Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (63 page)

Ohio’s first congressman, Jeremiah Morrow, who served as a Republican in the House from 1803 to 1813, was not one of the state’s great landowners. Unlike those Federalist magnates who possessed five-thousand-acre spreads, Morrow had a mere 385 acres, which, to the amazement of foreign visitors, he worked himself when he was back home from Congress. The large landowners in Ohio tended to be speculators who were in control of neither the economy nor the government. Because of competition, these speculators usually were forced to sell their lands not only as quickly as possible but also much more cheaply than they wished. These Ohio grandees were always vulnerable to having their unimproved lands taxed and to being challenged by other parvenu speculators; and, unlike the planters of the Southwest, they did not have dozens of slaves to set themselves off from the other landowners in the state.

But perhaps more important, not everyone in Ohio was a farmer. Indeed, the hundreds of multiplying small towns in the Northwest created a dizzying variety of occupations that made farming, and the growing of corn and wheat, seem to be an avocation rather than the basis for the economy. Newspapers proliferated in the Northwest in a way they did not in the Southwest, or even in the Old South. Before any state had been formed in the Northwest Territory, the area already had thirteen newspapers. By contrast, North Carolina, although over a century older than the Northwest Territory and with a population of nearly half a million, had only four newspapers. By the second decade of the nineteenth century Ohio had more than twice as many newspapers per capita as Georgia.
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Most of the capital in the Old Southwest was tied up in slaves and not, as in the Old Northwest, in land or manufacturing or other businesses; and those planters with the most human capital were the ones most able to move to the choice lands in the West and most capable of dominating
the commercial life of the area. The slave economy of the Old Southwest produced a single staple crop, cotton, whose credit and marketing systems tended to breed hierarchical structures of authority. Since small cotton farmers needed the patronage of the large planters with access to capital and markets, they inevitably deferred to them both socially and politically. The early nineteenth-century Southwest frontier, in other words, was not all that different from the Old South of the eighteenth century. Like tobacco in the eighteenth-century Upper South, cotton was a non-perishable product with a limited number of markets, mostly overseas. Since cotton did not need elaborate storage and handling facilities, marketing it did not produce towns or other distribution centers.
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Consequently, life in the Old Southwest did not revolve around towns or villages, as in the Old Northwest, but around plantations.
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By contrast, the economy of Ohio in the Old Northwest was diverse, with a variety of markets and no simple distribution system for the region’s many products, resulting in a proliferation of towns. Ohio’s political structure also differed from that of the territories and states of the Old Southwest. Unlike the county courts of the South and Southwest, the county commissions in Ohio were not self-perpetuating bodies but were under the elective control of local people. In addition, they shared authority with a hodgepodge of overlapping jurisdictions of towns, school districts, and other subdivisions, all of which produced a profusion of elective offices.
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In fact, with so many political offices available, everyone seemed to run for one of them at one time or another. One hundred sixteen men ran for Hamilton County’s seven seats in Ohio’s third territorial assembly, and ninety-nine men ran for its ten seats in the constitutional convention of 1802. In 1803 twenty-two candidates ran for the office of the first state governor. No wonder the Federalists complained that “few Constitutions were ever so bepeopled . . . throughout” as was the Ohio constitution of 1802.
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S
TILL, THE
S
OUTHWEST WAS HARDLY STATIC
, and despite the hierarchical influence of slavery on the society, many thought the region was
anything but stable. People in the Southwest were on the move, many of them in the 1790s pushing down the Mississippi toward the Spanish-held port city of New Orleans, which was becoming increasingly important to all Western Americans. Of course, New Orleans had always been on the mind of any American concerned about the West. Even Hamilton in 1790 thought that when the United States grew stronger and the American people were able to make good “our pretensions,” we would not “leave in the possession of any foreign power the territories at the mouth of the Mississippi, which are to be regarded as the key to it.”
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In the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795 the Americans had secured from Spain the right of depositing their goods in New Orleans and thus access to the larger commercial world through the Gulf of Mexico.

With this treaty Spain was trying to prevent an American takeover of its empire, but perhaps it was only postponing the inevitable. Jefferson and other Americans believed that Spain’s hold on its North American empire was so weak that it was only a matter of time before the various pieces of that empire—New Orleans, East and West Florida, maybe even Cuba—fell like ripe fruit “piece by piece” into American hands.
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As early as 1784 James Madison predicted that the safety of Spain’s “possessions in this quarter of the globe must depend more upon our peaceableness than her own power.”
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America need only wait and let its phenomenal demographic growth and movement take care of things.

Because of Spain’s weakness, its possessions on the continent were no problem for Jefferson; but the dynamic nation of England was a different matter altogether. Jefferson could not tolerate any additional English presence on the continent. During the Nootka Sound controversy in 1790, when an incident between England and Spain off the west coast of Vancouver Island threatened a war between the two European powers that bordered the United States, the Washington administration was deeply disturbed. By attempting to set up a base in Nootka Sound, the British had encroached on territory on the Pacific coast that the Spanish had regarded for centuries as exclusively theirs. When the Spanish seized and arrested the British intruders, Great Britain was prepared to retaliate. The U.S. government and especially Secretary of State Jefferson were apprehensive that Britain might use the conflict to seize all the Spanish possessions in North America, which would pose a danger to the security and even the independence of the new Republic.

What if the British requested permission to cross American territory to engage the Spanish in the West? What should the American response be? These were the questions that President Washington asked of his advisors. Washington was also worried that if war broke out between Spain and Britain, Spain’s ally France might get involved. Despite America’s alliance with France, Secretary of State Jefferson was willing to use American neutrality in the conflict between Spain and Britain to bargain for either Britain’s withdrawal from the Northwest posts or Spain’s opening up the Mississippi to American commerce. He expressed a willingness to go to war with Spain to acquire Florida and the rights to the Mississippi or, more important, even with Britain to prevent the former mother country from taking over Spain’s possessions.

In the end further conflict was averted. When France, preoccupied with its Revolution, declined to help Spain, the Spanish government backed down and in the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 agreed to recognize the right of England to trade and settle in the unoccupied territory that it had formerly claimed was exclusively Spanish. When in 1819 Spain ceded its rights to the Oregon Country to the United States, the stage was set for a competition between the two English-speaking nations for control of this far northwest piece of the continent. Partly as a result of the Nootka Sound controversy, Great Britain came to realize that having an accredited minister in the United States capital might be in its interest after all, and it sent George Hammond, who arrived in October 1791.

Spanish officials were well aware of America’s demographic growth and became more and more fearful of American encroachment. Suddenly in October 1800 Spain decided, under pressure from Napoleon, who was now in charge of the French Republic, to cede Louisiana back to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. Spain believed that France, as the dominant European power, would be better able to maintain a barrier between the Americans and the silver mines of Mexico.

In the meantime, France, under Napoleon’s leadership, had developed a renewed interest in its lost North American empire. Not only could French possession of Louisiana counter British ambitions in Canada, but, more important, Louisiana could become a dumping ground for French malcontents and a source for provisioning the lucrative French sugar islands in the Caribbean—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and especially Saint-Domingue.

Sugar was important to France. Processed in France and sold throughout Europe, sugar accounted for nearly 20 percent of France’s exports. And 70 percent of France’s sugar supply came from the single colony of Saint-Domingue. Napoleon knew that if France’s imperial ambitions were to be realized, the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue led by
Toussaint L’Ouverture would have to be put down and the island recovered for France. In 1801 Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc with an enormous force of forty thousand troops to recover Saint-Domingue and reinstate the ancien régime slave system that had made the island so profitable for France.

It was one of the greatest mistakes Napoleon ever made, as he himself later admitted. By 1802 most of the French troops had been killed or had succumbed to yellow fever, including Leclerc himself, and only two thousand remained healthy. Before the rebellion that had begun in 1791 ended in 1803 followed by the declaration of Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, some three hundred fifty thousand Haitians of all colors had died along with as many as sixty thousand French soldiers. Since Louisiana was supposed to supply goods to Saint-Domingue, the loss of that rich island suddenly made Louisiana dispensable. Already Napoleon was turning his eyes back toward Europe and to a renewal of the war with Great Britain, for which he needed money.

But Americans did not yet know of this turn of events. In 1802 all they heard were rumors that Napoleon had induced Spain to retrocede Louisiana to France, including, as many thought, both East and West Florida. For the Americans, and especially for President Jefferson, nothing could have been more alarming. It was one thing for a feeble and decrepit Spain to hold Louisiana; “her possession of the place,” said Jefferson, “would hardly be felt by us.” But it was quite another for a vigorous and powerful France to control what Jefferson called “the one single spot” on the globe, “the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.” Since that one single spot, New Orleans, was fast becoming the outlet for the produce of more than half of America’s inhabitants, in French hands, said Jefferson, it would become “a point of eternal friction with us.” Indeed, Jefferson told the American minister in France, Robert R. Livingston, “the day that France takes possession of New Orleans . . . seals the union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”
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For someone like Jefferson who hated the British with a passion matched by no other American, this was an extraordinary statement, but one that he knew Livingston would pass on to Napoleon and French officials. Probably Jefferson was never serious about an Anglo-American military alliance but hoped that Napoleon would see the light and realize that such an alliance was not in the interest of either France or the United
States.
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If France insisted on taking possession of Louisiana, however, “she might perhaps be willing to look about for arrangements which might reconcile it to our interests. If anything could do this,” the crafty president told Livingston in April 1802, “it would be the ceding to us the island of New Orleans and the Floridas.” He thought France might be willing to sell these territories for $6 million, and he sent his good and trusted friend James Monroe to Paris to help Livingston clinch the deal.
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Only Monroe had enough confidence in his intimacy with his fellow Virginians, President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, to allow him and Livingston to exceed their instructions and pay $ 15 million for all of Louisiana, some nine hundred thousand square miles of Western land.

When he learned of the acquisition Jefferson was ecstatic. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” he exclaimed, “probably containing 500 million acres.” Not only did the acquisition of Louisiana fulfill the president’s greatest dream of having sufficient land for generations to come of his yeoman farmers, his “chosen people of God,” but, he said, it also “removes from us the greatest source of danger to our peace.” Neither France nor Britain could now threaten New Orleans and America’s Mississippi outlet to the sea. The fact that East and West Florida remained with Spain was of little concern, “because,” said Jefferson, “we think they cannot fail to fall in our hands.”
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The purchase of Louisiana was the most popular and momentous event of Jefferson’s presidency. Not only did it end the long struggle for control of the Mississippi’s outlet to the sea, but it also, as Jefferson exulted, freed America from Europe’s colonial entanglements and prepared the way for the eventual dominance of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.