This essay was the main project for the Historiography course I completed recently at Excelsior College. Considering the toil and sweat I put into it, I thought someone other than my professor should read it. So I’m inflicting it on my blog readers. All three of you! I’ve added images to jazz it up and linked some of the more arcane terminology to definitions on the Web.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
“Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” Napoleon Bonaparte exploded upon learning that he had lost Saint Domingue and with it, his hopes for dominating North America.[1] Left with few options and a war against Great Britain to finance, Napoleon offered to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Thus, on May 2, 1803, the U.S. made an unprecedented acquisition that doubled its size and made it an empire. The deal, which even President Thomas Jefferson considered unconstitutional, led to a permanent shift in the nature of federalism and executive power.
Since at least the 1890s, historians have critically examined the Louisiana Purchase. Most early scholarship credited First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte as sole author and orchestrator of the matter, yet depicted President Thomas Jefferson as an avid expansionist who ignored his conscience with regard to constitutional construction. However, the past thirty years have produced a greater diversity of interpretation and analytical innovation. Where historians of the past often appeared driven by a need to pass black-and-white judgments on the event and its key figures, today’s scholars generally demonstrate more ability to discern shades of gray.
Some of the earliest available works on the Louisiana Purchase date from the 1890s through the 1920s. Henry Adams’s 1893 History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (republished in 1986) includes an engagingly-written narrative rich with detail, analysis, and opinion about “the greatest diplomatic success recorded in American history.[2] He credits Napoleon and his ministers as controlling the situation and notes the embarrassments the treaty provisions held for the Americans, which for him demonstrated “that the American negotiators were ready to stipulate whatever was needed for their purpose.”[3] He paints Jefferson’s political imperatives as being in direct opposition to his strict constructionist views and complains that, in abandoning those views, “Jefferson did not lead the way, but he allowed his friends to drag him in the path they chose.”[4] For Adams, these events sounded “the death knell of Federalism altogether.”[5] The shallowness of his interpretations indicates a positivistic focus on observable facts and a reluctance to consider the complexities of human agency. His harsh criticisms might reflect the disillusionment of the American Civil War, which was scarcely three decades past and had significant roots in the Louisiana acquisition. However, thorough and meticulous research redeems the work. Adams’s family connections – he was grandson of one U.S. president, great-grandson of another, and son of a senator and diplomat – gained him access to hitherto untouched European archives.
William M. Sloane’s article, “The World Aspects of the Louisiana Purchase,” appeared concurrently with the opening of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This dramatic retrospective cites no sources, and its vivid language frequently sounds ironic to the modern ear. Without actually naming Henry Adams, Sloane singles out that venerable scholar as “one of our historians” who believes the “far-fetched contention” that it was the black soldiers of Saint Domingue who thwarted Napoleon’s ambitions for a New World empire. Rather, “an act of God through pestilence” was the deciding factor.[6] Addressing Napoleon’s motivations, Sloane places greater emphasis on European concerns than New World disappointments. He is disdainful of Jefferson, the “philosophic theorist” whose foreign policy was ineffectual.[7] When he purports to know that American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston felt a concern for Louisiana’s inhabitants that Napoleon lacked,[8] he sounds more sarcastic than sincere. Sloane’s preoccupation with the thoughts and intentions of historical actors may be a rejoinder to positivism.
The Congressional debates following the treaty’s signing receive extensive analysis in Everett S. Brown’s 1920 monograph, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803-1812. Like Adams, Everett examined many previously untapped primary sources, and his conclusions are similar to those of Adams but less colorfully expressed. He is less critical than Adams of the president’s turn away from strict construction, reckoning Jefferson felt that the common good could sometimes supersede ideology.[9] Brown’s analysis illustrates what a grave and complex problem the slave trade presented, yet his tone remains blandly neutral until he discusses imperialist aspects of the Purchase. He believed Constitution framer Gouverneur Morris would have found “justification for his statement that ‘paper restrictions’ would avail little in the face of American expansion.”[10] Continuing in this vein, he alludes to such far-flung dependencies as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, which the U.S. acquired in 1898 as spoils of the Spanish-American War.[11]
Everett Brown’s disgust with American imperialism presaged the New Left school of the mid-twentieth-century postmodernism, in which American foreign
Courtesy U.S. State Department
policy was dissected and criticized. Richard Van Alstyne’s 1960 book, The Rising American Empire, portrays a Jefferson (drawn from the president’s correspondence and other writings) who was, like Sloane’s, inept at foreign relations but bent upon American expansion. This Jefferson possessed a “reputation for intrigue,” and a “morbid jealousy on anything, no matter how remote or unlikely, relating to the American continents!”[12] He intended the U.S. to disperse emigrants that would overrun all of North and South America and displace existing populations.[13] Van Alstyne again seems to channel Sloane when he deems the constitutional crisis and the complications of financing the Purchase “high comedy.”[14] For him, the transaction was less an achievement for America than a “brilliant diplomatic victory” for Napoleon.[15]
Jefferson and America are slightly redeemed sixteen years later through extensive primary and secondary research in This Affair of Louisiana. Although Alexander DeConde’s Jefferson is far removed from Van Alstyne’s paranoid bumbler, and DeConde concedes the exigencies surrounding the acquisition, he still sees it as driven primarily by expansionist fervor. Quoting statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton and Patrick Henry, he concludes that the United States had always been meant to grow. Thomas Paine, in commenting on the constitutional problem, noted that the framers had probably deemed it wise to remain silent on territorial acquisitions in order not to disturb foreign nations.[16] DeConde is less critical of Jefferson’s departure from strict construction, seeing not vacillation, but rather the conclusion of a deeply conscientious thinker that strict constructionism must sometimes yield to doing for the people what “they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.”[17]
The 1990s ushered in a new trend that turned from comprehensive, mostly negative assessments of the Louisiana Purchase to a diverse mix of perspectives, emphases, and interpretations. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson’s 1990 book, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson highlights Jefferson’s commitment “to secure American objectives by economic and peaceable means of coercion.”[18] They dispute Henry Adams’s view of the Louisiana affair as owed entirely to the Saint Domingue rebellion, instead viewing that circumstance as “only one element among several that Jefferson made use of in fashioning a diplomatic strategy for successfully countering French ambitions in Louisiana.”[19] After painting the stark contrast between the autocratic Napoleon and the democratic Jefferson, they note that even Jefferson could behave “with a degree of secrecy and discretion that resembled the most traditional representative of the ancien régime.”[20] Yet they still believe it wasn’t Jefferson’s vague threats of war and English alliance that worked to America’s benefit, but rather his patiently avoiding open confrontation while events in Europe ran their course.[21]
In 1992, David A. Carson consulted the works of Everett Brown and reviewed reams of correspondence and congressional annals for his article, “Blank Paper of the Constitution: The Louisiana Purchase Debates.” Regarding the conflict between Jefferson’s strict constructionist philosophy and “the need for expediency and practicality in government,” Carson points out that this was but one of “many debates between [Jefferson’s] head and his heart.”[22] In discussing Senator John Quincy Adams’s repeated pressing of the Constitutional amendment issue, Carson opines that, if not for the urgency of the situation, the two men might have worked together to secure a suitable constitutional amendment.”[23]
The array of Louisiana Purchase scholarship expanded further at a 2003 symposium commemorating the event’s bicentennial and exploring its constitutional significance. Peter S. Onuf contributed a paper that drew on Jefferson’s correspondence to demonstrate that, while revisionist interpretations of a passive role for Jefferson in the acquisition may be justified, they underestimate the Jeffersonian influence on expansionist momentum and on the ultimate shape of the nation.[24] “‘The Strongest Government on Earth’: Jefferson’s Republicanism, the Expansion of the Union, and the New Nation’s Destiny” reviewed Jefferson’s 1809-11 discourse with French political economist Antoine Claude Destutt de Tracy on the merits of Montesquieu’s theories that a republic must remain small and an empire was by definition despotic. Despite various differences on the nature of the ideal form of government, Jefferson and Destutt agreed on “the progress of political civilization,” and on the unique advantage presented by America’s expanding territory: surplus European labor had few options other than emigration, but Americans could “simply move on to greener fields.”[25] And while Jefferson believed the United States could be an “empire for liberty,” a letter he wrote to John Breckinridge soon after the Purchase illustrates his equanimity regarding the prospect that Louisiana might opt to separate from the east and become an independent nation.[26]
Courtesy Library of Congress
The year 2004 saw a compelling defense of Jefferson’s character in Bernard Sheehan’s article, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire for Liberty.’” Sheehan complains of the “currently fashionable practice of stressing Jeffersonian hypocrisy” and asserts that the president’s strict-constructionist lapse “remains a minor blemish on his biography.”[27] He explains that, in speaking of the “Empire for Liberty,” Jefferson meant this in universal terms, not as a call for expansion of the American republic.[28] He disputes Henry Adams’s portrayal of a passive Jefferson and points out the reasons for Jefferson’s ambivalence with regard to Saint Domingue: Initially, he had agreed to aid France in recapturing the island because it furthered the interests of the slaveholding U.S. But things changed when he learned of Napoleon’s grand plan to use the island as a launching point for his occupation of Louisiana. In justifying the Purchase itself, Sheehan emphasizes how a loss of access to the Mississippi could have weakened the union. Finally, he devotes much of the article to a spirited rebuttal of Roger Kennedy’s book, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase, which Sheehan claims attributes to the Louisiana Purchase all manner of modern American ills, from the cultural disintegration of Native American tribes to Walmart.[29] Sheehan doesn’t hold Jefferson blameless but defends him against the most egregious of Kennedy’s accusations.
In 2006, Sean M. Theriault published the first social-scientific analysis of the congressional debates. “Party Politics during the Louisiana Purchase” identifies this period as a key turning point in the “transition from a colonial government to modern-day democracy.”[30] For Theriault, the Louisiana Purchase debates constitute one of the first instances wherein the political parties put their quest for votes above their adherence to ideological stances,[31] and this reversal of party positions can best be understood by viewing the debate in the context of electoral politics. His methods are highly positivist, seeking to apply a quasi-scientific analysis to human decision-making through the use of charts, graphs, and a decision tree. The effort is impressive, and the thesis is logical. But the analysis itself considers only a finite set of possible relevant factors in the legislators’ voting decisions, and thus doesn’t provide a strong foundation for Theriault’s contentions.
In 2008, François Furstenberg drew upon numerous, mainly secondary sources to produce a sweeping study of “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” and advance the proposition that “the Appalachian Mountains were responsible for the great problem of North American, and perhaps even Atlantic, history from 1754 to 1815.”[32] In an incisive analysis of the world politics surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, he focuses on the importance of New Orleans and Saint Domingue to Napoleon’s plans to dominate Louisiana. Furstenberg credits Jefferson with shrewd foreign policy and with recognizing, as early as 1795, the potential that Saint Domingue held for American interests.[33] He postulates that, in promising and then withholding American aid for the French campaign in Saint Domingue, Jefferson deliberately lured Napoleon into a tactical folly that lost him the island permanently.[34] That loss not only forced France to abandon its New World hopes, but also removed the danger that a legitimatized Toussaint regime would tilt French foreign policy toward the anti-slavery cause.[35]
Two further 2008 articles examine different facets of American imperialism as
Courtesy U.S. House of Representatives
revealed through the acquisition of Louisiana and its aftermath. Julien Vernet’s New Left analysis, “Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec,” considers the backlash that results from an imperial power’s imposing non-representative rule upon subject peoples who had prior experience of representative government. First Québec and then, four decades later, Louisiana, appointed representatives to petition England and the United States for the type of self-determination that the colonizers’ own citizens enjoyed. Both petitions reflect deep concerns with the courts, taxes, and commerce; heavily agricultural Louisiana sought the continuation of the slave trade as well. Vernet emphasizes the remarkable similarity between the governments established for the two colonies.[36] Both Jefferson and his appointed governor, William Claiborne, saw the Louisianans as an immature and incapable of self-government. The mayor of New Orleans stated the need to increase the American population in the region and thus assimilate it into the mainstream.[37]
Peter Kastor’s “‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’: Inventing Expansion in the Early American Republic” contradicts the contentions of DeConde and others that the acquisition was driven by an “inexorable expansionist impulse.”[38] To investigate the veracity of such claims, Kastor examined a series of pamphlets, travel narratives, and maps dating from before and after the Purchase. He found that the earliest pamphlets written about Louisiana applauded the peaceful nature of the acquisition but expressed more trepidation than enthusiasm about its implications for the country. Any glimmers of Manifest Destiny we now see in these cautiously optimistic writings were not perceived by their authors.[39] The shift toward expansionist boosterism in American literature came after the publication of William Clark’s official narrative and its accompanying map. Clark’s writing did not shrink from the perils and harshness of the frontier, but his works supplied the raw materials with which subsequent cartographers and writers built a more nationalistic, expansionist image of the West.[40] By the 1830s, the groundwork for John O’Sullivan’s 1845 use of the term “Manifest Destiny” had been laid.[41]
[1] Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson,
Empire of Liberty: the Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 131
[2] Henry Adams and Earl N. Harbert, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986), 334.
[3] Adams, History of the United States, 332.
[4] Adams, History of the United States, 363.
[5] Adams, History of the United States, 357.
[6] William Milligan Sloane, “The World Aspects of the Louisiana Purchase,” The American Historical Review 9, no. 3 (April 1904): 513.
[7] Sloane, “World Aspects,” 516.
[8] Sloane, “World Aspects,” 517.
[9] Everett Somerville Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803-1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920), 28.
[10] Brown, Constitutional History, 32.
[11] Brown, Constitutional History, 32-33.
[12] Richard Warner Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 78-80.
[13] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 87.
[14] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 86-87.
[15] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 86.
[16] Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner, 1976), 185.
[17] DeConde, This Affair, 184.
[18] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, ix.
[19] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 92.
[20] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 101-102.
[21] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 135.
[22] David A. Carson, “Blank paper of the Constitution: The Louisiana Purchase Debates,” Historian 54, no. 3 (Spring 1992) http://vlib.excelsior.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9601312138&site=ehost-live (accessed May 31, 2009).
[23] Carson, “Blank Paper.”
[24] Peter S. Onuf, “‘The Strongest Government on Earth’: Jefferson’s Republicanism, the Expansion of the Union, and the New Nation’s Destiny,” in The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898, ed. Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 41.
[25] Onuf, “Strongest Government on Earth,” 58-59.
[26] Onuf, “Strongest Government on Earth,” 62.
[27] Bernard W. Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire for Liberty,’” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 4 (December 2004): 346.
[28] Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire,’” 353-354.
[29] Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire,’” 357-358.
[30] Sean M. Theriault, “Party Politics During the Louisiana Purchase,” Social Science History 30, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 294-295.
[31] Theriault, “Party Politics,” 295.
[32] François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 648.
[33] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 669.
[34] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 673.
[35] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 672.
[36] Vernet, “Petitions,” 495.
[37] Vernet, “Petitions,” 498.
[38] Peter J. Kastor, “‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’: Inventing Expansion in the Early American Republic,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 2008): 1003.
[39] Kastor, “Advantages,” 1014.
[40] Kastor, “Advantage,” 1025-1026.
[41] Kastor, “Advantages,” 1031.
