Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  The Jefferson administration benefited from this nationalistic surge, though Jefferson was careful to remind all concerned that the naval operation in the Mediterranean was a mere sideshow and would not deter his plans to dry-dock a hefty portion of the American fleet. In the grand scheme of things the centerpiece of his foreign policy remained the avoidance of war at almost any cost. Retiring the debt and sustaining republican austerity had to take precedence. In that sense the campaign against the Barbary pirates was perfect: It was a safe and limited projection of American power abroad, it displayed Jefferson’s resolve as president, it produced convenient heroes to celebrate and it cost very little. It was, if you will, the ideal miniature war for Jefferson’s minimalist presidency.59

  There was nothing miniature about the American West, nothing less than grandiose about Jefferson’s vision of its future role in American history and nothing but extraordinary presidential leadership, matched with even more extraordinary good fortune, that produced the Louisiana Purchase. When word reached Washington in 1803 (on July 4 no less) that France had agreed to the sale of the Louisiana Territory for fifteen million dollars, the American republic doubled in size overnight. Even compared with the legendary purchase of Manhattan from the Indians for a pittance, the acquisition of half a continent for about three cents an acre was a bigger steal. It was unquestionably the greatest achievement of the Jefferson presidency and, with room left for scholarly quibbling about Abraham Lincoln in 1861, Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and Harry Truman in 1945, one of the most consequential executive actions in all of American history.60

  It was fashionable for many years to tell the story of the transaction primarily as a meditation on the influence of dumb luck. “Napoleon threw the province, so to speak, at Livingston, Monroe, Madison and Jefferson,” wrote one historian, “and they share between [sic] them—equally—whatever credit there was in catching it and holding it—that is all.” This interpretation represented a continuation of Federalist explanations at the time. “[T]he acquisition has been solely owing to a fortuitous concurrence of unforeseen and unexpected circumstances,” said an editor in the New York Evening Post, “and not to any wise or vigorous measures on the part of the American government.” The fairer judgment would seem to be that Jefferson was both more fortunate and more prescient than anyone realized at the time. And his nearly mystical sense of the American West made him more flexible in the implementation of his political principles than at any other time in his public life. To seize an empire, it turned out, required an imperial president.61

  Although he himself had never been west of the Shenandoah Valley, Jefferson’s proprietary attitude toward the Mississippi Valley and beyond was long-standing. In the 1780s, when rumors spread that John Jay was negotiating the surrender of American navigation rights on the Mississippi to Spain, both Jefferson and Madison expressed outrage. They consistently described the Mississippi as the major artery of the American body politic, “the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic, formed into one stream.” While secretary of state, most pointedly during the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790, Jefferson had been prepared to risk war in order to prevent either England or France from displacing Spain as the European presence in the trans-Mississippi West. From that time forward Jefferson regarded Spanish ownership of the vast western region of North America as essentially a temporary occupation that conveniently bided time for the inevitable American sweep across the continent. Of all the European powers, Spain, the chronically weak “sick man of Europe,” was, as Rufus King put it, “the most proper to possess a great empire with insignificance.” When rumors reached Washington in 1802 that Spain had ceded its rights in North America, including the all-important control over the Mississippi, to Napoleon and France, Jefferson immediately recognized the French presence as a fundamental shift in the strategic situation; it both threatened American security and blocked westward American expansion. Without quite shouldering Madison to the sidelines, Jefferson assumed personal control over the diplomatic initiative to remove this unacceptable intrusion of a major European power onto the American continent.62

  His instructions to Robert Livingston, the newly appointed American ambassador to France, minced no words. He apologized for temporarily displacing the secretary of state but explained that he “cannot forbear recurring to it personally, so deep is the impression it makes in my mind.” The sale of the Louisiana region to France was a major disaster that “completely reverses all the political relations of the United States and will form a new epoch in our political course.” It constituted, he believed, the greatest challenge to American independence and national integrity since the American Revolution: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” he explained to Livingston. That epicenter of American national interest was New Orleans. Despite past friendship with France and despite his own personal affinity for the Franco-American alliance, the moment France occupied New Orleans the two nations must become mortal enemies. “From that moment,” he concluded ominously, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Given his deep and lifelong hatred of England, Jefferson was effectively describing French control of the Mississippi as the equivalent of an international earthquake that moved all the geological templates into a new pattern.63

  Though eminently capable, Livingston possessed the singular disadvantage of not being a Virginian. Jefferson wanted someone on the ground in Paris whom he could trust implicitly. So he in effect ordered James Monroe, a Jefferson protégé currently serving as governor of Virginia, to become a special envoy to France. “[T]he circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline,” Jefferson observed dramatically, because “on the event of this mission, depends the future destinies of this republic.” Monroe’s instructions authorized the purchase of New Orleans and as much of the Mississippi Valley as possible—the geographic boundaries of the French acquisition from Spain were fuzzy—for up to ten million dollars. Even the paramount domestic goal of debt reduction was subordinated to recovering control over America’s interior.64

  During the winter and spring of 1803, while the outcome of the Monroe mission remained up in the air, Jefferson’s management of the prospective crisis was deft and shrewd. He saw to it that du Pont de Nemours, an old French friend, was provided information about America’s deadly serious intentions that could be leaked in the proper corridors at Versailles. When the Spanish official still governing New Orleans abruptly closed the port to American commerce, Jefferson came under considerable pressure to launch a unilateral military expedition to seize both the city and the Floridas, thereby abandoning diplomacy in favor of war with both Spain and France. Hamilton, writing as Pericles, endorsed the military solution, arguing that “in an emergency like the present, energy is wisdom.” Despite an authorization from Congress empowering the president to raise eighty thousand volunteers for a military campaign, Jefferson remained calm. Even if the ongoing negotiations in Paris failed, he explained—and of course they did not—outright war was both unwise and unnecessary. Time and demography were on the American side, justifying a patient policy “till we have planted such a population on the Mississippi as will be able to do their own business, without the necessity of marching men from the shores of the Atlantic 1500 or 2000 miles thither… .”65

  Jefferson was also extremely fortunate, in some ways ironically so. Napoleon’s decision to sell not just New Orleans but also the entire Mississippi Valley and modern-day American Midwest was prompted by the resumption of the Anglo-French war in 1802. Ambassador Livingston had earlier complained that negotiating with France was impossible: “There is no people, no Legislature, no counsellors. One man is everything. He seldom asks advice, and never hears it unasked.” This, of course, was the essence of the Napoleonic all-or-nothing style. But once Napoleon decided to cut his losses in America in return for money that would subsidize his European army, the same style worked to Jef
ferson’s advantage; Napoleon sold all his North American possessions for practically nothing. The early Federalist attempts to undercut Jefferson’s coup in acquiring the Louisiana Territory emphasized the impulsive character of Napoleon’s decision, which had nothing to do with Jefferson’s diplomatic maneuverings and everything to do with the shifting European context and the unpredictable Napoleonic character.66

  The deeper truth was that Louisiana was a providential gift from the insurgent slaves and the malaria-carrying mosquitoes of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). The immediate cause of Napoleon’s decision to abandon his dreams of a French empire in America was the disastrous failure of a twenty-five-thousand-man expeditionary force headed by Charles Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, that had been dispatched to Santo Domingo to suppress the slave insurrection there under the charismatic leadership of a black man named Toussaint L’Ouverture. Believing that a show of American support against the revolutionary government of Toussaint might win Napoleon’s favor, Jefferson had informed the French government that “nothing would be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything, and to reduce Toussaint to starvation.” As it happened, Leclerc’s troops were decimated in the savage fighting against the slave insurrectionaries before American aid could arrive, and the mosquitoes killed off the rest. The virtual extinction of the French expeditionary force, which had been scheduled to proceed to New Orleans after dispatching the blacks of Santo Domingo, was the immediate cause of Napoleon’s decision to cut his losses in the Western Hemisphere. In that sense, Jefferson was not only extraordinarily lucky but also beholden to historical forces that he had actually opposed.67

  If, then, one ever wished to construct a monument in New Orleans memorializing the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson would have to be a central figure, but he would also need to be flanked by busts of Toussaint and his fellow black insurrectionaries, plus perhaps a tribute to the deadly mosquito. And the most appropriately eloquent quotation would come from Talleyrand, that ubiquitous and famously unscrupulous French foreign minister. “I can give you no direction,” he said to Livingston, “you have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it.” Talleyrand was referring to the imprecise and therefore controversial borders of French Louisiana, but his statement accurately described Jefferson’s presidential style in the immediate aftermath of the sale. He violated his most cherished political principles several times over in order to guarantee the most expansive version of the “noble bargain,” and he temporarily made himself into just the kind of monarchical chief magistrate he had warned against. “It is incumbent on those who accept great charges,” he explained afterward, “to risk themselves on great occasions,” adding that “to lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written laws, would be to lose the law itself… .”68

  With regard to the borders question, Jefferson had acted preemptively, even before knowing whether Napoleon would sell all or part of Louisiana. He commissioned his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to organize an expedition comprised of “ten or twelve chosen men” to explore the trans-Mississippi region and discover the most direct water route, if any existed, to the Pacific. Since France and Spain still owned the huge tract Lewis would be exploring, Jefferson obtained authorization from Congress on the pretense that this was a scientific venture or “a literary pursuit” and that it would go no farther west than the Mississippi basin. This official explanation “satisfied curiosity,” he informed Lewis, “and masks sufficiently the real destination.” News of the Louisiana Purchase arrived just as what history has come to know as the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed Washington, so from the very start they knew themselves to be a covert reconnaissance team exploring the western borders, and beyond, of America’s newest possession.69

  Once Lewis was launched into the vast and unmapped interior of the trans-Mississippi West, Jefferson turned his attention to the Gulf Coast. Back at Monticello during the late summer of 1803 he studied old maps and determined to his own satisfaction that the southeastern border of French Louisiana was the Perdido River, near present-day Pensacola. Subsequent scrutiny of the maps also satisfied him that the southwestern border was the Rio Grande. This meant that the United States had acquired all the land west of modern Florida along the Gulf Coast through present-day Texas. France had no objections to this somewhat expansive interpretation of the treaty. As Talleyrand had indicated, France was washing its hands of the entire American business, and no one in France knew the location of the Perdido or Rio Grande from the Hudson or Potomac anyway.70

  Spain, however, took a somewhat less charitable view of the American claims, insisting that neither the Gulf Coast (called West Florida) nor any land southwest of New Orleans was included in the purchase. Jefferson instructed Monroe to leave Paris for Madrid and there make a modest effort to buy West Florida from Spain. “We scarcely expect any liberal or just settlement with Spain,” Jefferson observed, but it made little difference since “whatever may be the views of Spain, there will be no difficulty… in getting thro’ with our purposes.” In short, Spain being Spain, it should be regarded as a mere holding company for the United States, “and if, as soon as she is at war, we push them strongly with one hand, holding out a price in the other, we shall certainly obtain the Floridas, and all in good time.” Though it required another fifteen years, plus the military adventurism of Andrew Jackson, that is exactly what happened.71

  Finally, and most famously, there were the constitutional questions raised by the acquisition of so vast a tract, whatever the borders. Although Madison and Gallatin tried to persuade him otherwise, Jefferson remained convinced that the enlargement of the Union required an amendment to the Constitution: “The constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory…” he acknowledged. “The Executive in seizing the fugitive occurrence, have done an act beyond the Constitution.” As Jefferson explained to Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, he had been placed in the awkward position of a guardian who, presented with an unprecedented investment opportunity, had decided to act without obtaining the consent of his clients, saying in effect, “I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.” But he was now under moral obligation to request a constitutional amendment from the Congress at the same time he forwarded the treaty for ratification.72

  By the time the special session of Congress convened in October 1803, however, Jefferson had changed his mind. Reports from Paris indicated that the ever-impulsive Napoleon was having second thoughts; at the same time the Spanish were threatening to challenge the entire treaty on the ground that no one really knew the proper boundaries of Louisiana. Fearing that any delay might put the purchase at risk, Jefferson concluded that “the less that is said about my constitutional difficulty, the better; and that it will be desirable for Congress to do what is necessary in silence.” If the choice was between sustaining his strict interpretation of executive authority or losing half a continent, he chose the more pragmatic course, all the while expressing the hope that “the good sense of our country will correct the evil of [broad] construction when it shall produce ill effects.”73

  The constitutional embarrassments became worse over the succeeding months. The huge Republican majority in Congress ratified the Louisiana Purchase, as one senator put it, “in less time than required for the most trivial Indian contract,” then passed enabling legislation that delegated to the president nearly autocratic power over decisions about a provisional government in the Louisiana Territory. John Quincy Adams, one of the few senators to oppose the legislation, observed that Jefferson would possess “an assumption of implied power greater… than all the assumptions of implied powers in the years of the Washington and Adams administrations put together.” The old enemy of George III now wielded more arbitrary power over the residents of Louisiana than any British king had wielded over the American colonists.74

  Moreover, Jefferson chose to use that executive power to propose a blatantly nonrepublican ter
ritorial government. His outline for a proposed constitution was accompanied by a cover letter to Senator Breckinridge, swearing him to secrecy. “You must never let any person know that I have put pen to paper,” he warned, “and should destroy the original” immediately after making a copy. “I am this particular,” Jefferson explained, “because you know with what bloody teeth and fangs the federalists will attack any sentiment or principle known to come from me, and what blackguardisms and personalities they make it the occasion of vomiting forth.”75

  The chief reason for Jefferson’s apprehension was that the provisional government of the territory he proposed consisted of a governor appointed by the president and a nonelected council or senate, which Jefferson called the “Assembly of Notables.” This was precisely the kind of constitutional arrangement one might have expected from John Adams, who was more comfortable with aristocratic entrustments of authority, preferred ornate titles and might have argued that the predominantly French residents of Louisiana would appreciate a familiar political framework reminiscent of the ancien régime. But this was also precisely the kind of government Jefferson had condemned the Federalists for preferring, since it deprived the residents of any elective rights and, as Madison privately admitted, “will leave the people of that District for a while without the organization of power dictated by the Republican theory.”76