Postscript to the Purchase

The United States was a new nation in 1803, fourteen years young, when the President ordained the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. The meager population lay near the Atlantic coastline. The remoter areas just east of the Mississippi river were largely uninhabited. The new territory extended nearly a thousand miles farther west—a vast and largely unknown region. Colonization of that distant desert was not even foreseen—it was to be a refuge of displaced Indians living east of the “Father of Waters.”^[1]Officially, Indian populations in the territory being unknown, Louisiana in 1785 had included an estimated 14,215 whites, 1,303 “free people of color,” and 16,544 slaves, for a total of … Continue reading

So the dramatic coup, the Louisiana Purchase, announced publicly with great fanfare on the glorious Fourth of July, was not without its critics. Initial opposition arose when those who viewed the Constitution as a document engraved upon stone claimed that the President had no sanction, no right to execute such a violent shift in national policy. Where was it written, they asked, that a unilateral decision could make such a purchase? What consultation was held with the people’s representatives, the Congress? This was an illegal, stealthy abuse of power, they cried—and they could indeed cite chapter and verse to sustain their argument. Strictly construed, the Constitution, the rock upon which the republic rested, allowed no such wild initiative. Thomas Jefferson had played fast and loose with our sacred writ and had reduced the constitution to a mere piece of paper.

Jefferson himself, as was well known, had held the very same “strict constructionist” views about his predecessors’ actions. Only masterful counter-argument by his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, convinced Jefferson to go ahead and accept the treaty with France binding the sale. Now he was certain that because the constitution did not explicitly forbid such an action, then he could take it. Now his view was that the office of president could move ahead because the constitution “implied” that he had that power to act. What had begun as an attempt to secure warehousing space along the lower Mississippi had resulted in a major constitutional shift in American history.

Slave or Free State?

Other critics asked whether we had the right to impose our government upon the people of New Orleans, and whether slavery could be introduced into the new territory without explicit constitutional authority. How could the president possibly countenance the further spread of that cruel institution? Even Rufus King, the best informed American in Europe when he represented his country in London at the time of sale, discussed the matter with John Quincy Adams; they concluded that if slavery spread into the new territory it would occasion an inevitable collision between free and slave states.^[2]The “Missouri Compromise” of 1820 was to allow Missouri to join the Union as a slave state, but made free soil of the rest of Louisiana north of its southern boundary. Thus continued the … Continue reading

Jefferson sought to counter this slave-free argument by restricting American colonization in the new territory. His view was that it should be a reserve for Indians. There were powerful and numerous tribes east of the great river. If they could be offered lands to its west, the country then could be filled in more humanely, more justly. He had already instructed Lewis to be especially cognizant of the native American communities through which he passed—to be alert to culture, customs, speech, dress, diet—all the knowledge the government would need to meld eastern and western Indian cultures.

Western Expansion

Also, Jefferson sought to control that most intractable of American habits—doing business with Indians. The traders were already up the Missouri, but in an abrupt shift of national policy, only the government could do business in the trans-Mississippi west. Indeed, when William Clark, after his return from the great exploration, became governor of upper Louisiana—the Missouri territory and areas to the northwest—he spent a great deal of time on this issue. Jefferson was never able to realize that goal of controlling trade in goods with Indians—no president ever was.

If there was a single unyielding American national characteristic, it was land hunger. Slave or free, Indian or not, land hunger drove a westward push so fast, so intensely, so relentlessly, that by the time of Thomas Jefferson’s death (and John Adam’s on that same Fourth of July, 1826), the Louisiana Territory was already becoming a plowed and cultivated land.

It may well be argued that the most important of all developments arising from this fortuitous sale by a capricious French ruler, was psychological. Americans became continental to be sure, but in order to achieve that, they had to become westerners. Jefferson was already a forerunner in this arena. He never came west, but he felt it in his bones. His faith in that momentous purchase is proof of the contention. But now a whole energetic populace, in rapidly increasing numbers, began chasing the rainbow toward the Pacific shore.

What about the Floridas?

Of the province of Louisiana no general map, sufficiently correct to be depended upon, has been published, nor has any been yet procured from a private source . . . surveys have never been made on so extensive a scale.” Thus the first sentence from the set of documents submitted by President Thomas Jefferson to Congress justifying the American purchase of the Louisiana Territory.

When Robert Livingston and James Monroe asked Napoleon what it was precisely that they had purchased, he responded that the territory was that which had been retroceded by Spain to France. When Napoleon’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, was further pressed to be explicit, he repeated that formula, and added that he hoped the United States would “make the most if it.”

President Jefferson was energetic in his determination to maximize the boundaries of that new territory. He and Livingston were absolutely certain that the Gulf Coast was ours—what then was known as the Floridas. They hoped that the territory might include a chunk of what is now Texas, but that was hardly certain. Jefferson did send exploring expeditions into the Red River country of what is now the state of Louisiana, and would send Lt. Zebulon Pike up to the Lake of the Woods in Minnesota to see if that boundary might be pushed farther north. But the greatest stretching would take place in the far west—with Lewis and Clark searching for the Northwest Passage that would lead to the Orient.

The United States had to buy the Floridas—and did so following the 1812 war. Spain’s claim to the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico was clear—no matter what Napoleon had said. The country would have to settle, eventually, on the forty-ninth parallel as the northern boundary. Yet what wonderful things might be found in that great northwest?

Lewis and Clark felt an immense responsibility to record their observations so minutely, so clearly, that any claim based upon their work could be sustained. It would be wrong to see the venture—the adventure—as a business trip. There was an important and psychologically sustaining romance about it. They would be the first American adventurers to view these new vistas. As Lewis explained to each tribe they encountered, we are on a “long journey to the Great Lake of the West, where the land ends.”

Mapping Louisiana

Limits to the Louisiana Territory were defined by watersheds. That was a well established European custom. Determining the extent of the upper Missouri watershed was the single most important task they faced. The result was that they spent more time in what is now Montana than in any other area. Their search for the westernmost source of the Jefferson River nearly cost them their lives. They traversed the Bitterroot mountain range so late in the season that winter almost trapped them in a death cycle of fatigue, starvation and despair.

On the return leg of the journey, Lewis chose to explore the Marias River in an effort to establish the northern boundary of the Missouri, hoping it would prove to be above the 50th parallel.

The weight of responsibility upon the captains was doubly heavy because now their country owned the Louisiana country—and, like good Americans, they were going to make the most of it.

William Clark’s remarkable mapmaking skills were coupled with Lewis’s power of observation to produce a cornucopia of valuable information about an extremely valuable area. Yet even those gifted explorers could not encompass the precise measurements necessary to define the territory. Indeed, that was not accomplished until the second decade of the twentieth century. The area west of the Mississippi is now to be 828,000 square miles. General Horatio Gates, writing to President Jefferson, July 18, 1803, expressed a common feeling when he said: “Let the Land rejoice, for you have bought Louisiana for a song.”

In Figure 2, Thomas Jefferson is satirized as an emaciated dog with his obviously docked tail ending in a few scraggly hairs, and a prominent organ between his extremely long hind legs—a lewd reminder of Jefferson’s scandalous liaisons with his mulatto concubine, Sally Hemings. Goaded by a stinging bee (the official symbol of Napoleon’s Second Empire) sporting a Napoleanic cocked hat, “dog” Jefferson vomits “Two Millions” of dollars on the prairie. Facing him, James Monroe holds a map of “West Florida” in his proper right hand and a map of “East Florida” in his left. From his left pocket protrudes a list of instructions from Talleyrand. The dialog balloon at his lips reads “A gull [deception] for the people.”

The background of Akin’s cartoon was this: Jefferson had assumed that the Louisiana Purchase included West Florida. When he discovered that it did not, he immediately (in 1804) sought to carry out a secret plan with Congress—with encouragement and support from France—to buy it from Spain for $2,000,000. His scheme failed, but the issue was eventually resolved by John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State under President James Monroe, in the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819.

For many years it has been thought that this very famous cartoon was published in the Newburyport, Massachusetts, Herald sometime in 1804.^[3]Akin declared his authorship of the cartoon in the Newburyport Herald of November 14, 1806, but did not specify the date on which it was published. James C. Kelly and B. S. Lovell, “Thomas … Continue reading However, the species that was sometimes called “prairie dog” (which in 1815 naturalist George Ord (1781-1866) was to officially name Arctomys ludoviciana [“bear-mouse of Louisiana”]) was entirely unknown to easterners until Meriwether Lewis sent a caged live specimen to President Jefferson from Fort Mandan on the same day the expedition resumed its journey up the Missouri.

That was on April 7, 1805. Forty-three days later the expedition’s barge, on which the “barking squirrel” began its long journey, reached St. Louis. It was sent on down the Mississippi by barge to New Orleans, carried by sea to Baltimore and then by land to the capitol, arriving—alive!—in Washington on August 12. Jefferson was at Monticello, but his maitre d’hotel, Etienne Lemaire, placed “the kind of squirrel . . . in the room where Monsieur receives his callers.”^[4]Lemaire to Jefferson, August 20, 1805. Jackson, Letters, 256. The first word of the new species to leak out of the personal correspondence pipeline was in a letter that Clark wrote to William Henry Harrison, and dispatched on the barge headed for St. Louis.^[5]Harrison was the governor of Indiana Territory; his office was in Kaskaskia, in the Illinois country. The letter was published in the Baltimore Telegraph and Daily Advertiser on July 25. Clark informed the governor that in what he had so far seen of Louisiana, there was “a great variety of wild animals . . such as . . . the ground prairie dog.” On October 6 Jefferson, who had returned to Washington, wrote to Charles Willson Peale that Captain Daniel Cormack, of the U.S. Marines, was soon to carry the “burrowing squirrel . . . a species of Marmotte” to Philadelphia for display in Peale’s Museum. On October 22 Peale informed Jefferson that the “living Marmotte . . . a handsome little Animal” was thriving.^[6]Jackson, Letters, 1:267. Jefferson returned to Washington in late September, and on October 9 informed Charles Willson Peale that a U.S. Marine, Captain Daniel Cormack, would be carrying the “Marmotte” to Philadelphia for display in Peale’s Museum.

Harry Croswell, the fiercely anti-Jeffersonian editor of an Albany newspaper, either personally got a peek at the animal in Jefferson’s reception room—doubtful, considering the distance he would have had to travel—or received a written description of it from an anonymous conspirator. In any case, he seized the opportunity to impugn Lewis’s qualifications as a naturalist in a short paragraph on “Louisiana Curiosities,” dated September 17. Writing over one of his several pseudonyms, “Alex. D. Adv.,” he insisted that Lewis wasn’t smart enough to see that his so-called prairie dog was only an eastern fox squirrel that had “lost part of the hair from its tail on the journey.”^[7]“Louisiana Curiosities,” Balance and Columbian Repository, vol. 4, no. 38 (September 17, 1805), 304. American Periodicals Series Online. Maureen O’Brien Quimby, “The Political … Continue reading Of course, nobody was around yet to counter the canard, but all this is enough to strongly suggest that Akin could not have conceived his satirical cartoon until sometime after he read Croswell’s shaggy-dog story, and after there was a readership that could understand his own punch line. Sometime after September 17, 1805.