100 Documents That Changed the World

by Scott Christianson

  An agreement was quickly reached. The formal document known as the Louisiana Purchase Agreement was made up of the Treaty of Cession and two Conventions setting forth the financial aspects of the transaction. The treaty was signed in Paris on 30 April 1803, by Citizen Francis Barbé Marbois of France and Livingston and Monroe.

  Instead of spending up to $10 million for the port of New Orleans and the Floridas, the US ended up paying $15 million for an enormous territory of more than 828,000 square miles of land stretching west from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. The area was larger than most of Western Europe and amounted to a virtual doubling of the nation’s total size, at a price of about four cents an acre.

  It took several weeks for word of the deal to reach Washington by sea and the action was not announced until 4 July.

  Because the new nation’s Constitution contained no provision for such a purchase, the Louisiana Purchase treaty had to undergo close scrutiny before it was eventually upheld by Chief Justice John Marshall and ratified by the Senate. The House also approved the appropriation, finalizing the greatest nonviolent land acquisition in American history.

  A map showing the extent of the Louisiana Purchase. The territory secured by the treaty included the present-day states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and North and South Dakota.

  The $116.68 allocated for ‘Indian presents’ in this early shopping list (top) rose to $696 in Lewis’s final list of expenses. Despite alcohol being a precious commodity, Lewis purchased 30 gallons of ‘Strong Spt. Wine’ (brandy) in Philadelphia before embarking on his expedition. This was in addition to his crew’s main refreshment – 120 gallons of whisky.

  Meriwether Lewis’s List of Expenses

  (1803)

  Before setting off with William Clark on his epic overland expedition westward to the Pacific, Jefferson’s protégé prepares a detailed list of all the equipment and supplies that Congress will need to authorize for purchase. Nearly one-third of the total projected cost is for ‘Indian presents’.

  While final negotiations were still going on for the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson proceeded with another audacious plan – this one involving exploration of the vast, uncharted North American continent west of the Mississippi River. In the fall of 1802 he picked his secretary and disciple, Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809), to head an expedition of discovery. Specially trained in astronomy, navigation, surveying, geography, botany, zoology, engineering, biology, medicine, writing, politics and art, Lewis also received instruction in the use of a cipher to enable him to secretly communicate with the President in order to safeguard their activities from foreign powers.

  Lewis was ordered to keep meticulous records of the expedition, and for starters, in order to receive federal funding for the mission, he had to draw up an estimate of costs, based on his projected expenses for equipping and supporting an officer and 10 to 12 soldiers across the wilderness.

  His detailed accounting added up to $2,500 for clothing, guns, ammunition, medical supplies, camp gear and scientific instruments, with $696 earmarked for ‘gifts to the Indians’. The latter underscored Jefferson’s recognition of the mission’s importance in opening diplomatic relations between the United States and the as-yet-unknown Native American nations of the West, in hopes of gaining their favour in trade over the English, French or Spanish. The President told Lewis, ‘it will now be proper you should inform those through whose country you will pass...that henceforth we become their fathers and friends.’

  Based on his limited understanding of Native American affairs, Jefferson anticipated this would entail the giving of ceremonial gifts to establish cordial relations. But there was no way of telling what kind of reception they might encounter. Lewis’s list of gifts included pocket mirrors, sewing needles and thread, steels for striking fire, scissors, glass beads, silk scarves, ivory combs, rolls of tobacco, tomahawks, knives, fishhooks, and other items considered enticing and appropriate.

  With Congressional approval in early 1803, Lewis and Capt. William Clark were officially appointed to head the venture, to be called the Corps of Discovery. The expedition began at the Mississippi River in May 1804 and proceeded west until they crossed the Rockies and came within sight of the Pacific Ocean on 7 November 1805. Then they returned to St. Louis, Missouri on 23 September 1806. At the time the results were considered mixed. On one hand they had proved the feasibility of an overland crossing of the continent and met with more than two dozen indigenous nations, mapping and establishing their presence for a legal claim to the land. But their mission failed to find an easy water route across the western expanse.

  Lewis died of gunshot wounds in 1809. He had been on his way to Washington, DC to reclaim payment of drafts he had drawn against the War Department. It was never established whether he committed suicide or was murdered.

  The Meriwether Lewis records are held by the National Archives.

  Napoléonic Code

  (1804)

  Napoléon Bonaparte establishes a comprehensive civil code that abolishes feudalism, fosters religious tolerance and enacts other liberal reforms across Europe. Building on Roman law and principles of the French Revolution, it proves to be one of the most influential legal codes in world history.

  The French military commander and political leader Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) dominated European affairs from 1799 to 1815, serving much of that time as supreme ruler over a vast and growing empire. His ambitious, hands-on style and attention to detail extended to a sweeping reform of the French legal system, which under the ancien régime had long suffered from a welter of problems including an excessive number of privilege-based courts with overlapping jurisdictions that conducted slow and exorbitantly expensive proceedings to produce rampant injustice.

  To remedy the situation, Napoléon appointed a commission of experts who spent more than two years discussing the subject. Napoléon himself attended many of the meetings and astounded the jurists with his deep knowledge of ancient Roman law and his ability to get things done.

  The result was a sweeping new French civil code (Code civil des français), known as the Napoléonic Code or Code Napoléon, which took effect on 21 March 1804, shortly before the ruler would be declared Emperor of France.

  Modelled on Justinian’s sixth-century codification of Roman law and other exemplars, Napoléon’s comprehensive structure was highly rational and lacking in religious content. It also incorporated the French Revolution’s ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity in clear vernacular French. In keeping with the Revolution, vestiges of feudalism and royal privilege were seemingly abolished. The Code required that for laws to be properly applied, they first had to be duly promulgated and enacted. Secret laws were ended. Ex post facto laws were invalidated. And procedures were required to make the application of the laws just and fair.

  Not everything about the Code represented a step forward, however, as Napoléon’s act also reinforced patriarchal power by making the husband the ruler of the household, with supremacy over his wife and minor children; and its abolition of divorce by mutual consent actually amounted to a significant regression for French women. (Notwithstanding the revolt in Saint-Domingue, in 1802 he had already restored hideous black slavery in France’s colonies.)

  But Napoléon was pleased that his new laws had been disseminated throughout the empire, and said late in his life: ‘Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.’

  An original copy of the Napoléonic Code is housed in the Historisches Museum der Pfalz in Speyer, Germany.

  Napoléon’s weighty tome is divided into three books that comprise 2,281 clauses, 1,570 of which are related to property. He wrote into law what the Revolution had promised or practised. Feudalism and royal privilege were seemingly abolished.

  Champollion’s phonetic table held the key to the Rosetta Stone, showing that hi
eroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language. His discovery laid the foundation for our understanding of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

  Deciphering the Rosetta Stone

  (1822)

  After more than a decade of obsessive work studying the mysterious hieroglyphics on the famous Rosetta Stone, a young Frenchman has an epiphany that he describes in a letter to the head of the country’s leading scholarly organization. He has cracked the code.

  At the age of 10, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) became enchanted by stories of Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign, the pyramids and the strange ancient hieroglyphs that no European had been able to decipher. Upon visiting an exhibition of antiquities decorated with the odd-looking inscriptions, he vowed that one day he would solve the mystery and decode them.

  In the 1810s, Champollion closely followed the exacting empirical work of the English polymath Thomas Young, who was publishing his theories about Egyptian hieroglyphs that were based on his study of the Rosetta Stone. The ancient stele from the days of the pharaohs had been recovered by French soldiers in the Nile Delta in 1799. But efforts to decipher its extensive script, apparently written in three different languages, had thwarted Young and everyone else. Champollion was determined to crack the code.

  On 14 September 1822, while in Paris, Champollion made a crucial breakthrough that revealed the phonetic nature of hieroglyphics. He proclaimed ‘Je tiens l’affaire!’ (‘I’ve got it!’), before fainting on the spot.

  He immediately sent a letter to the secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres regarding his discovery. On 27 September, Champollion read the eight-page document before a packed room at the Académie. ‘I am certain,’ he wrote,

  that the same hieroglyphic-phonetical signs used to represent the sounds of Greek or Roman proper names, are also employed in hieroglyphic texts inscribed far prior to the arrival of the Greeks in Egypt, and that they at that earlier time already had the same representative sound or articulations as in the cartouches inscribed under the Greeks or Romans.

  Shortly afterwards, Champollion published his findings in a booklet of 44 pages containing four illustrated plates. His work was instrumental in showing that the Rosetta Stone, dating from 196 BC, had announced a decree issued on behalf of King Ptolemy V, in three different languages. The lowest text was written in Ancient Greek, the middle one in Demotic (Egyptian) script, and the top version was written in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because the stone presented essentially the same text in all three scripts, and one of the languages (Ancient Greek) could be understood, this held the key to decoding two forgotten languages.

  Based on his discoveries, Champollion became known as the ‘Father of the Decipherment of Hieroglyphs.’ His original papers are displayed at the Champollion Museum in Figeac, France.

  First Photograph

  (1826)

  A brilliant French inventor labours for more than a decade to capture real-life images as lasting records by means of a process he calls Heliographie; his first surviving effort, depicting the country scene outside his workshop window, is considered the first permanent photographic image.

  Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) was an ingenious French inventor who had created a number of amazing mechanical devices, including the Pyréolophore (the world’s first internal combustion engine), a hydraulic Marly machine for pumping water and the delightful Velocipede (an early version of the bicycle). Some of his longtime fascinations converged around his dream of capturing sunlight and a desire to develop improved processes in the emerging art of lithography. Although he was not an artist, he saw great commercial potential in such pursuits, provided he could make it work.

  In April 1816, using a camera obscura, he managed to capture small images on paper he had coated with silver chloride, which excited him. But the strange results were darkest where they should have been brightest and vice versa – what we now know as negatives – and the images quickly faded. After countless experiments with different light-sensitive materials and techniques, in 1822 he succeeded in copying a copperplate engraving by laying it on a glass plate coated with bitumen of Judea, although that achievement also proved rather primitive.

  Four years later, on a sunny spring day at his country estate Le Gras at Chalon-sur-Saone, Niépce conducted an eight-hour-long experiment using a professionally crafted camera made by the Parisian optician Charles Chevalier to capture an image upon a pewter plate. With cotton swabs he coated the plate with an emulsion of bitumen of Judea. The coating, dissolved in oil of lavender, hardened in the brightly lit parts, whereas the dimly lit areas remained soluble and the coating was washed away with a solvent consisting of oil of lavender and white petroleum (turpentine). The result was a permanent positive picture in which the light was preserved by bitumen and the darker shades by bare pewter.

  There, preserved on the pewter, was the image of the view from his high workroom window. It showed the pigeon house on the left, a pear tree with a patch of sky showing through its branches; at the centre one could clearly see the barn’s slanting roof, and another wing of the house on the right-hand side.

  Niépce believed he had made a major discovery, which he called Heliographie (for sun drawing). But he was never able to capitalize on it. Upon his death in 1833, Niépce’s notes were passed on to his associate, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), the creator of the daguerreotype, who made further improvements. In 1839, the new art form became known as ‘photography’.

  Niépce’s original picture from 1826, meanwhile, was rediscovered in 1952 when the historian Helmut Gernsheim credited Niépce as the inventor of photography and ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’ was identified as the world’s oldest surviving photograph. The original plate belongs to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

  This daguerreotype is the earliest surviving photographic self-portrait. It was taken in 1839 by Philadelphia-based photographer Robert Cornelius.

  This is the earliest surviving photograph. Taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, it is a view from the photographer’s studio window in Le Gras, France.

  Louis Daguerre’s 1838 photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris is the earliest known photograph to include people.

  The Act made an exception for ‘Territories in the Possession of the East India Company, or to the Island of Ceylon, or to the Island of Saint Helena.’ Slavery continued there until the Indian Slavery Act of 1843.

  Slavery Abolition Act

  (1833)

  Pressured by slave revolts and abolitionist agitation, Parliament finally outlaws slavery in the British Empire, with some exceptions and caveats. The act includes a provision for huge compensation, not for the slaves, but for the slave owners – reparations for the wealthy.

  By the time Parliament outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, British ships had carried more than three million Africans into bondage and slavery was booming in the colonies. Although judicial action in 1772 had ended the practice of slavery in Great Britain, and slave trading in the British Empire was ceased in 1807, a growing anti-slavery movement was demanding the abolition of British slavery anywhere.

  Slave resistance and rebellion fuelled the unrest. During Jamaica’s Christmas holiday of 1831, a slave preacher named Sam Sharpe led a peaceful protest in the island’s sugarcane fields that escalated into a fully fledged revolt. The Jamaican planters suppressed the uprising at a cost of hundreds of slaves and 14 white men killed, prompting many abolitionists to escalate their campaign.

  In response to the furore, the British Parliament conducted two inquiries, which contributed to the passage of an ‘Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves.’ The Act received Royal Assent in August 1833 and came into force on 1 August 1834.

  In practical terms, the Anti-Slavery Act only freed slaves below t
he age of six. Those who were older were redesignated as ‘apprentices’ and their servitude was gradually abolished in two stages: the first set of apprenticeships were to end in 1838, while the final (exceptional) apprenticeships were scheduled to cease in 1840. All ‘apprentices’ were expected to continue serving their former owners until their apprenticeships expired. In the words of the Act: ‘it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free.’

  A crucial provision for the slave owners addressed the issue of compensation for those who would be losing their ‘property’. Under the Act, the British government authorized £20 million to compensate the registered owners for the loss of their business assets. Although the sum for reparations amounted to a staggering 40 per cent of the government’s total annual expenditure, it didn’t offer a penny to the former slaves or their descendants.

  The Act also provided for a Parliamentary Return listing of the names of those who had been compensated. Records showed that hundreds of wealthy British families were considerably enriched by the payoffs. The awardees included Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter; John Gladstone (the father of 19th-century Prime Minister William Gladstone); ancestors of British Prime Minister David Cameron and many others.

  Records of the original documents are preserved in Britain’s National Archives. A database bearing the names of the plantation owners and the compensation they received is kept by University College London.