in a clear sun-shiny day.” Add to this “an immense lake of molasses” and “an extensive vale of hasty pudding, stretching as far as the eye could reach,” and one sees how physiocratic thinking would automatically strike busy Federalists as glowing fiction. They would never let Jefferson live down his reputation for dreaming on about the West’s breadth and beauty and productive potential.6
Despite its basis in pragmatism, Madison was less attached to Jefferson’s adaptation of physiocratic thinking and the sanitation-based moral calculus that Jefferson attached to it. Both men endorsed territorial expansion, a reliance on agricultural production, and freedom from British trade monopolies, but Madison was more comfortable with Newtonian physics for his model of westward expansion. Seeing the larger forces of attraction and repulsion in play, he felt that government should act to avert “collisions” along national borders (as he had warned the French when they considered occupying Louisiana); it should preempt the kinds of disruptions that were induced by population density and that gave rise to competing political factions. In Newtonian terms, he was monitoring gravitational pull, making certain that the planets remained in their proper orbits. In other words, his emphasis was on avoidance of conflict.7
“Probationary Slavery”
The Louisiana Purchase challenged the philosophies of both men. Jefferson was preoccupied with its constitutionality; after learning that the treaty had been signed, he convened his cabinet to discuss the legal ramifications and quickly drafted a detailed constitutional amendment, which he thought could and should be passed ex post facto (after the fact of the purchase). He defended his actions on the basis of national urgency, as he voiced his concern over how to rectify the unusual but necessary move.
His letter of August 1803 to Senator John Breckinridge on this subject was meant as both clarification and self-justification. Once again, Jefferson’s surrogate in promoting the Kentucky Resolutions would prove himself a trustworthy ally. In 1799, as a leading state legislator, Breckinridge had worked to limit federal authority. Now as a U.S. senator, he would be doing the opposite: aggrandizing the power of the executive.
Jefferson felt the need to document his apprehension. The treaty would have to be ratified by the Senate and the purchase funded by the House. Nonetheless he thought he should entertain one additional step. “I suppose,” he wrote Breckinridge, with reference to the members of Congress, “they must then appeal to the nation for an additional article to the Constitution, approving and confirming an act which the nation had not previously authorized.” His tentative “I suppose” was followed by a clear recognition that “the Constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union.”
Jefferson’s underlying premise in the letter was that the West was inseparable from the nation’s destiny, whether new territories entered the Union or established themselves as independent republics allied with it. Fate and foresi
ght gave him the right to seize this “fugitive occurrence”—a fleeting opportunity—to advance the good of the country: “It is the case of the guardian, investing money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; & saying to him, when of age, I did this for your good.” Adopting this paternal tone, he insisted that Congress must now do “what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.”8
Before even a week went by, though, the president was forced to adjust his thinking. A nervous letter from Robert Livingston led him to confer with Madison, then to issue a reclarification to Breckinridge: he should put off any discussion in Congress of the “constitutional difficulty” he had raised just days earlier. The administration’s position was that any delay could prove costly, and the treaty might be lost. An ominous-sounding letter to Madison from French foreign minister Talleyrand removed all remaining doubt: the administration had no time to consider a “safe & precise” construction of the Constitution.9
Treasury secretary Gallatin also played a role in the president’s decision not to seek authorization by means of a constitutional amendment. Gallatin felt there was no legal necessity to pursue such a course, and he told Jefferson so. He succeeded in leaning on Jefferson to borrow a portion of the funds that enabled the $15 million purchase; then he prevailed upon him to expand federal powers by establishing a branch of the National Bank in New Orleans—mainly as a way to secure more firm connections with the new, culturally diverse, and politically uncertain possession.10
Jefferson called for a special session of Congress to convene on October 17, 1803. The Senate ratified the treaty in three days, and both houses swiftly passed the Enabling Act that allowed the president to take possession of the territory. The speed with which Congress acted demonstrated just how tightly Jefferson held the reins over the Republican Party at that moment. Nothing was left to chance. His draft of the bill was forwarded to Breckinridge, leaving the Federalist minority to grumble from the sidelines. There was no real deliberation on the treaty’s provisions.11
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