A Wilderness So Immense (49 page)

That same day, by coincidence, Monroe and Livingston dispatched a short note to King confirming that the treaty had been signed. Both messages went by courier, but in effect they crossed in the mail. As a result, before heading home to America, King was able to inform Lord Hawkesbury, the British foreign minister,

Sailing on April 21 aboard the
John Morgan,
King stepped ashore ten weeks later to bring Americans the first official news that the Louisiana Purchase Treaty had been signed. King also brought assurances of “harmony and good understanding between Britain and the United States” from George III and Lord Hawkesbury—although British military planners at the Admiralty and the War Department just bundled up their papers for the invasion of New Orleans and filed them away in case they might be useful—perhaps a dozen years hence.
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America’s twenty-seventh celebration of the Fourth of July was an especially festive Monday for the author of the Declaration of Independence. Everything that Rufus King knew about the Louisiana Purchase—but no details about price or boundaries
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—had reached President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison in Washington on the evening of July 3.

“We received a letter from Mr. King arrived in N[ew] York,” Jefferson announced to his son-in-law on July 5,

President Thomas Jefferson in January 1805 from the portrait by Rembrandt Peale. As the debate over the extension of slavery into the territory of the Louisiana Purchase grew strident, the implications of the Missouri Compromise alarmed Jefferson. To maintain a balance of power in the Senate, Maine joined the union as a free state in March 1820, Missouri joined as a slave state in August 1821, and slavery was henceforth prohibited north of 360 361 north latitude. “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political,” Jefferson wrote in April 1820, “once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”
(Courtesy Library of Virginia)

“It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” Jefferson continued, “probably containing 500 millions of acres, the U.S. containing 434 millions.” “By the acquisition of Louisiana,” London’s
European Magazine
reported, “the whole extent of the United States will then be 1,680,000 square miles … or about sixteen times and a half larger than Great Britain and Ireland!!!” Louisiana’s boundaries were vague, even in the treaty, but Jefferson’s guess was close. Sixteen years later, when the lines were finally
drawn, the Louisiana Purchase territory comprised 529,402,880 acres. Jefferson was right on the mark, however, about the first and paramount consequence of his Louisiana Purchase: “This removes from us the greatest source of danger to our peace.”
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As the astonishing news spread, letters of congratulations poured into the White House. “It has the air of enchantment,” seventy-five-year-old General Horatio Gates wrote from his home at Rose Hill, New York, “as the greatest and most beneficial event that has taken place since the Declaration of Independence.” An admirer from Tennessee, David Campbell, wrote that “in its magnitude it approaches to a second Declaration of Independence.” So common was the analogy between the Louisiana Purchase and independence that even the French charge d’affaires, Louis André Pichón, described the transaction as “the greatest achievement in the history of the United States since their independence.”
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Ohio senator John Smith voiced the other common comparison. The “permanent and exclusive” control of the Mississippi was the greatest contribution toward “peace and harmony among ourselves,” Smith wrote, “since the establishment of the federal constitution.” For the moment at least, as Pichón reported to Talleyrand, “the enemies of the President seem to be truly stupefied.”
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Jefferson’s “hourly expectation of the treaty by a special messenger” was too optimistic by more than a week. Livingston and Monroe had sent copies by three different messengers. The fastest courier delivered the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the two conventions, and their cover letter to the president on Thursday evening, July 14—Bastille Day.
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Despite their achievement, Livingston and Monroe adopted an almost apologetic tone in their letter transmitting the text of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty to Jefferson and Madison. “An acquisition of so great an extent was, we well Know, not contemplated by our appointment,” they wrote,

“Before the negociation commenced,” they wrote, “the first Consul had decided to offer to the U[nited] States by sale the whole of Louisiana, and not a part of it.” As their discussions continued they had discovered “that Mr. Marbois was absolutely restricted to the disposition of the
whole” as well, and “that he would treat for no less portion, and … that it was useless to urge it.”
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Had Bonaparte been willing to sell only New Orleans, they admitted, acquiring possession of the east bank of the Mississippi River would have fulfilled their instructions. But in time “a divided Jurisdiction over the River” was certain to “beget jealousies, discontents and dissentions which the wisest policy on our part could not prevent.” By acquiring both banks of “this great River and all the streams that empty into it… the apprehension of these disasters is banished for ages.”
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They saw many advantages in the acquisition of the entire Louisiana territory. The purchase bolstered American neutrality. “We separate ourselves in great measure from the European World and its concerns, especially its wars and intrigues.” It was a step toward economic self-sufficiency—“a great stride to real and substantial independence … in all our foreign and domestic Relations.” They hoped that it might cement “the Bond of our Union … by the encreased parity of interest” between west and east, south and north. And finally, on the world stage, “without exciting the apprehensions of any Power,” it gave the young American republic “a more imposing attitude, with respect to all.”
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With the text of the treaty at last in hand, Jefferson summoned his cabinet to meet on Saturday, July 16, to plan their next steps. At Bonaparte’s insistence, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty set an October 30 deadline for ratification. Jefferson’s first question to the cabinet was, “Shall Congress be called, or only Senate and when?” Their unanimous recommendation was to convene both houses of Congress on October 17. In preparation, Secretary of State Madison would send copies of the treaty to the senators and congressmen with a letter explaining “that the call 3 weeks earlier than they had fixed was rend[ere]d necessary by the treaty, and urging a punctual attendance on the 1st day”
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Jefferson and his cabinet also decided that “the substance of the treaty [should] be made public, but not the treaty itself.” They wanted Daniel Clark, the American consul at New Orleans, to turn “his attention to the public property [to be] transferred to us” including “archives, papers and documents.” In case the Spanish reacted angrily, Jefferson and his cabinet resolved to send William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the Mississippi Territory, to take possession of New Orleans “and act as Governor and Intendant under the Spanish laws, leaving every thing to go on as heretofore [and] making no innovation, nor doing a single act which will bear postponing.” Two companies of troops would be put on alert at Fort Adams, which commanded the Mississippi River at the American boundary,
midway between Natchez and Baton Rouge. Jefferson wanted to “get the Spanish troops off as soon as possible.”
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After considering the domestic implications of the treaty, the cabinet turned its attention to Livingston and Monroe, voicing unanimous approval for “their having treated for Louisiana and the price given.” Jefferson, Madison, Dearborn, and Smith agreed to inform their diplomats that they saw “no reason to doubt ratification of the whole.” Mr. Gallatin, the president noted, had scruples about the separation of powers and “disapprove[d] of this last as committing members of the Congress. All the other points unanimous.”
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As the meeting drew to a close, Jefferson and his cabinet addressed one last concern. Ever since Juan Ventura Morales had precipitated the Mississippi crisis on October 16, 1802, Jefferson and his friends had been proclaiming the critical importance both of New Orleans
and the Floridas.
His ministers had accomplished vastly more than anyone expected. Still, if measured against the letter of their instructions, they had sent home only half a loaf. How important were the Floridas?

In light of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the cabinet’s answer was a frugal and resounding shrug. “We are more indifferent about the purchase of the Floridas,” Jefferson noted, “because of the money we have to provide for Louisiana.” Their indifference was also rooted in a typically Jeffersonian anticipation of the future—“because we think they cannot fail to fall in our hands.” Westerners immediately agreed. “As to the Floridas,” Senator John Breckinridge wrote from Lexington, Kentucky, “I really consider their acquisition as of no consequence for the present. We can obtain them long before we shall want them, and upon our own terms.”
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Although the success of Jefferson’s emissaries astonished the entire nation, the president’s political adversaries did not remain “stupefied” for very long. Indeed, the first Federalist criticisms of the Louisiana Purchase came ashore with Rufus King. Ten weeks at sea gave King ample time for reflection upon the implications of the Louisiana Purchase. As to the western territory, King’s opinions dated back to his flirtation with New England separatism during the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786. Once again, as King was preparing for his departure from London in May 1803, Americans there heard him complain that the Louisiana territory “will be too extensive” and “impossible to govern.”
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James Monroe and his friend Fulwar Skipwith warned the administration
of King’s hostile opinions (and of the political ambitions that led to his candidacy for the vice presidency in 1804), but George William Erving was more blunt about his colleague the ambassador. Educated in England but a staunch republican from King’s adopted New York, Erving had been sharply attacked by the Federalist press when his appointment as the American consul in London displaced Timothy Pickering’s nephew, Samuel Williams, “a favorite child of the Essex tribe.” Erving was “an offensive aristocrat in manners and habits,” the
New-England Palladium
sneered from Boston, “but a jacobin in principle.”
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Ambassador King, Erving warned Secretary of State Madison, was “a very artificial and dangerous character—a man with two faces.” He was “a sort of Janus in his common intercourse with the world,” Erving contended, “and he would be a Sejanus in certain political circumstances”—an allusion to the ambitious praetorian guard Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who had poisoned the son of the Roman emperor Tiberius while plotting to place himself on the imperial throne.
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Madison and Monroe had their own misgivings about the returning ambassador, for each had witnessed Rufus King’s duplicity firsthand during the congressional intrigues over the Mississippi River in the 1780s.

While nay-saying New England Federalists fumed about the Louisiana Purchase, Alexander Hamilton’s immediate reaction—an intricate blend of realism, partisanship, and regional pride—influenced his compatriots in the middle states, the south, and the west. The Louisiana Purchase was beneficial, Hamilton announced in an unsigned
New-York Evening Post
editorial published on July 5, just days after the news reached America, not because it expanded American territory but because it “was essential to the peace and prosperity of our Western country,” and because it opened “a free and valuable market to our commercial states.” So long as the price was not “too dear,” Hamilton condoned the “exultation which the friends of the administration display, and which all Americans may be allowed to feel.”
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“This purchase has been made during the period of Mr. Jefferson’s presidency,” Hamilton had to admit,