by Andrea Wulf
12 Lombardy poplars were a good beginning as in Italy they were regarded as “a tree of liberty,” because, as the eighteenth-century poet Victor Alfieri wrote, “the quivering of the leaves of this tree symbolized the prayers of those oppressed by despots.” In the long term, Jefferson wanted American trees to shade the most important avenue in Washington, but there were not enough funds to replace the poplars with willow oaks.
13 Jefferson also relaxed his strict “simple” clothes rule during his second term—for his second inauguration he did not dress as a “plain citizen” as he had in 1801 but “dressed in black and even in black silk stockings.”
14 When James Madison became president, in March 1809, Latrobe hoped that the garden would be finished. Only ten days after the inauguration, Latrobe forwarded a plan that had been approved by Jefferson to Madison. “The principal work,” he explained, “will be the planting of trees & shrubs.” Two weeks later he sent a plant list based on Jefferson’s suggestions, and two months after that Jefferson received an enthusiastic report: “If you were now at the Presidents house you would scarcely know it. The north front is become a wilderness of shrubry and trees.” The planting wasn’t very successful, and at the end of 1810, Latrobe reported that “the whole Area being at present without Shade.”
7
“EMPIRE OF LIBERTY”
JEFFERSON’S WESTERN EXPANSION
THE SOUND OF EIGHTEEN GUNSHOTS woke the citizens of Washington at dawn, announcing the arrival of Independence Day on 4 July 1803. As he did every year during his two-term presidency, Thomas Jefferson had organized a large party to celebrate “the only birthday I ever commemorate,” ignoring his usual reticence against public appearances and show. At eleven o’clock orderly rows of soldiers and officers in shining uniforms marched along dusty Pennsylvania Avenue. The Lombardy poplars that had been planted only a few months earlier were still too small to provide any shade, and most looked sickly from being nibbled on by grazing cattle and deer.
The troops assembled at the White House to perform patriotic songs for the crowds. Tents and booths had been set up, transforming the land around the unfinished White House into a bustling, colorful and noisy fairground in which the teeming, well-dressed crowds jostled for space with cows and other livestock. Jefferson, together with his ministers and foreign diplomats, waited on the high steps of the White House to greet the soldiers. Tall, and with his long gray hair waving in the wind, Jefferson as always stood out from the smartly dressed and powdered politicians. Inside the house, servants scurried around placing wine, punch and cakes on tables set up in the large reception room. Once the music had stopped, the president invited his guests to food and drink, chatting and enjoying his favorite day of the year.
That day Jefferson was in a particularly festive mood because the previous evening, he had received news that Napoleon had agreed to sell the Territory of Louisiana to the United States, a vast amount of land covering more than 800,000 square miles, stretching west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, thus doubling the size of the country in one stroke. It was “the most important & beneficial transaction … since the declaration of Independence,” one of Jefferson’s contemporaries said. The deal would make Jefferson “immortal,” according to the editor of the National Intelligencer, because not only New Orleans and Louisiana but also the entire Mississippi Valley, and indeed the whole of today’s Midwest, now became part of the United States—for the bargain price of fifteen million dollars, around three cents per acre.
Not only had the country dramatically increased in size but France, the greatest military power in the world and a perpetual nuisance to the United States, had disappeared from the North American horizon. Since before the Declaration of Independence, the Mississippi had been controlled by Spain, Europe’s weakest empire, but in 1800 Spain had ceded the land to France, a move that worried the Americans deeply. The moment France took possession of New Orleans, Jefferson had warned, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”—a dramatic change of heart for a man who so despised the old oppressor. To avert a French empire in America, Jefferson had dispatched fellow Virginian James Monroe as a special envoy to Paris with the American offer to buy New Orleans and as much of the Mississippi Valley as the French would sell (at the same time asking Monroe to deliver a box of seeds to his French friends).
As it turned out, Jefferson got more than he had asked for. It wasn’t so much Monroe’s diplomatic skills as a successful slave rebellion in the French colony of Santo Domingo (today’s Haiti), twinned with huge swarms of mosquitoes, that led France to give up the whole of the Louisiana Territory. Napoleon’s plan had been to quash the Caribbean uprising with an army of 25,000 soldiers, who would then be transferred to New Orleans. The soldiers, however, never made it to Louisiana because almost all of them died, either in battle or from a devastating malaria epidemic. In the wake of this disastrous campaign, and with his army decimated, Napoleon abandoned the idea of a French colony in North America and decided to concentrate on Europe instead.
The timing of Napoleon’s offer could not have been better, for it came on the eve not only of Independence Day but of the day that Jefferson’s secretary, the former U.S. soldier Meriwether Lewis, was due to embark on the first ever overland journey across the whole of the North American continent. Originally conceived as an expedition through Spanish and French territory, Lewis’s journey would now cross a continent largely free from European rivals.1 The Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson later said, “increased infinitely the interest we felt in the expedition.”
For months, Jefferson—the “man of letters and of science” who, as was rumored in diplomatic circles, dreamed of “distinguishing his Presidency by a discovery”—had gone to great lengths to make sure that the expedition was properly organized. Before Lewis departed, Jefferson handed him a letter authorizing his secretary to draw money and supplies on behalf of the United States from anybody across the world: an unlimited and unprecedented credit note. He also gave Lewis a cipher for his correspondence and a long list of instructions that he had compiled over the previous weeks. He had asked his secretary of state, James Madison, and Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, to comment on a draft of these instructions, but except for some minor points—including the suggestion that Lewis be told to look out for “signs of the soil” and trees indicating “fertility”—they agreed that the fastidious president had covered everything. Today Jefferson’s objectives for the expedition read like a blueprint for Enlightenment thought. Imploring Lewis to observe, collect, document and classify, they reveal a man who had been nurtured by rational enquiry and a passion for imposing order on nature.
Meriwether Lewis (Illustration credit 7.1)
“The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river,” Jefferson had written, in order to find a trade route across the continent to the Pacific. Lewis should also make maps of the new territory and gain knowledge about the Native Americans (including language, agriculture and customs) who inhabited these regions. At the same time he was to observe the climate, animals (including those “deemed rare or extinct”), minerals and “the soil & face of the country, it’s growth & vegetable productions.” These instructions had been shaped by Jefferson’s own experiences: a lifelong study of natural history books and botanical inquiry, surveying, compiling records of Native American vocabulary, and his meticulous meteorological diary. Even his advice that Lewis should use “paper of the birch” to protect the writing from damp was the result of his own observations during his botanical ramble with Madison in the summer of 1791. Lewis was also to note “the dates in which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leafs,” just as Jefferson had asked his daughters to do in their Monticello correspondence, only Lewis was being asked to chart the entire continent. Gaining all this knowledge was even more important than actually reaching the Pacific, Jefferson asserted—and if threatened at
any point, Lewis was to retreat rather than push forward, lest “the information you will have acquired” be lost.
Between the lines of these scientific instructions we can sense Jefferson’s sheer excitement: soon he really might learn about this new world. Maybe Lewis would find the huge mastodon roaming across the plains, discover profitable crops, flowers in exotic shapes and sizes, and trees that would soar even higher than those already encountered. Jefferson planned this expedition in the name of science, but it would also be the beginning of a distinctly American glorification of the wilderness. The years after the expedition would see the awakening of an obsession with rugged nature, a passion that instilled the American landscape with patriotism and is still part of the national identity today.
For the past two years the widowed president and his secretary had lived alone in the White House “like two mice in a church.” They had often talked about the journey and in the course of their many discussions had discovered their shared interest in botany and natural history. It was probably after Jefferson’s daily rides through the countryside around Washington with his bags stuffed with plant specimens that Jefferson discovered Lewis’s “remarkable store of accurate observation.” Lewis was “no regular botanist,” Jefferson noted, but with a mother who was an accomplished herbal healer, he had grown up with a tacit knowledge of plants. The president was sure that he had chosen the right man for the expedition—brave, strong and prudent but also “adapted to the woods,” familiar with the native population and knowledgeable in the “three kingdoms” (plants, animals and minerals).
Lewis’s intuitive grasp of the natural world notwithstanding, to prepare for the journey Jefferson had sent him to be tutored by America’s leading naturalists and scientists in order to learn the arts of mapmaking and surveying, anatomy and fossil-hunting, as well as mathematics and botany. Andrew Ellicott, the Pennsylvania-based surveyor who had mapped Washington, agreed to teach Lewis how to take the necessary observations to make maps and advised on the best instruments to take. For nearly three weeks Lewis practiced measuring, calculating and using sextants, chronometers and a “portable horizon.” In Philadelphia, Caspar Wistar, the professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on fossils, briefed Lewis about mastodons and the bones of the Megalonyx (an animal that Jefferson initially likened to a gigantic kind of lion)—both would symbolize the United States of America’s strength if, as Jefferson hoped, they were living in the West.2
Lewis also consulted Benjamin Rush, a celebrated physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Rush compiled a list of medicine that included hundreds of his famous pills, nicknamed “Thunderclappers,” powerful laxatives consisting of mercury, chlorine and jalap which according to Rush would cure almost any illnesses. In addition he also wrote some “Rules of Health” and a long questionnaire about Native Americans, including questions about diseases, women’s menstruation, food, vices, murder and death (“Is Suicide common among them,” and, if so, “ever from love?”). Most important, the professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton, polished Lewis’s botanical knowledge, teaching him the intricacies of taxonomy and botanical descriptions. Lewis also learned how to collect, dry, mount and label plant specimens, and how best to preserve seeds.
Jefferson’s correspondence with these scientists reveals his excitement. If Lewis succeeded in his mission, he would bring home plants that would adorn America’s flowerbeds and new vegetables and crops to feed the people of the United States. He would discover giant animals and trees that would symbolize the country’s dominance and power. At the same time, he would convince the Native Americans to adopt the republican ideal of farming and cede their lands to the United States,3 and he would show that the Missouri links the East to the Pacific.
Jefferson had long been intrigued by the West. When he had returned from France fourteen years earlier, he visited the ailing Benjamin Franklin to see the map that had been used to draw up the United States’s western boundaries in the Paris peace talks after the War of Independence. Franklin, despite being bed-bound, explained the details and later sent Jefferson the map—his last letter before his death in April 1790. Over the past two decades Jefferson had also tried to organize explorations to the West on a number of occasions. The last time had been ten years previously, when he and some members of the American Philosophical Society had collected money to send the French botanist André Michaux across the continent. Washington, Adams and Madison had shared Jefferson’s enthusiasm, all of them contributing between twenty and one hundred dollars. Unfortunately, despite the widespread support, the expedition failed because Michaux became tangled up in political problems among France, Spain and the United States.
This early interest in exploring the West was fired by more than just a yearning for knowledge. Basic economic concerns played their part—Franklin, Washington and Madison, for example, had all invested and speculated in huge tracts of lands in the western territories—but so too did the overriding feeling that the United States was to be an agrarian republic. Already before the Declaration of Independence Franklin had promoted settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains, explaining that westward expansion would protect the country from becoming a manufacturing society with all its vices. Americans were “placed in the most enviable condition,” Washington echoed shortly after the War of Independence, for they were the “Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent.” Size mattered for an agrarian republic because a growing nation of farmers needed new fields to cultivate—and one day, Washington hoped, the United States would become “a storehouse and granary For the world.” The West thus gradually become part of the political agenda. Jefferson believed that the West would assure the agricultural and therefore republican future of the United States. “By enlarging the empire of liberty,” he famously claimed, “we multiply it’s auxiliaries, & provide new sources of renovation, should it’s principles, at any time, degenerate.” The West was the guarantee of the United States and its people remaining virtuous. It would secure liberty, Jefferson believed, for “millions yet unborn.”
For long the Potomac River held the promise of the West. (Illustration credit 7.2)
Most of the Federalists disagreed about the promises of the West, however. New Orleans was certainly of interest, because it was the port through which much of the produce of the western territories had to pass, but the additional acquisition of “a vast wilderness world” seemed ludicrous to them. It would “prove worse than useless to us,” complained one; another protested that they were being far too impetuous, rushing “like a comet into infinite space.” They were being asked to spend money they did not have, one Federalist newspaper griped, “for land of which we already have too much.” Many opponents also feared that the expansion westward would result in a sprawling, ungovernable country so enormous in size that no central government would be able to control it. But it was this vastness, the Republicans believed, that was America’s asset. The larger the country, Jefferson said, “the less will it be shaken by local passions.”
Lewis’s expedition was met with equally strong reservations. Congress could only be convinced to finance it if Jefferson pretended it was for commerce, the president had told the Spanish, British and French ambassadors. In reality, Jefferson assured them, this expedition would be led in the name of science. The pretense, the president explained, was necessary because the Constitution had made no provisions for such scientific ventures. And even though the Federalists believed it a waste of money, they stood no chance against the congressional Republican majority. Despite being outnumbered, they continued to voice their objections—even after Lewis had set off. “The Feds.,” Jefferson told Lewis, “treat it as philosophism, and would rejoice in it’s failure.”
Adams, though not active in politics anymore since his retirement to his farm in 1801, remained deeply interested in the nation’s affairs. He had supported the Louisiana Purchase, because he believed it would bi
nd the West to the East in one union,4 but agreed with the Federalists about the futility of the expedition, writing that there were so many “Travellers in our Wilderness, which have proved in the end to be mere delusions, that I give little attention to them.” Ten years earlier he had backed Michaux’s failed expedition to the West but was now concerned that the “Country is explored and thinly planted much too fast.” One of the reasons for his change of mind might have been the rift with Jefferson—it seems Adams was still smarting from the viciously fought election in 1800. In letters to friends Adams made his opinion of Jefferson’s scientific interest in the West very clear: “I care not a farthing about all the Big Bones in Europe or America,” he replied when one acquaintance inquired about the mastodon. “The spirit of party has seized upon the bones of this huge animal, because the head of a party [Jefferson] has written something about them,” Adams mocked, but as long as no living specimen was found, “I feel little interest in them.”
To Jefferson, however, a lot more was at stake than what Adams called “pitiful Bagatelles.” On the contrary, the basis of Enlightenment thinking was to understand nature and nature’s productions, be they fossils, plants or animals. Botany, horticulture, paleontology or any other aspect of natural history revealed a world to Jefferson that was orderly and governed by natural laws.5 At the same time trees, fossils or an awe-inspiring landscape could contribute to an American narrative that endowed the country with attributes of strength and pride, associations that would become fundamental aspects of the national identity. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had rebutted Buffon’s theory that America was degenerated; now Lewis’s expedition along the Missouri and across the Rocky Mountains was about to add a new chapter to this story.