Madison and Jefferson (72 page)

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

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 foresight 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

As Congress weighed the acquisition of Louisiana that month, the country learned of two deaths of national significance. On October 3 the eighty-one-year-old Revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams “paid the last tribute to nature,” as the newspapers were wont to phrase it; and on the twenty-third, when eighty-two-year-old Edmund Pendleton followed him, it was broadcast that “another star has fallen from the splendid constellation of virtue and talents which guided the people of the United States in their struggle for independence.” The House of Representatives instructed each of its members to wear a “badge of mourning” for thirty days, to show their veneration for both men. Some in the U.S. Senate balked at the suggestion, leading the
Aurora
to shudder that such an abhorrent act was “almost too malignant even for federalists.” As the nation’s boundaries expanded, the battle over the Revolution’s meaning went on.
¹²

The bill Jefferson signed on October 31 was a temporary measure. It allowed Madison to notify William C. C. Claiborne that he had been appointed the territorial governor of Louisiana; but the government itself was without form or substance. Claiborne, a less-than-poised twenty-eight-year-old former congressman from Tennessee, had been serving as governor of Mississippi Territory since 1801. Moving over to New Orleans, he was accompanied by five hundred troops, in case the Spanish attempted to resist the transfer of power. The show of force was meant as well to awe Indians of the region and curb potentially rebellious slaves.

Claiborne found the Crescent City prosperous and bent on improvement, its buildings “elegant.” But he also found the displaced French to be of a “disorderly disposition”; those among them whom he called “warm imprudent young men” seemed spiteful toward Americans. If the French had to be watched, so did “adventurers … from several different nations—of various characters, and among them many vagabonds.” The young governor-in-waiting was unsure how far he should go to demonstrate his authority. Illustrative of the problems he had to confront, Claiborne did not speak French.

In early December 1803, at long last, the Spanish in New Orleans staged an official retrocession to France, though at that time no French military
presence was in the area. Cannon fire sparked the event, and the celebrants toasted both Bonaparte and Jefferson. Then, on December 20, the Louisiana Territory was formally conveyed from France to the United States, and its Virginia-born, Tennessee-bred governor addressed the people of New Orleans: “The American people receive you as brothers; and will hasten to extend to you a participation in those inestimable rights which have formed the basis of their own unexampled prosperity.” In the middle of January, when word of the peaceful transfer finally reached Washington, members of Congress hosted a festive dinner for the president and his cabinet; a ball in Georgetown brought out close to five hundred gentlemen and ladies.
¹³

In framing a government, Jefferson turned yet again to Senator Breckinridge, insisting this time that anything he told him was to be kept in the strictest confidence. “Never let any person know that I have put pen to paper on this subject,” he wrote, and enclosed his draft of the bill he wanted. Breckinridge, who conveniently chaired the committee on Louisiana, followed instructions, returned the original letter to the wary chief executive, and made few changes in the blueprint for a new political order in this most extensive territory.

It was a good thing for Jefferson that he concealed his authorship. Debate on the Louisiana Ordinance of 1804 began in the Senate in early January and was immediately controversial. It pleased few members of Congress from either party. It was, in fact, a rather “unJeffersonian” creation: autocratic and oligarchic. The governor was appointed, not elected, and the thirteen councilors whom Jefferson designated were drawn from the ranks of “notables.” In effect, President Jefferson was reinventing the British colonial model.

In keeping with that model, ordinary citizens had no voice in government. The outspoken Matthew Lyon, formerly of Vermont, sat in Congress these days as a Republican representative from Kentucky. He could not restrain himself from griping that the Louisianans were being reduced to “probationary slavery.” For all intents and purposes, in crafting America’s first colony, Jefferson was giving its residents fewer rights than the rebellious patriots of 1776 owned.
¹⁴

Those in Congress who defended the undemocratic ordinance rationalized that the people were not ready for self-government. In a display of nativism, men in Washington pronounced that New Orleanians were different from citizens of the United States, their character marred by too much exposure to colonial Spanish (and before that French) rulers. They
were prone to unrest; they had to be weaned off bad habits. Native Louisianans sought audiences with President Jefferson in order to convince the administration that their cultural forms were consistent with the American understanding of free republican government. He politely heard their pleas but was unmoved.
¹⁵

Jefferson continued to be guided by the metaphor of the guardian and his ward. He told DeWitt Clinton of New York of his reluctance to experiment with democracy in Louisiana. “Our new fellow citizens as of yet are incapable of self government as children,” he stated, disagreeing with those in Congress who refused to “suspend its principles for a single moment.” Jefferson was saying that as children, or wards of the government, these dependents were to be regarded as aliens to republican values, who therefore could not act in their own best interest. This logic was oddly reminiscent of the hated Alien Acts of 1798, which had extended the naturalization period for aliens.
¹⁶

The political taint would wear off once Virginians, and others like them, migrated into the Louisiana Territory and replicated “American” forms. In the “empire for liberty” that Jefferson envisioned, vast open spaces invited new opportunity for a decent and deserving people who were meant to spread west and republicanize. Cultural dominance was built into that grand vision. It was impossible not to look to the future, as Jefferson mused to James Monroe in 1801, “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond our limits, and over the whole northern, if not southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms by similar laws.” They would, of necessity, comprise a homogeneous population.
¹⁷