Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  With this treaty Spain was trying to prevent an American takeover of its empire, but perhaps it was only postponing the inevitable. Jefferson and other Americans believed that Spain’s hold on its North American empire was so weak that it was only a matter of time before the various pieces of that empire—New Orleans, East and West Florida, maybe even Cuba—fell like ripe fruit “piece by piece” into American hands.24 As early as 1784 James Madison predicted that the safety of Spain’s “possessions in this quarter of the globe must depend more upon our peaceableness than her own power.”25 America need only wait and let its phenomenal demographic growth and movement take care of things.

  Because of Spain’s weakness, its possessions on the continent were no problem for Jefferson; but the dynamic nation of England was a different matter altogether. Jefferson could not tolerate any additional English presence on the continent. During the Nootka Sound controversy in 1790, when an incident between England and Spain off the west coast of Vancouver Island threatened a war between the two European powers that bordered the United States, the Washington administration was deeply disturbed. By attempting to set up a base in Nootka Sound, the British had encroached on territory on the Pacific coast that the Spanish had regarded for centuries as exclusively theirs. When the Spanish seized and arrested the British intruders, Great Britain was prepared to retaliate. The U.S. government and especially Secretary of State Jefferson were apprehensive that Britain might use the conflict to seize all the Spanish possessions in North America, which would pose a danger to the security and even the independence of the new Republic.

  What if the British requested permission to cross American territory to engage the Spanish in the West? What should the American response be? These were the questions that President Washington asked of his advisors. Washington was also worried that if war broke out between Spain and Britain, Spain’s ally France might get involved. Despite America’s alliance with France, Secretary of State Jefferson was willing to use American neutrality in the conflict between Spain and Britain to bargain for either Britain’s withdrawal from the Northwest posts or Spain’s opening up the Mississippi to American commerce. He expressed a willingness to go to war with Spain to acquire Florida and the rights to the Mississippi or, more important, even with Britain to prevent the former mother country from taking over Spain’s possessions.

  In the end further conflict was averted. When France, preoccupied with its Revolution, declined to help Spain, the Spanish government backed down and in the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 agreed to recognize the right of England to trade and settle in the unoccupied territory that it had formerly claimed was exclusively Spanish. When in 1819 Spain ceded its rights to the Oregon Country to the United States, the stage was set for a competition between the two English-speaking nations for control of this far northwest piece of the continent. Partly as a result of the Nootka Sound controversy, Great Britain came to realize that having an accredited minister in the United States capital might be in its interest after all, and it sent George Hammond, who arrived in October 1791.

  Spanish officials were well aware of America’s demographic growth and became more and more fearful of American encroachment. Suddenly in October 1800 Spain decided, under pressure from Napoleon, who was now in charge of the French Republic, to cede Louisiana back to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. Spain believed that France, as the dominant European power, would be better able to maintain a barrier between the Americans and the silver mines of Mexico.

  In the meantime, France, under Napoleon’s leadership, had developed a renewed interest in its lost North American empire. Not only could French possession of Louisiana counter British ambitions in Canada, but, more important, Louisiana could become a dumping ground for French malcontents and a source for provisioning the lucrative French sugar islands in the Caribbean—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and especially Saint-Domingue.

  Sugar was important to France. Processed in France and sold throughout Europe, sugar accounted for nearly 20 percent of France’s exports. And 70 percent of France’s sugar supply came from the single colony of Saint-Domingue. Napoleon knew that if France’s imperial ambitions were to be realized, the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue led by Toussaint L’Ouverture would have to be put down and the island recovered for France. In 1801 Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc with an enormous force of forty thousand troops to recover Saint-Domingue and reinstate the ancien régime slave system that had made the island so profitable for France.

  It was one of the greatest mistakes Napoleon ever made, as he himself later admitted. By 1802 most of the French troops had been killed or had succumbed to yellow fever, including Leclerc himself, and only two thousand remained healthy. Before the rebellion that had begun in 1791 ended in 1803 followed by the declaration of Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, some three hundred fifty thousand Haitians of all colors had died along with as many as sixty thousand French soldiers. Since Louisiana was supposed to supply goods to Saint-Domingue, the loss of that rich island suddenly made Louisiana dispensable. Already Napoleon was turning his eyes back toward Europe and to a renewal of the war with Great Britain, for which he needed money.

  But Americans did not yet know of this turn of events. In 1802 all they heard were rumors that Napoleon had induced Spain to retrocede Louisiana to France, including, as many thought, both East and West Florida. For the Americans, and especially for President Jefferson, nothing could have been more alarming. It was one thing for a feeble and decrepit Spain to hold Louisiana; “her possession of the place,” said Jefferson, “would hardly be felt by us.” But it was quite another for a vigorous and powerful France to control what Jefferson called “the one single spot” on the globe, “the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.” Since that one single spot, New Orleans, was fast becoming the outlet for the produce of more than half of America’s inhabitants, in French hands, said Jefferson, it would become “a point of eternal friction with us.” Indeed, Jefferson told the American minister in France, Robert R. Livingston, “the day that France takes possession of New Orleans . . . seals the union of two nations, who, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”26

  For someone like Jefferson who hated the British with a passion matched by no other American, this was an extraordinary statement, but one that he knew Livingston would pass on to Napoleon and French officials. Probably Jefferson was never serious about an Anglo-American military alliance but hoped that Napoleon would see the light and realize that such an alliance was not in the interest of either France or the United States.27 If France insisted on taking possession of Louisiana, however, “she might perhaps be willing to look about for arrangements which might reconcile it to our interests. If anything could do this,” the crafty president told Livingston in April 1802, “it would be the ceding to us the island of New Orleans and the Floridas.” He thought France might be willing to sell these territories for $6 million, and he sent his good and trusted friend James Monroe to Paris to help Livingston clinch the deal.28

  Only Monroe had enough confidence in his intimacy with his fellow Virginians, President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, to allow him and Livingston to exceed their instructions and pay $ 15 million for all of Louisiana, some nine hundred thousand square miles of Western land.

  When he learned of the acquisition Jefferson was ecstatic. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” he exclaimed, “probably containing 500 million acres.” Not only did the acquisition of Louisiana fulfill the president’s greatest dream of having sufficient land for generations to come of his yeoman farmers, his “chosen people of God,” but, he said, it also “removes from us the greatest source of danger to our peace.” Neither France nor Britain could now threaten New Orleans and America’s Mississippi outlet to the sea. The fact that East and West Florida remained with Spain was of little conce
rn, “because,” said Jefferson, “we think they cannot fail to fall in our hands.”29

  The purchase of Louisiana was the most popular and momentous event of Jefferson’s presidency. Not only did it end the long struggle for control of the Mississippi’s outlet to the sea, but it also, as Jefferson exulted, freed America from Europe’s colonial entanglements and prepared the way for the eventual dominance of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

  Most Federalists saw it differently; indeed, they were aghast at the purchase. Louisiana, declared Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, was “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” He thought the deal was a disaster. “We are to spend money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much.” It was simply a device by which “Imperial Virginia” could spread its slaveholding population westward in order to remain “arbitress” of the whole nation.

  Although Alexander Hamilton favored the purchase, without granting Jefferson any credit for it, he was worried about what the addition of such a great extent of territory would mean for the integrity of the United States. Could the people of Louisiana, with such differences of culture, religion, and ethnicity, be made “an integral part of the United States,” or would the territory have to remain a permanent colony of the United States?30

  Many Federalists fretted that this expansion of the nation would enhance the slaveholding South at the expense of the Northeast. “The Virginia faction,” observed Stephen Higginson of Massachusetts, “have certainly formed a deliberate plan to govern and depress New England; and this eagerness to extend our territory and create new States is an essential part of it.”31 Some of these Federalists, led by former secretary of state Timothy Pickering and Connecticut’s Roger Griswold, revived the 1780s idea of breaking away and forming a separate confederacy of New England and New York. Hamilton’s adamant opposition to such a scheme, however, essentially killed it, at least for the time being. “Dismemberment of our Empire,” Hamilton told one prominent New England Federalist the night before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, offered “no relief to our real Disease; which is DEMOCRACY.”32

  With their conception of the United States as a loosely bound confederation of states, the Democratic-Republicans had no problem with the addition of this huge expanse of territory. “Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?” asked Jefferson in his second inaugural address in March 1805. Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” was always one of like principles, not of like boundaries. As long as Americans believed in certain ideals, he said, they remained Americans, regardless of the territory they happened to occupy.33

  In 1799, for example, the famous pioneer Daniel Boone moved his extended family from Kentucky to Missouri—into Spanish territory!—without any sense that he had become less American. The Spanish government had simply promised ample portions of cheap land for him and his family, and that was enough, not just for him but for countless other Americans who moved into Spanish-owned territory, including Texas, in search of cheap land. Boone later said that he would never have settled outside the United States “had he not firmly believed it would become a portion of the American republic.” Maybe so: Jefferson certainly welcomed this movement of Americans into lands owned by Spain, since “it may be the means of delivering to us peaceably what may otherwise cost us a war.”34

  The president often expressed a strange idea of the American nation. At times he was remarkably indifferent to the possibility that a Western confederacy might break away from the Eastern United States. What did it matter? he asked in 1804. “Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendents as those of the eastern.”35 This relaxed attitude toward a precisely bounded territory as a source of nationhood was different from that of the European nations. For Jefferson and many other Republicans, this peculiar conception of nationhood made ideology a more important determinant of America’s identity than occupying a particular geographical space.

  Despite Jefferson’s great enthusiasm for the purchase, he hesitated to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Being a firm believer in limited government and strict construction of the Constitution, Jefferson doubted that the federal government had the constitutional right either to acquire foreign territory or, more important, to incorporate it into the Union. For seven weeks he worried about the issue and tinkered with the idea of amending the Constitution. Only when Livingston and Monroe informed him in August 1803 that Napoleon was having second thoughts about the deal did he reluctantly agree to send the treaty to the Senate without mentioning his constitutional misgivings. Better to pass over them in silence, he said, than to attempt to justify the purchase by invoking a broad construction of the Constitution.

  The Senate complied with Jefferson’s wishes, but the more unruly and rambunctious House of Representatives, which had to implement the treaty financially, opened up the constitutional issues that Jefferson had hoped to avoid. Although they remained firm believers in states’ rights and strict construction, many House Republicans were forced to invoke, as Hamilton had in the 1790s, the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to justify the government’s acquisition of Louisiana. Even though the Republicans enjoyed a three-to-one majority in the House, the supporters of the purchase were able to carry their first procedural bill by a margin of only two votes, fifty-nine to fifty-seven.

  It was certainly ironic that some Republicans talked like Federalists, but too much can be made of that. More impressive is the seriousness with which Jefferson and the other Republicans took their constitutional scruples. Although they wanted this addition of Western territory in the worst way, they nevertheless worried and hesitated to the point where they almost lost it.

  In Article III of the treaty the United States committed itself to incorporating the inhabitants of the ceded territory into the Union “as soon as possible.” But most Americans believed that this would not be easy, either constitutionally or culturally. Like the Federalists, Jefferson knew that this new territory was composed of people who were quite different from those of the United States, in religion, race, and ethnicity. Because these former subjects of France and Spain were accustomed to authoritarian rule and unfamiliar with self-government, “the approach of such a people to liberty,” the Republicans said, “must be gradual.” Consequently, the administration thought that until the people of Louisiana were ready for democracy America might have to continue to rule them arbitrarily. The president was given far more power to rule in Louisiana than was the case in the other territories, leading some critics to charge that the administration had created in Louisiana “a government about as despotic as that of Turkey in Asia.”36

  In March 1804 Congress divided the Louisiana Purchase by a line that is now the northern border of the present state of Louisiana. While the vast and little-known region to the north became the District of Louisiana with St. Louis as its capital and with the notorious General James Wilkinson as its governor, the southern part became the Territory of Orleans with New Orleans as its capital.37 The borders with Spanish territory were unclear, and although a buffer zone between Louisiana and Texas was created, boundary disputes between the Americans and the Spanish were both inevitable and exploitable by adventurers, runaway slaves, and troublemakers of all sorts.

  The first governor of the Territory of Orleans was twenty-nine-year-old William Claiborne, who at twenty-one had been a judge of the Tennessee state supreme court and most recently was governor of the Mississippi Territory. Because of doubts about the capacity of the French and Spanish people of Orleans for self-rule, Claiborne was given nearly dictatorial powers over them, even though he did not speak their languages, share their religion, or comprehend their customs and society. Not surprisingly, Claiborne found dealing with the diversity of the new territory to be his “principal difficulty.”38

  Since Claiborne, like nearly all white Americans, was used to a black-whi
te, slave-free dichotomy, he found it especially difficult to understand the division of Louisiana society into at least three castes—black, free colored, and white. Could the free colored population be armed and participate in the militia? Could they become citizens? Fisher Ames’s warning that Louisiana society was simply a “Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers” whose morals could never be “expected to sustain and glorify our republic” frightened many Americans.39

  Not only did the large numbers of Americans moving into Orleans have to adapt their common law to the European civil law, but they had to make their way into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and Catholic-dominated society unlike anyplace else in the United States. Fearing the unruly slaves being brought from the rebellious colony of Saint-Domingue, Congress in 1804 forbade the importation of slaves from abroad into Orleans. This restriction assumed that the domestic slave trade could supply the territory’s needs and thereby offset the influence of the French and Spanish slaves and what the Americans believed were the pernicious racial attitudes of the French and Spanish residents.

  Franco-Spanish slavery was different from Anglo-American slavery. Manumission and the slave’s right to self-purchase were easier; indeed, to the consternation of many white Americans, between 1804 and 1806 nearly two hundred slaves in Orleans purchased their own freedom. By 1810 free blacks composed about 20 percent of the population of the city of New Orleans.40 Consequently, the numbers of free blacks, interracial marriages and unions, and people of mixed race were much greater than elsewhere in the American South. Despite these differences, however, the territory of Orleans, or what became Louisiana, gained statehood in 1812, less than a decade after the Louisiana Purchase.

  Over the decades following 1803, Americans tried with mixed success to bring this polyglot society and its permissive interracial mixing into line with the binary racial culture prevailing throughout the rest of America. In the nineteenth century most Americans retained an image of New Orleans as an exotic place of loose morals and rampant miscegenation, and thus they learned little or nothing from this remarkable multicultural and multi-racial addition to the United States.