Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (64 page)

Most Federalists saw it differently; indeed, they were aghast at the purchase. Louisiana, declared Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, was “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” He thought the deal was a disaster. “We are to spend money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much.” It was simply a device by which “Imperial Virginia” could spread its
slaveholding population westward in order to remain “arbitress” of the whole nation.

Although Alexander Hamilton favored the purchase, without granting Jefferson any credit for it, he was worried about what the addition of such a great extent of territory would mean for the integrity of the United States. Could the people of Louisiana, with such differences of culture, religion, and ethnicity, be made “an integral part of the United States,” or would the territory have to remain a permanent colony of the United States?
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Many Federalists fretted that this expansion of the nation would enhance the slaveholding South at the expense of the Northeast. “The Virginia faction,” observed Stephen Higginson of Massachusetts, “have certainly formed a deliberate plan to govern and depress New England; and this eagerness to extend our territory and create new States is an essential part of it.”
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Some of these Federalists, led by former secretary of state Timothy Pickering and Connecticut’s Roger Griswold, revived the 1780s idea of breaking away and forming a separate confederacy of New England and New York. Hamilton’s adamant opposition to such a scheme, however, essentially killed it, at least for the time being. “Dismemberment of our Empire,” Hamilton told one prominent New England Federalist the night before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, offered “no relief to our real Disease; which is DEMOCRACY.”
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With their conception of the United States as a loosely bound confederation of states, the Democratic-Republicans had no problem with the addition of this huge expanse of territory. “Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?” asked Jefferson in his second inaugural address in March 1805. Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” was always one of like principles, not of like boundaries. As long as Americans believed in certain ideals, he said, they remained Americans, regardless of the territory they happened to occupy.
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In 1799, for example, the famous pioneer Daniel Boone moved his extended family from Kentucky to Missouri—into Spanish territory!—without any sense that he had become less American. The Spanish government had simply promised ample portions of cheap land for him and
his family, and that was enough, not just for him but for countless other Americans who moved into Spanish-owned territory, including Texas, in search of cheap land. Boone later said that he would never have settled outside the United States “had he not firmly believed it would become a portion of the American republic.” Maybe so: Jefferson certainly welcomed this movement of Americans into lands owned by Spain, since “it may be the means of delivering to us peaceably what may otherwise cost us a war.”
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The president often expressed a strange idea of the American nation. At times he was remarkably indifferent to the possibility that a Western confederacy might break away from the Eastern United States. What did it matter? he asked in 1804. “Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendents as those of the eastern.”
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This relaxed attitude toward a precisely bounded territory as a source of nationhood was different from that of the European nations. For Jefferson and many other Republicans, this peculiar conception of nationhood made ideology a more important determinant of America’s identity than occupying a particular geographical space.

Despite Jefferson’s great enthusiasm for the purchase, he hesitated to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Being a firm believer in limited government and strict construction of the Constitution, Jefferson doubted that the federal government had the constitutional right either to acquire foreign territory or, more important, to incorporate it into the Union. For seven weeks he worried about the issue and tinkered with the idea of amending the Constitution. Only when Livingston and Monroe informed him in August 1803 that Napoleon was having second thoughts about the deal did he reluctantly agree to send the treaty to the Senate without mentioning his constitutional misgivings. Better to pass over them in silence, he said, than to attempt to justify the purchase by invoking a broad construction of the Constitution.

The Senate complied with Jefferson’s wishes, but the more unruly and rambunctious House of Representatives, which had to implement the treaty financially, opened up the constitutional issues that Jefferson had hoped to avoid. Although they remained firm believers in states’ rights and strict construction, many House Republicans were forced to invoke, as Hamilton had in the 1790s, the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to justify the government’s acquisition of Louisiana. Even
though the Republicans enjoyed a three-to-one majority in the House, the supporters of the purchase were able to carry their first procedural bill by a margin of only two votes, fifty-nine to fifty-seven.

It was certainly ironic that some Republicans talked like Federalists, but too much can be made of that. More impressive is the seriousness with which Jefferson and the other Republicans took their constitutional scruples. Although they wanted this addition of Western territory in the worst way, they nevertheless worried and hesitated to the point where they almost lost it.

In Article III of the treaty the United States committed itself to incorporating the inhabitants of the ceded territory into the Union “as soon as possible.” But most Americans believed that this would not be easy, either constitutionally or culturally. Like the Federalists, Jefferson knew that this new territory was composed of people who were quite different from those of the United States, in religion, race, and ethnicity. Because these former subjects of France and Spain were accustomed to authoritarian rule and unfamiliar with self-government, “the approach of such a people to liberty,” the Republicans said, “must be gradual.” Consequently, the administration thought that until the people of Louisiana were ready for democracy America might have to continue to rule them arbitrarily. The president was given far more power to rule in Louisiana than was the case in the other territories, leading some critics to charge that the administration had created in Louisiana “a government about as despotic as that of Turkey in Asia.”
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In March 1804 Congress divided the Louisiana Purchase by a line that is now the northern border of the present state of Louisiana. While the vast and little-known region to the north became the District of Louisiana with St. Louis as its capital and with the notorious General James Wilkinson as its governor, the southern part became the Territory of Orleans with New Orleans as its capital.
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The borders with Spanish territory were unclear, and although a buffer zone between Louisiana and Texas was created, boundary disputes between the Americans and the Spanish were both inevitable and exploitable by adventurers, runaway slaves, and troublemakers of all sorts.

The first governor of the Territory of Orleans was twenty-nine-year-old William Claiborne, who at twenty-one had been a judge of the Tennessee state supreme court and most recently was governor of the Mississippi
Territory. Because of doubts about the capacity of the French and Spanish people of Orleans for self-rule, Claiborne was given nearly dictatorial powers over them, even though he did not speak their languages, share their religion, or comprehend their customs and society. Not surprisingly, Claiborne found dealing with the diversity of the new territory to be his “principal difficulty.”
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Since Claiborne, like nearly all white Americans, was used to a black-white, slave-free dichotomy, he found it especially difficult to understand the division of Louisiana society into at least three castes—black, free colored, and white. Could the free colored population be armed and participate in the militia? Could they become citizens? Fisher Ames’s warning that Louisiana society was simply a “
Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum
of savages and adventurers” whose morals could never be “expected to sustain and glorify our republic” frightened many Americans.
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Not only did the large numbers of Americans moving into Orleans have to adapt their common law to the European civil law, but they had to make their way into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and Catholic-dominated society unlike anyplace else in the United States. Fearing the unruly slaves being brought from the rebellious colony of Saint-Domingue, Congress in 1804 forbade the importation of slaves from abroad into Orleans. This restriction assumed that the domestic slave trade could supply the territory’s needs and thereby offset the influence of the French and Spanish slaves and what the Americans believed were the pernicious racial attitudes of the French and Spanish residents.

Franco-Spanish slavery was different from Anglo-American slavery. Manumission and the slave’s right to self-purchase were easier; indeed, to the consternation of many white Americans, between 1804 and 1806 nearly two hundred slaves in Orleans purchased their own freedom. By 1810 free blacks composed about 20 percent of the population of the city of New Orleans.
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Consequently, the numbers of free blacks, interracial marriages and unions, and people of mixed race were much greater than elsewhere in the American South. Despite these differences, however, the territory of Orleans, or what became Louisiana, gained statehood in 1812, less than a decade after the Louisiana Purchase.

Over the decades following 1803, Americans tried with mixed success to bring this polyglot society and its permissive interracial mixing into line
with the binary racial culture prevailing throughout the rest of America. In the nineteenth century most Americans retained an image of New Orleans as an exotic place of loose morals and rampant miscegenation, and thus they learned little or nothing from this remarkable multicultural and multi-racial addition to the United States.

J
EFFERSON WAS EAGER
to take advantage of the hazy boundaries of the Louisiana Territory. He thought that the western border went all the way to the Rio Grande and was convinced that West Florida on the eastern border was part of the Louisiana Purchase. The American negotiators, Livingston and Monroe, certainly had argued that Louisiana extended eastward to the Perdido River (the present western boundary of Florida), and they had backed up their argument by showing that France had claimed such a border for Louisiana prior to 1763.
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When Livingston asked the French foreign minister about the “East bounds of the Territory ceded to us,” the wily Talleyrand replied, “I can give you no direction; you have made a noble bargain for yourselves and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
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They did make the most of it—at the expense of Spain. The Republicans’ policy was simple: Claim West Florida as part of Louisiana (pointing out that that was how France had defined it) and then offer to forgo the use of force if Spain would sell both East and West Florida to the United States. Since, as Monroe pointed out, in what was conventional wisdom among most American leaders, America was “a rising and Spain a declining power,” the Floridas were sooner or later going to fall to the United States anyhow; thus it was in Spain’s interest to sell them now. In 1804 Congress passed the Mobile Act that extended the federal revenue laws to all territory ceded by France, including West Florida, which Spain considered to be its territory. The act vested the president with discretionary authority to take possession of the Mobile area “whenever he shall deem it expedient.”
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Spain called this act an “atrocious libel” and sought French backing for its position. Although Monroe and others recommended that the United States simply seize the disputed territory, Jefferson reluctantly decided to wait for circumstances to ripen. Yet at the same time he was eager to “correct the dangerous error that we are a people whom no
injuries can provoke to war,” and in his December 1805 message to the Congress he came close to calling for a declaration of war against Spain. To the amazement of foreign observers, the aggressive young country with little or no military establishment seemed to have no doubt that it was destined, in the words of a French diplomat, “to devour the whole of North America.”
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It seemed as if America could not acquire territory fast enough. When in early 1806 Jefferson requested $ 2 million from Congress to help obtain the Floridas, Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont proposed an amendment to give the president authority to acquire not only West and East Florida but also Canada and Nova Scotia, by purchase or “otherwise,” by which he meant military means. The amendment gained some support but was defeated. The “Two Million Dollar Act,” as it was called, was bitterly opposed by John Randolph, the Virginia spokesman for the States’ Rights Principles of 1798, largely because the money was to be paid to France, which presumably would influence Spain to surrender the Floridas. Randolph “considered it a base prostration of the national character, to excite one nation by money to bully another out of its property,” and he used this incident to break decisively with Jefferson.
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Although Randolph was not opposed to American expansion but only to the administration’s unbecoming and secret maneuvering, others were being made uneasy by the constant pressure for acquiring territory. Senator Samuel Mitchill of New York said the United States was caught up in “a land mania.” First it was Louisiana, “a world without bounds, without limits.” Now “we must buy more—we must have the Floridas. What next?” he asked. “Why all the Globe—why this rage—Have we an inhabitant for every acre?”
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