Jefferson's Folly

Was the Louisiana Purchase worth the price? For a mere $15 million, Thomas Jefferson doubled the American realm, bequeathing us not only a breadbasket but the soul of Middle American culture. Yet, as Henry Adams wrote, this gargantuan real-estate deal also "gave a fatal wound to u2018strict construction' of the Constitution."

Louisiana was the largest re-gift in North American history. France ceded it to Spain in 1762; in 1801 the Spaniards gave it back. Remote colonies drain the treasury, and besides, the Europeans could read the handwriting on the Mississippi River. American settlement of the "wilderness so immense" was inevitable. As the Spanish governor of Louisiana said in 1794: "A new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection, [are] advancing and multiplying with a prodigious rapidity." Not to mention bellicosity. Swallowing hard, the Francophile Thomas Jefferson warned: "The day that France takes possession of New Orleans…we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."

But the French never came. Mosquitoes and machetes were decimating the French army in St. Domingue, the site of a slave revolt. Desperate for francs to fuel his militarism, Napoleon negotiated the sale of Louisiana with U.S. diplomats James Monroe and Robert Robert Livingston. (The repetition is no typo, just a typical Hudson Valley conceit.)

Livingston would call the agreement "the noblest work of our whole lives," though the plural was a courtesy: He and Monroe engaged in what Thomas Fleming calls, in The Louisiana Purchase, an "ugly quarrel about who deserved credit for buying Louisiana," with Robert Robert even backdating a key document.

President Jefferson admitted that the Purchase was "beyond the Constitution." He fiddled with an authorizing amendment before concluding that "the less that is said about any constitutional difficulty, the better." This was not his finest hour but rather his imperial moment. As Jon Kukla writes in A Wilderness So Immense. "Only five years earlier, Jefferson's party had championed states' rights and strict construction in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798. Now their words could have been scripted by the Hamiltonian Federalists."

Almost all the opposition to the Purchase came from New England, and what is most interesting in Mr. Kukla's and Mr. Fleming's books are the voices of dissent. The Yankees had read their Montesquieu, who wisely wrote: "It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist." The country was already too large, perhaps, and further expansion would swell it past the point of viability.

To the splenetic Federalist Fisher Ames, the U.S. was "rushing like a comet into infinite space." Even Jefferson's allies wondered if the enlargement of the territorial U.S. might lead inevitably to a larger and less responsive central government. Was Jefferson signing the death warrant for Jeffersonianism? Or, as an editorialist asked in September 1803: "Will republicans, who glory in their sacred regard to the rights of human nature, purchase an immense wilderness for the purpose of cultivating it with the labor of slaves?"

Alas, yes, answers Roger G. Kennedy in Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause. That lost cause – a South of free and independent yeomen – was sold out by Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, who were simply "planters serving other planters," according to Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Kennedy frankly despises the planter class, gentlemen whose country manors and courtly manners rested on man-owning and on the short-sighted exploitation of the land through such cash crops as tobacco and cotton. "Yeomen were kinder to the land than planters," he writes, because they themselves, and not uprooted slaves, worked their little patches of earth. Unlike vagabond planters, yeomen also exhibited the virtue of "sedentism," or staying in one place.

Mr. Kennedy is fashionably hard on Jefferson, arguing that, by acquiring Louisiana and refusing to insist on the prohibition of slavery in the new territory, Jefferson doomed his South. Those "who had worn out the productivity of their soil for their staple crops were provided new land to wear out and new markets for the sale of their surplus slaves."

Mr. Kennedy's Jefferson is an expropriator of Indian lands, disrespecter of black intellects and unconscious dupe of British textile interests. He is a hypocritical lover of liberty and owner of slaves, the architect not of an Empire of Liberty but of an "empire of servitude." (The anti-Jefferson current of our age has gone too far: "The Wall of Shame" in my daughter's rural New York public school featured Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson and Thomas Jefferson.)

I can accept a principled radical condemning Jefferson for trimming, but surely a career bureaucrat who "served six presidents," as Mr. Kennedy's author-biography boasts, is in no position to accuse anyone of compromise – least of all Jefferson, who, whatever his sins, did more to promote liberty than almost any politician in our history.

Still, Mr. Kennedy's astringency forces us to reconsider settled opinions, always a good thing. Of the Purchase, he concludes: "The American nation became bigger but not necessarily better, from the point of view of those of us who admire the aspirations of the Founding Fathers."

The Louisiana Purchase was not a freebie. We gained Mark Twain, Huey Long and the Mississippi River and lost strict construction and the small republic. I guess every deal has its price.

December 12, 2003