On July 3, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson learned to his delight that his representatives in Paris had concluded an epic deal with Napoleon two months earlier. Sent to negotiate for possession of New Orleans and other French territory along the Gulf Coast, Robert Livingston and James Monroe had seized a larger opportunity by purchasing the entire French province of Louisiana for $15 million. The treaty left vague the extent of that territory, but France had long defined Louisiana as embracing all the land covered by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, reaching westward to the Rocky Mountains. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves,” the French foreign minister Talleyrand told Livingston, “and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
Jefferson shared the news at once with a friendly editor, who touted the deal in print on the Fourth of July as “an event which history will record among the most splendid in our annals.” Critics tried to dampen the festivities. One called Louisiana “a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” But most in Congress agreed with Jefferson that the Louisiana Purchase was a great bargain, if only because it gave the United States control of New Orleans and thus ensured free navigation between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Gulf of Mexico.
Beyond such commercial considerations, Jefferson saw the nation’s continued westward expansion as essential to preserving liberty. By securing land for future generations of yeoman farmers in the West, he sought to perpetuate an agrarian way of life that he believed made Americans more democratic, more self-reliant, and more resistant to government interference and the social ills he associated with cities. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
By 1800, one American in ten lived west of the Appalachians, and many settlers were vying with Indians for control of land. Jefferson hoped to end that strife by reserving land west of the Mississippi for Indians. Once tribes at odds with whites had voluntarily emigrated across that river, or been forcibly removed, all the country east of the Mississippi would be safe for settlement.
Such grand schemes aside, Jefferson took pride in a purchase that roughly doubled the nation’s territory “for a song,” as one admirer put it. The $15 million price tag seemed small for so vast an acquisition even then. In recent times, the treaty has been hailed as an outright steal, amounting to a few cents an acre in an era when public land sold for a dollar an acre.
That tidy reckoning, however, greatly understates the real cost of securing this vast area. Today, as America observes the bicentennial
of the Louisiana Purchase, the deal merits reassessment. Only a small part of Louisiana—including New Orleans, St. Louis, and other towns of French origin along the Mississippi—belonged to France by right of occupancy. The rest was French in theory but belonged in fact to Indians of many tribes, whose treaties or trading ties with France did not entitle that nation to dispose of their territory.
Furthermore, rival European powers had long challenged French claims in the New World. In 1763, after conquering Canada, Britain had acquired most of Louisiana east of the Mississippi from France, which ceded the rest of the province to its ally Spain. In years to come, Spanish overseers left their mark on the French Quarter in New Orleans by erecting the handsome Cabildo, or council house, and other impressive structures. By 1800 France had regained strength and extracted a promise from Spain to return Louisiana as part of a larger territorial exchange (the deal would not take effect until France occupied Louisiana). When word of this retrocession reached Jefferson, he feared that French troops sent to put down a slave revolt in Haiti would proceed to New Orleans—“the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” as he put it—and seal off the Mississippi. This threat spurred the negotiations that led to the Louisiana Purchase. For Napoleon, fast losing interest in America as his plans for European conquest took shape, Louisiana was a bargaining chip of diminishing value, and he promptly cashed it in.
Ratification of the Louisiana Purchase by the Senate in October 1803 by no means clinched the deal. What Jefferson had secured was not clear title to Louisiana but a debatable French claim that other nations disputed. Spain, for one, denied that French Louisiana had ever extended very far west of the Mississippi and protested that France had pledged not to transfer the province to a third party without its consent. In the end, however, Spain deferred to Napoleon by surrendering New Orleans and other settlements along the Mississippi to French officials, who then transferred them to U.S. authorities. This repaid much if not all of Jefferson’s investment, for New Orleans alone was a great asset. But any further American efforts to claim land west of the Mississippi were sure to meet with stiff opposition—not only from Spain in the southwest and Britain in the northwest but also from various Indian nations in between, whose chiefs had never bowed to any white men and were not about to start.
The Louisiana Purchase was indeed a momentous transaction. But the price paid to France was only a down payment on a much larger sum, expended in blood, toil, and treasure as Americans struggled for decades to assert their tenuous claim to tribal lands France had no real authority to sell. And the long-term consequences of that commitment to expansion went far beyond anything Jefferson envisioned. To this day, the West remains a land of contradictions, where cherished Jeffersonian ideals are often confounded by reality.
Forging an ‘empire for liberty’
On March 9, 1804, French residents of St. Louis looked on solemnly as the Spanish flag was lowered in front of the Government House and the French Tricolor was raised in its place. In deference to local sentiments, the French flag was allowed to fly for a day before it was replaced by the Stars and Stripes and Americans took charge of the town. Among those witnessing this transfer of power was Meriwether Lewis, who was preparing with William Clark to lead an American expedition to the headwaters of the Missouri River (the limits of the Lousiana Purchase in the northwest) before continuing on to the Pacific. The ceremony in St. Louis—which followed a similar transfer in New Orleans in late 1803 that left the town’s French inhabitants in tears—fulfilled Napoleon’s pledge to hand over those settlements. Now Lewis and Clark would set out to fulfill Jefferson’s larger goals for the deal by extending the American frontier westward to the Rockies.
Jefferson was not a ruthless expansionist. His stated goal in acquiring western territory was to forge an “empire for liberty” that would foster new democratic settlements without causing undue harm to American Indians. By his own account, he had long felt “attachment and commiseration” toward Indians, and in seeking approval of the Louisiana Purchase he proposed “confirming to the Indian inhabitants their occupancy and self-government.” At the same time, he was intent on bringing those Indians under American control and preventing them from dealing with Britain and other rival nations. To that end, Lewis and Clark greeted tribes along the Missouri through an interpreter with a speech
informing them that they were now children of their father in Washington and must recognize no other sovereign.
Some tribes resented such talk. In late September 1804, Lewis and Clark met with a large party of Teton Sioux in what is now South Dakota; the Sioux saw themselves as masters of that country and had no intention of obeying some distant white “father.” Sioux chiefs demanded more gifts than Lewis and Clark were prepared to part with and took offense when they refused offers of women to sleep with—a symbolic rejection of the tribe as a whole. The two sides nearly came to blows before the explorers brandished their weapons and proceeded upriver. This tense encounter foretold the fierce resistance Americans would face from the Sioux and other Plains tribes in decades to come.
Coping with violent opposition was not the only added cost of fulfilling America’s problematic deal with France. Much of the Louisiana Purchase ultimately had to be repurchased from tribes that demanded compensation for land they surrendered. Admittedly, the terms federal negotiators offered were not very generous. In 1808, for example, Osage chiefs signed a deal with Clark giving up nearly “50,000 square miles of excellent country” between the Arkansas and Missouri rivers for goods worth about $5,000. This was later renegotiated, but the compensation remained paltry. Such treaties often kindled fiery resentments among Indians who were not party to the deal.
Even when terms offered by the government proved satisfactory to Indians, the agreement was often short-lived. Part of the land ceded by the Osage and nearby Indians went to eastern tribes that moved west voluntarily or were pressured into doing so. This fulfilled Jefferson’s plan of freeing the country east of the Mississippi for whites. And some tribespeople who went west also fulfilled Jefferson’s hopes for Indian assimilation by settling down as farmers. But far from winning acceptance as productive Americans, those Indian settlers were forced to make way for land-hungry white emigrants by signing new treaties and moving to less desirable country. Jefferson’s idea of halting white settlement at the Mississppi was little more than a pipe dream that allowed him to embrace the Louisiana Purchase without confronting its bitter consequences for Indians.
The seemingly endless process of treaty making and treaty breaking took a toll not only on the tribes affected but also on the federal officials and troops sent to enforce the deals. As president, Jefferson reduced the size of the army as part of a concerted effort to curb federal power, which he regarded as a threat to democracy and states’ rights. But the costly process of making good on his commitment to expansion forced Jefferson’s successors to enlarge the army and the roster of federal Indian agents and administrators. His high hopes for an “empire for liberty” ignored the hard fact that sustaining any sort of empire, even one founded on virtuous principles, required a more assertive federal government than he considered healthy for democracy.
Constitutional scruples
From the start, the Louisiana Purchase posed a challenge to Jefferson’s view that the federal government should assume no powers not prescribed to it by the Constitution. Since the Constitution gave neither the president nor Congress express authority to acquire territory and incorporate it into the Union, he thought a constitutional amendment might be necessary to validate the Purchase. That would take time, and if he failed to win approval of the deal within six months, France could nullify it. In the end, his hunger for westward expansion overcame his constitutional scruples. The deal went before Congress like any other treaty negotiated by the president and became law once it was ratified.
Jefferson was similarly loose—or pragmatic—when it came to granting Louisiana’s French settlers the rights of American citizenship, as called for in the treaty. Privately, he worried that the Creoles had no experience with democracy and were “as yet as incapable of self-government as children.” So he proposed an interim status for New Orleans and environs, organizing the area as an American territory with a governor appointed by the president and an assembly appointed by the governor. The absence of elected representatives struck some in Congress as contrary to Jefferson’s insistence in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” One legislator dismissed the plan as “complete despotism.”
In response to protests from New Orleans, Jefferson approved an act granting the territory an elected assembly, and in 1812 it entered the Union as the state of Louisiana. But disenchantment with territorial status would long be a problem in the West, where several decades sometimes elapsed between the organization of a territory and its admission as a state. Residents with no say in choosing their governor and no vote in Congress who complained of being treated like colonists were adopting the language of Jefferson the revolutionary to protest limitations on the consent of the governed endorsed by Jefferson the president.
The supreme test of federal power versus local sovereignty in the West involved the question of slavery in new states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase (see “Slavery in Jefferson’s New Lands of Liberty,” below). That issue convulsed the region until Union forces defeated the Confederacy in 1865 and asserted federal supremacy over the rebellious states.
But the abolition of slavery did not end the controversy over federal power in the West. Thousands of U.S. troops were needed to crush Indian resistance in the region and force tribes onto reservations. Lands vacated by Indians fell to the federal government, which distributed some to railroads to promote construction and some to homesteaders. Those federal land grants helped settle the West, but they also sowed widespread discontent. In the late 1800s, homesteaders in Kansas and other states in the arid western portion of the Louisiana Purchase fell on hard times and joined the protest movement called Populism. Echoing Jeffersonian rhetoric, Populists blamed their plight on politicians in Washington who neglected the concerns of God’s chosen people in rural areas while catering to the mobs and money men in the nation’s
festering cities.
Such complaints have persisted in a region where the government remains in control of much of the land, water, and timber. “Far from declining in the twentieth century, federal participation in the Western economy expanded,” notes historian Patricia Nelson Limerick. That dependence on Washington, she adds, while not unprofitable to westerners, has fostered resentment among those who share Jefferson’s vision of the West as a bastion of agrarian virtues and would like to think of themselves as “the most self-reliant and independent of all citizens.”
To be sure, many who went west to settle the Louisiana Purchase lived up to Jeffersonian ideals as citizens, succeeding largely through their own efforts and nurturing democracy through the votes they cast and the protests they registered. But all their accomplishments rested on a massive foundation laid by the federal government when it claimed territory from European powers or Indian nations and set out to secure those claims.
Napoleon sensed prophetically that the Lousiana Purchase might give rise to an American empire that would dominate the world one day. “Perhaps it will be objected that the Americans may be found too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries,” he remarked during the negotiations. “But my foresight does not embrace such remote fears.” Jefferson, for his part, was content to limit his “empire for liberty” to the North American continent, for he recognized that Napoleonic dreams of global supremacy could end in tyranny. The great problem Jefferson wrestled with as he launched America on an epic course of expansion—how to pursue empire while preserving liberty—remains with us to this day.
Stephen G. Hyslop is a contributing writer to The History Channel Magazine.
Slavery in Jefferson’s New Lands of Liberty
Jefferson saw slavery as a great evil, worthy of divine punishment. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote. Yet these convictions did not lead Jefferson, author of the declaration that “all men are created equal,” to free more than a few of the 200 or so slaves he owned.
Jefferson’s deep ambivalence over slavery was betrayed by his shifting position on the hot issue of whether Congress should ban slavery in the nation’s western territories. Before he became president, he introduced legislation in Congress that would have done just that. After that measure was rejected, he grew increasingly pessimistic about curbing slavery. He feared that if blacks were freed they would either clash with whites or intermingle with them, producing a mixed race inferior to the white race. (This bleak view of miscegenation evidently did not prevent him from fathering children by his slave Sally Hemings, as suggested by recent genetic tests on their descendants.)
Jefferson could only hope that the glaring issue of slavery in the territories would fade as westward expansion gained momentum, providing settlers from North and South with common ground and diverting them from sectional rivalry. Instead, the Louisiana Purchase inflamed the debate over slavery and brought the nation closer to the day of reckoning he dreaded. Contrary to his idealized vision of the West as a refuge for self-reliant yeoman farmers, slavery was well established in New Orleans and other French settlements before the United States took possession, and American slaveholders flocked to the region afterward. As a result, both Louisiana and Missouri—the first two territories within the Purchase to enter the Union—did so as slave states. Before admitting Missouri, however, Congress engaged in a bitter debate culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which banned slavery in any new territories formed from the Lousiana Purchase north or west of Missouri.
For Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello when this debate took place, the Missouri controversy was like an alarm in the night. He complained that rival Federalists were trying to blame his fellow Republicans for “the miseries of slavery, as if we were advocates for it.” In fact, many Republicans in Congress were Southerners like Jefferson who opposed the antislavery provision in the Missouri Compromise as a federal assault on states’ rights. He saw this as a matter of principle, for he and his party had long sought to curb federal power, but his cherished cause of states’ rights was becoming increasingly identified with slavery.
Ultimately, the explosive issue of slavery in the territories gave rise to a new Republican party, the party of Lincoln, whose election in 1860 and subsequent triumph over the Confederacy settled the matter once and for all. But even as he overturned the conservative Jeffersonian doctrine of states’ rights, Lincoln invoked Jefferson’s revolutionary principle of equal rights to uphold emancipation.—S.G.H.