American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Virginia Republicans in 1801 were watching with hope the rising new empire to the west, watching with scorn the quarrelsome old empires to the east. But sometimes to see west they had to look east. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson had expanded complacently on America’s favored situation: “Kindly separated by nature, and a wide ocean, from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.…Possessing a chosen country, with room enough for all descendants to the 100th & 1000th generation.…” Within three weeks he was writing a friend, “It ought to be the very first object of our pursuits to have nothing to do with the European interests and politics.…we have nothing to fear from them in any form.” Within a few weeks the President was reading reports that Spain was ceding Louisiana and the Floridas to the French. Napoleon on our rear borders! The Atlantic suddenly did not seem so wide.

  “It is a policy very unwise in both, and very ominous to us,” the President wrote Governor Monroe. A French reacquisition of Louisiana would make the area a pawn of the fiercest rivalry in the West—that between France and England. It would place French armies athwart America’s western frontier—French armies now under the control of a man Jefferson increasingly detested, Napoleon Bonaparte. It would enable the French to choke off American commerce in New Orleans or farther north.

  Jefferson already had reason to fear Bonaparte’s imperial ambitions. The First Consul was organizing an expedition to Saint Domingue in order to overthrow the regime of General Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black leader who had seized power after a bloody slave rebellion. Jefferson did not object to the attempt to suppress Toussaint—he feared the implications of an independent black republic—but would Bonaparte stop there? If the French ruler could send 20,000 soldiers to the West Indies, could he not dispatch other armies to Louisiana, a far greater temptation? And if France regained Louisiana, would there be no reaction from England, which had driven them out of the area years beforehand which still commanded the seas?

  Federalists demanded that the President take aggressive action to forestall French and English imperial ambitions on the western frontier, but Jefferson preferred the methods of diplomacy. He had dispatched the seasoned New York Republican leader and diplomat Robert Livingston to Paris as Minister to France, with instructions to dissuade the French from acquiring Louisiana if the deal with Spain had not already gone through, or, if it had, to look into the possibility of American acquisition of Spanish Florida. Livingston found Talleyrand elusive and evasive. By April 1802, when the cession of Louisiana to France seemed definite, Jefferson instructed Livingston to warn the French government that the “day that France takes possession of N. Orleans” is “the moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” The President now was practicing diplomacy with a mailed fist. Never wholly captive to his pacifist yearnings, he was during this period quietly strengthening American outposts along the western borders.

  Even so, Jefferson was hardly reckoning with the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte. Frustrated by the British in the east, the First Consul was turning west to redeem French territory lost by the Bourbons and not recovered by the bellicose revolutionaries of the 1790s. His expedition to Saint Domingue had met with initial success; even Toussaint was now in French hands, albeit as the result of trickery. With that island and other parts of the West Indies back under French control, Napoleon’s “New France would extend its sheltering arms round the whole Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, taking in not only the islands but also Louisiana and the Floridas,” in Oscar Handlin’s summation. “Resting on a fulcrum at New Orleans, the two great areas of the empire could balance one another.” During the summer of 1802 Napoleon organized in Holland an armada to carry a huge army and his ambitions into Louisiana. He was delayed, however, by machinations within the Spanish court; only after Napoleon had promised Italian lands to the Queen’s brother was Louisiana ceded by Spain and the expeditionary force told to prepare to depart.

  In the autumn of 1802, while this fleet was mobilizing, word reached Washington of an event in New Orleans that catalyzed American fears about the future of Louisiana. The Spanish intendant there had suddenly revoked the right to deposit goods in the city while awaiting their sale or shipment. It could be a potentially fatal blow to American exports. Mississippi traders and boatmen were wrathful, and Washington politicians indignant—and curious. Why had the intendant acted at this moment? Obviously, it must be part of the French plot. Later it was learned that the intendant was acting on orders from Spain. According to one theory, Napoleon was stalling on his promises to the Spanish court, offering the Queen not the province she wanted but other Italian lands, and to be turned over not to her brother but to her nephew; and the Queen was happy to find a way to complicate Napoleon’s future in Louisiana. Another view is simpler: the intendant was furious at American smugglers. But such reasonable views had little standing at the time. If Napoleon was organizing an expedition in Holland, he certainly would not be above provocations in the territory he hoped soon to occupy.

  Jefferson and Madison stepped up their diplomatic counteroffensive by dispatching James Monroe to Paris to bolster Livingston’s efforts. This move would also placate some of the western firebrands, for Monroe, who was just ending his term as governor, had big landholdings in Kentucky, many friends and allies there and farther south and west, and a reputation as a spokesman for Westerners. The Federalists were already exploiting the situation by demanding action, so the President’s move could head them off as well. Monroe was about to leave for Kentucky to look after his interests there when the urgent presidential summons arrived:

  Washington, Jan. 10, 1803

  DEAR SIR,—I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at N. Orleans stimulated by the mercantile, and generally the federal interest threatens to overbear our peace. 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. I shall to-morrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France, and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline; because the whole public hope will be rested on you.…

  No Virginian could resist such a call, least of all Monroe. Soon he was receiving instructions—formal from Madison, informal but authoritative from the President. When Monroe, after waiting several weeks for Congress to authorize and finance the mission, finally sailed from New York early in March 1803, he carried with him instructions to offer almost $10 million for New Orleans, if need be, or at least to regain some advantages for American traders on the Mississippi.

  On reaching Paris, however, the envoy extraordinary found the situation remarkably changed. Livingston had been patiently working on the French with offers and veiled threats, but with little effect; suddenly, to his astonishment, Talleyrand was sounding him out as to what the American government would pay for the entire colony. Napoleon had received two pieces of staggering news: his fleet had become icebound in Holland just as it was to sail for the occupation of Louisiana; and his army in Saint Domingue had been almost annihilated by yellow fever. With his hopes for a western empire vanishing, Napoleon was turning back to his main enemy, England. In one blow he could diminish the possibility of an Anglo-American alliance, perhaps gain a potential ally against Britain, and in any event pick up some much-needed cash.

  Quickly Livingston and Monroe arranged terms with Napoleon’s Finance Minister: $11,250,000 for all of Louisiana, the United States to set aside $3,750,000 to pay for American claims against France; protection for Indian rights and for some commercial privileges for French traders. These terms—indeed, buying Louisiana at all—greatly exceeded the envoys’ instructions, but they had no doubt of Jefferson’s and the nation’s approbation. The Republican National Intelligencer, getting the news just before Independence Day, declared that this Fourth of July was a proud day for the President; not simply because of gaining vast and rich lands, b
ut because “We have secured our rights by pacific means: truth and reason have been more powerful than the sword.”

  This was Jefferson’s proudest boast too; “Peace is our passion,” he wrote an English friend. Federalists were skeptical and suspicious. “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much,” “Fabricus” wrote the Boston Columbian Centinel. This “great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians,” would be cut up into numberless states, so that Virginia could continue to lord it over all the other states—and all that cheap and fertile land would further depress land values in New England.

  A “great waste,” unpeopled by whites—just where and what was Louisiana anyway? No one knew for sure. The tract lay between the Mississippi and the Rockies; it comprised over 800,000 square miles, and it would double the size of the United States. But the legal boundaries were those of whatever the French had ceded to Spain forty years before, and neither the French nor the Spanish could be, or would be, very precise. It was not clear at all whether the cession included West Florida and Texas. But for the moment Americans did not fuss over details; they celebrated one of the biggest real estate transactions in history with festivals and feasts, toasts and songs.

  Jefferson’s brilliant success left him with a political boon and a constitutional dilemma. The Constitution contained no grant of authority to acquire territory, or to admit a territory to the Union and its inhabitants to citizenship. And Jefferson headed the party of strict and narrow construction of the Constitution. As usual, the President consulted widely on the matter, but his Cabinet was divided, Attorney General Lincoln doubting the power to acquire and Treasury Secretary Gallatin affirming an “inherent right” to do so. His friend Tom Paine took a view Jefferson might have expected from a man of eminent common sense: “The cession makes no alteration in the Constitution; it only extends the principles of it over a larger territory, and this certainly is within the morality of the Constitution.…

  Jefferson did not agonize long about the right to acquire; the need to act was vital and palpable. “A strict observance of the written laws,” he wrote some time later, “is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.…”

  The constitutional question of citizenship and statehood was harder to settle, especially now that the Federalists, originally the party of broad construction, were taking a narrow view, while many Republicans were switching to the opposite side. Jefferson drafted some proposed amendments, one of which read simply, “Louisiana as ceded by France to the U.S. is made a part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights & obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous situations.” Slowly he swung away from the idea of a constitutional amendment as he faced several imperative facts. Livingston warned that Napoleon—who had the dictator’s luxurious power of being able to shift his nation’s strategy from east to west almost overnight—was growing impatient with delay. The amending process laid out in the Constitution was long and tricky. Few seemed deeply concerned about the constitutional problem—even the Federalists were moving to different grounds—and his party was pressing for action. With a final bow to constitutional scruples, the President said he was prepared, “if our friends think differently,” to “acquiesce with satisfaction, confident that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects.”

  Congress was eager to act. The Senate, after four days’ debate, approved the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7. Both houses of Congress shortly passed, by heavy majorities, a measure authorizing the President to take possession of the Louisiana territory. But now Jefferson too, with the formalities over, was eager to move ahead. And he was consumed with curiosity about the new land—its soil, appearance, vegetables, animals, mountains, climate, Indian population, minerals, everything. The nation had bought Louisiana; now someone would have to find out just what had been acquired.

  It was a lackluster start for an expedition destined to become an epic. Three workaday boats bobbed gently on the Missouri: a fifty-five-foot keelboat, carrying one square sail and twenty-two oars, and decked over at the bow, with a cabin astern; and two low, open boats called pirogues, one of seven oars and the other of six. During the day a gang of American soldiers and French rivermen finished packing the boats with 14 bales of presents for Indians, arms and ammunition, 28 bushels of “parch meal,” 20 barrels of flour, seven barrels of salt, 50 kegs of pork, 50 bushels of meal, drugs and medicine, tools and scientific instruments. The co-leader of the expedition, Captain Meriwether Lewis, was not even there; he had gone to St. Louis on official business and, it was said, to dally with the girls in a final fling. But “Captain” William Clark—he was actually a lieutenant—was very much there, closely directing operations. Also present were Clark’s slave York, a handsome man colored a deep ebony, Private Cruzat and his violin, one sergeant, one corporal, 27 men, “7 French,” and Clark’s dog Scannon, a Newfoundland.

  The expedition did not get under way until late afternoon of this day, May 14, 1804, and even with the help of a “jentle brease” moved upstream only four miles. That night it rained, leaving all fires extinguished, and “Some Provisions on the top of the Perogus wet,” as Clark wrote in his journal. The army landlubbers had loaded the boats heavily in the stern, so that the bow stuck up and ran up on logs and other snags in the river. But soon the weather turned fair, the boats were reloaded, Lewis rode overland to join the company, and the craft were passing between high bluffs and forested banks, all of which Lewis and Clark duly noted.

  At last the dream was being realized—the dream of countless Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Spaniards, the dream of striking west from the northern reaches of the Missouri to the distant and mysterious alps, conquering these heights, and then moving down the coastal rivers to the Pacific. Rivermen, soldiers, trappers, and traders had penetrated the prairie lands, and Indians already lived there, but no one had broken through to the Pacific and brought back a record of the trip. For years Jefferson too had dreamed the dream, and now that he was President, and the issue of Louisiana and the western lands was coming to a head, he could act. Months before the purchase of Louisiana became a real possibility, he asked Congress for an appropriation of $2,500 “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States.” His purpose rather was multifold: he wished to gain for America the English and French trade in “furs and peltry” but he was interested also in the political and military uses of an expedition, and as a naturalist he was eager to know more about the vast territory and to share his findings with other members of the American Philosophical Society.

  Only resourceful and skillful men could lead such an expedition, and Jefferson felt he had found the ideal combination in Lewis and Clark. Both were young and vigorous Virginians, and experienced woodsmen, and both were good Republicans—Lewis ardently so. Of Lewis the President wrote long after that he was of “courage undaunted; possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose…; careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order and discipline; intimate with the Indian character, customs, and principles; habituated to the hunting life…honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth.…” Jefferson could speak almost as warmly of Clark, whose family he knew well. They were men the President could guide, and he issued elaborate instructions for the expedition.

  “The object of your mission,” he wrote Lewis on June 20, 1803, “is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the water of the Pacific Ocean ma
y offer the most direct & practicable water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce.” The mission, Jefferson said, had been communicated to the ministers in Washington from Spain, Britain, and France, the new owner of Louisiana. Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, the explorers were to note the details of geography and river transportation; of the inhabitants’ possessions, languages, traditions, monuments, occupations, food, clothing, diseases and remedies, physical circumstances, religion, and morality; of the soil, produce, animals, minerals, climate, “the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flowers, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects.” The expedition was to be entirely pacific; Lewis was to “err on the side of your safety” in case of confrontation with superior forces, and to bring back his party safely, even if it be with less information.

  Lewis spent months preparing for the expedition. He bought scientific instruments and medicine in Philadelphia, even consulting the famous Dr. Rush, had an iron boat built at the arsenal of Harpers Ferry, bought some dubious “portable soup,” and amassed hundreds of brooches, rings, earrings, beads, looking glasses, and even scalping knives as presents to Indians. He also acquired an air gun, an English import that, after being pumped up with air, could eject bullets more quickly than a Kentucky rifle could be loaded, wadded, and primed, but with power more to stun than to kill. From everyone he met he collected information on the western country. From frontier army posts he handpicked his men, most notably his co-commander William Clark, an old friend who had probably talked with Daniel Boone himself. Boating down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, he gathered up more men, including Clark at Louisville, and then turned out of the Ohio and up the Mississippi to the St. Louis area, where the party spent the winter of 1803-04 building boats.