THIRTY-FIVE
The news of the cession of Louisiana.… forms an era in our history, and of itself must render the administration of Jefferson immortal.
—SAMUEL HARRISON SMITH
The fame of your political wisdom is now so permanently established, that it is past the power of a disappointed faction ever to diminish it.
—HORATIO GATES, on learning of the Louisiana Purchase
BEFORE HIS FIRST MONTH as president was done, Jefferson received reports of rumors in London that Spain had signed a treaty giving France more than half of her North American colonies. Known as the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, the agreement had been reached in a glorious eighteenth-century palace north of Madrid favored as a hunting retreat by Castilian kings. The arrangement, negotiated in late 1800, gave France ownership of the Spanish territory of Louisiana in the New World. The cession, as it was called, “works most sorely on the U.S.,” Jefferson wrote in April 1802. “It completely reverses all the political relations of the U.S. and will form a new epoch in our political course.”
Napoleon now had a vast interest in (and on) the American continent. “I am willing to hope, as long as anybody will hope with me” that the reports were wrong, Jefferson said.
They were not wrong. Jefferson understood he needed to act, but act subtly. “I believe that the destinies of great countries depend on it,” he wrote the French economist Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours.
To Jefferson it was an existential matter. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.” In a conversation “of some length” with the British diplomat Edward Thornton in Washington, Jefferson said that “the occupation of this country by France gave an entirely new character to all American relations with her.” Jefferson was not sanguine: “The inevitable consequences of such a neighborhood,” Thornton recorded Jefferson saying, “must be jealousy, irritation, and finally hostilities.”
As frightening as the moment was, Jefferson approached it with confidence: The success of his first year in office buoyed him for the struggle with Napoleon. The crisis over Louisiana and the Floridas was as profound as any that had faced the country to date. It was commensurate in scope with Jefferson’s worries about British political, economic, and military designs, for it was about a foreign power’s ambitions on America.
The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson’s resilience in the face of his opponents and, most important, his determination to secure the vast territory from France, thus doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither slow nor weak nor overly idealistic.
He drew on a lifetime of political experience, of victories and defeats, to manage the Louisiana crisis. He knew he needed to control the mechanics of decision as best he could (in this case by sending his own envoy, James Monroe, to Paris), a lesson learned in Williamsburg during the Stamp Act debates. He knew he needed to communicate in a way to rally the public, a lesson learned in 1774 when writing the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution and again in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Most important, he knew he needed to seize the initiative when he could, a lesson learned in his days as governor during the Revolution.
Now that Napoleon was in the picture, Jefferson understood what had to be done. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” With national interests at stake, Jefferson was willing to shift his sympathies from Paris to London—or at least be seen that way to improve America’s negotiating power.
Jefferson was clear-eyed. The fading Spanish empire had been one thing; Napoleonic France was quite another. “France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance,” Jefferson said. “Spain might have retained it quietly for years.… Not so can it ever be in the hands of France. The impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her character, placed in a point of eternal friction with us … render it impossible that France and the U.S. can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position.” (The cession was rumored but not confirmed until the summer of 1801 in a copy of a subsequent treaty, of Aranjuez, sent to Washington by Rufus King, the American minister to Britain.)
In a letter written just before he left the United States for France, Pierre S. du Pont gave Jefferson a tutorial on the practicalities of power. Most important, America should not offend or threaten Napoleon. Among the issues for Europe was the fear that the United States had designs on Spanish-held Mexico. The question came to this: “How then do you intend to acquire Louisiana and persuade France to surrender its ownership in an amicable way? Alas, Mister President, contractual freedom and a natural taste for wealth in all nations and all individuals (poverty strikes all great powers and only second-rate powers escape it) leave you with only one alternative, since you have no land to trade: it is financed purchase.”
Jefferson could not go to France himself, and so he reached out to a trusted friend. The president and James Madison weighed the possibilities and, in what Dolley Madison called “a most important piece of political business,” decided to ask their fellow Virginian James Monroe to travel to France as a presidential envoy. “In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs,” Jefferson wrote Monroe, who agreed to the assignment.
A snowstorm and unfavorable winds delayed Monroe’s departure, and he took advantage of the unexpected time on his hands to write Jefferson about the politics of his mission: “I hope the French govt. will have wisdom enough to see that we will never suffer France or any other power to tamper with our interior; if that is not the object there can be no reason for declining an accommodation to the whole of our demands.”
The incumbent minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, had meanwhile learned much in a drawing room gathering in Paris hosted by Joséphine Bonaparte. According to custom, Madame Bonaparte entered first, and Napoleon followed her, making conversation first with the ladies on hand and then with the men. “When the First Consul has gone the round of one room, he turned to me and made some of those common questions usual on such occasions,” Livingston told Jefferson. A moment later Napoleon moved toward Lord Whitworth, the British envoy, and, Livingston said, “accosted Lord Whitworth with some warmth, told him that there would probably be a storm.” It was a public declaration of what Lord Whitmore had been told in private two days earlier: “if you do not evacuate Malta there will be war.”
Napoleon then suddenly withdrew altogether after roiling European diplomacy in a drawing room. “You may easily surmise the sensation that this excited,” Livingston said. “Two expresses were dispatched to England that very night and I daresay to every court in Europe in the course of the next day.”
Livingston interpreted the incident in the same way everyone else did: as a sign of Napoleon’s intention to go to war with England. And that possibility increased the chances that France might want to simplify its North American problems by putting Louisiana in the hands of the United States.
For France, holding and defending lands so far from Europe was growing too expensive and troublesome. The defeat at the hands of slave forces in St. Domingue was especially galling to Napoleon, who believed he needed to husband his resources for campaigns closer to home.
Napoleon was in his bath, soaking in cologne-scented water, when his brothers came in to protest the decision to sell Louisiana. “You will have no need to lead the opposition,” Napoleon told his brothers, “for I repeat there will be no debate, for the reason that the project … conceived by me, negotiated by me, shall be ratified and executed by me, alone. Do you comprehend me?”
“I renounce Louisiana,” Napoleon announced to finance minister Barbé-Marbois, in the early morning of April 11, 1803. Within hours, foreign minister Talleyrand was enquiring whether the United States would be interested in the entire territory. “It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without any reservation. I know the price of what I abandon.… I renounce it with the greatest regret. But to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.”
Livingston knew what he had to do. “The field open to us is infinitely larger than our instructions contemplated,” Livingston told Madison, and the chance “must not be missed.” He and Monroe, who had arrived in Paris, negotiated a treaty giving the United States the Louisiana Territory—a landmass so vast the borders were unclear even to the buyers and the sellers—for about $15 million, or three cents an acre.
Word reached Jefferson on Sunday evening, July 3, 1803. Rufus King had arrived in New York and dispatched a packet to Washington. The key document was a letter from Livingston and Monroe announcing that they had signed a treaty with France on April 30 “ceding to us the island of N. Orleans and all Louisiana as it had been held by Spain,” Jefferson wrote Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., from Washington on Tuesday, July 5. “The price is not mentioned.”
Jefferson was stunned—happily stunned, but stunned nonetheless. Reading the correspondence in the President’s House he slowly grasped the scope of the news. “It is something larger than the whole U.S., probably containing 500 millions of acres, the U.S. containing 434 millions,” he wrote, seemingly thinking aloud as his mind took in what had happened. “This removes from us the greatest source of danger to our peace.”
It was wondrous. “It must … strike the mind of every true friend to freedom in the United States, as the greatest and most beneficial event that has taken place since the Declaration of Independence,” wrote Horatio Gates on Thursday, July 7. “I am astonished when I see so great a business finished, which but a few months since we whispered to one another about; it has the air of enchantment!”
“Every face wears a smile, and every heart leaps with Joy,” Andrew Jackson wrote Jefferson from the West. “The thing is new in the annals of the world,” wrote Arthur Campbell. “The great matter now is to make the wonderful event a blessing to the human race.”
As Jefferson absorbed the news, he wrote Meriwether Lewis, who left Washington on that Tuesday, July 5, 1803, to begin the expedition Jefferson described as “the journey which you are about to undertake for the discovery of the course and source of the Mississippi, and of the most convenient water communication from thence to the Pacific.”
It was the letter of a president at once optimistic and realistic. He hoped Lewis would reach the Pacific and armed the party with the means necessary to return home, come what may, authorizing Lewis to draw on the credit of the United States if necessary.
Jefferson had now done all he could to control the largely uncontrollable nature of the mission that was to take Lewis, Clark, and their party of forty or so up the Missouri River, into the winter of present-day North Dakota, then along the Columbia River to the Pacific. Jefferson had written detailed instructions, offered counsel, and worried over details. At last it was in the hands of the explorers, and Jefferson waited, eagerly, for word from the fields he had long traveled in his mind.
The Fourth of July fell on Monday. The President’s House was filled with festive callers. Samuel Harrison Smith thought there were more visitors than usual. The party was abuzz with the Louisiana news and “enlivened too by the presence of between 40 and 50 ladies clothed in their best attire, cakes, punch, wine, etc. in profusion,” Smith wrote.
In the flush of success, Jefferson was sanguine about everything—even the fate of the Union. “The future inhabitants of the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons,” Jefferson wrote John Breckinridge. “We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; and if they see their interest in separation, why should we take side with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”
To Joseph Priestley he boasted of his diplomatic subtlety. “I very early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon which was to burst in a tornado; and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was. Nothing but a frank and friendly development of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte to see that the train was unavoidable, and would change the face of the world, saved us from that storm.” He closed the letter with a scholarly query: “Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen.”
How like Jefferson—amid the greatest of possible events affecting every aspect of American life and beyond, he was reading Malthus.
The treaty had to be ratified by Sunday, October 30, 1803. Jefferson consulted with the cabinet and called for Congress to meet on Monday, October 17, 1803, to consider what he called “great and weighty matters.”
Jefferson’s initial view was that purchasing Louisiana and then governing it required a constitutional amendment. To John Breckinridge, he wrote: “This treaty must of course be laid before both houses because both have important functions to exercise respecting it. They I presume will see their duty to their country in ratifying and paying for it so as to secure a good which would otherwise probably be never again in their person. But I suppose 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.”
What he had done thus far by allowing his representatives to negotiate and sign the treaty with France was, in his current view, beyond the scope of his powers. “The Executive in seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advanced the good of their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The legislature in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties, and risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.” He used a lawyerly analogy to underscore his point. “It is the case of a guardian investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; and saying to him when of age, I did this for your good; I pretend to no right to bind you. You may disavow me, and I must get out of the scrape as I can. I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.”
Jefferson’s opinion in the second week of August 1803, then, was that the laborious machinery of amendment was crucial to ratify the purchase. Six days after writing Breckinridge, though, Jefferson hurriedly wrote him again, essentially calling back the point. “I wrote you on the 12th. inst. on the subject of Louisiana, and the constitutional provision which might be necessary for it,” he wrote on Thursday, August 18. “A letter received yesterday shows that nothing must be said on that subject which may give a pretext for retracting but that we should do sub silentio what shall be found necessary. Be so good therefore as to consider that part of my letter as confidential. It strengthens the reasons for desiring the presence of every friend to the treaty on the first day of the session.”
The unwelcome letter received on Wednesday, August 17, had come from Paris. Reporting from the French capital, Livingston and Monroe warned that France was growing uncomfortable with the deal. Fearing trouble, Jefferson moved decisively, pressing for a fast congressional vote in October and changing his mind about the need for a constitutional amendment. “You will find that the French government, dissatisfied perhaps with their late bargain with us, will be glad of a pretext to declare it void,” Jefferson wrote Gallatin on Tuesday, August 23, 1803. “It will be necessary therefore that we execute it with punctuality and without delay.”
Speed was essential. “Whatever Congress shall think it necessary to do should be done with as little debate as possible; and particularly so far as respects the constitutional difficulty,” Jefferson wrote Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia from Monticello on Wednesday, September 7.
Attorney General Levi Lincoln worried that there could be opposition to an acquisition, which was all the more reason for Jefferson to move quickly and unilaterally. “Is there not danger that the Eastern States, including even Rhode Island and Vermont, if not New York, and other States further South, would object to the ratification of a treaty directly introducing a state of things, involving the idea of adding to the weight of the southern States in one branch of the Govt. of which there is already too great a jealousy and dread … ? No plea of necessity, of commercial utility, or national security, will have weight with a violent party, or be any security against their hostile efforts and opposition clamor.”
Thomas Paine suggested an extraordinary scenario to Jefferson on Friday, September 23, 1803. What if Napoleon successfully defeated and subjugated England? “The English Government is but in a tottering condition, and if Bonaparte succeeds the Government will break up,” Paine wrote Jefferson. “In that case it is not improbable we may obtain Canada, and I think that Bermuda ought to belong to the United States.”
Paine mused about Bonaparte’s war plans for England, too. The First Consul, Paine said, had only to choose “a dark night and a calm” to land along the North Sea coast. Paine’s implied point: With such momentous things afoot, it was foolish to worry over constitutional niceties.
Alexander Hamilton could not have put it better.
The philosophical Jefferson had believed an amendment necessary. The political Jefferson, however, was not going to allow theory to get in the way of reality. “I confess … I think it important in the present case to set an example against broad construction by appealing for new power to the people,” he wrote Wilson Cary Nicholas. “If however our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall acquiesce with satisfaction, confiding that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects.”
So he left himself room to maneuver. It was the same kind of political craft he had practiced in the debate over the Bank of the United States, when he made the case against Hamilton’s broad construction only to (wisely) leave open the possibility that Washington could sign the bill.
Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a constitutional amendment expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would likely have driven Jefferson to distraction had another man been president. Much of his political life, though, had been devoted to the study and the wise exercise of power. He did what had to be done to preserve the possibility of republicanism and progress. Things were neat only in theory. And despite his love of ideas and image of himself, Thomas Jefferson was as much a man of action as he was of theory.
Indian tribes knew this well. Though he would not live to see the Trail of Tears of the 1830s, Jefferson was among the architects of Indian removal. He eagerly acquired lands from the tribes throughout the American interior—up to two hundred thousand square miles—and, as in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, did all he could to encourage white settlement ever farther west and south. In 1803, writing to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, Jefferson said that he believed the Indians “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Mississippi.” He threatened to retaliate against any attacking tribes by “seizing … the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace.”
Jefferson was triumphant on every front. “Our business is to march straight forward to the object which has occupied us for eight and twenty years, without either turning to the right or left,” Jefferson wrote former New York governor George Clinton on New Year’s Eve 1803. “In the hour of death we shall have the consolation to see established in the land of our fathers the most wonderful work of wisdom and disinterested patriotism that has ever yet appeared on the globe.”
To his opponents, Jefferson’s success seemed insurmountable and unendurable. “The [Republicans] have, as I expected, done more to strengthen the executive than Federalists dared think of even in Washington’s day,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to Roger Griswold in November 1803.
In January 1804, the Federalist senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts suggested secession and the formation of a northern confederacy. “If, I say, Federalism is crumbling away in New England, there is no time to be lost, lest it should be overwhelmed and become unable to attempt its own relief,” he said. New York would be essential if the project—what Griswold euphemistically called “a reunion of the Northern states”—were to succeed. “The people of the East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West,” said Pickering. “The latter are beginning to rule with a rod of iron.” The opposition was more than a little desperate. “Many persons are at this moment prepared to declare Jefferson President for life,” Griswold wrote on Tuesday, January 10, 1804.
Which was what the Federalists feared most.