American Sphinx (36 page)

Spain, however, took a somewhat less charitable view of the American claims, insisting that neither the Gulf Coast (called West Florida) nor any land southwest of New Orleans was included in the purchase. Jefferson instructed Monroe to leave Paris for Madrid and there make a modest effort to buy West Florida from Spain. “We scarcely expect any liberal or just settlement with Spain,” Jefferson observed, but it made little difference since “whatever may be the views of Spain, there will be no difficulty . . . in getting thro’ with our purposes.” In short, Spain being Spain, it should be regarded as a mere holding company for the United States, “and if, as soon as she is at war, we push them strongly with one hand, holding out a price in the other, we shall certainly obtain the Floridas, and all in good time.” Though it required another fifteen years, plus the military adventurism of Andrew Jackson, that is exactly what happened.
⁷¹

Finally, and most famously, there were the constitutional questions raised by the acquisition of so vast a tract, whatever the borders. Although Madison and Gallatin tried to persuade him otherwise, Jefferson remained convinced that the enlargement of the Union required an amendment to the Constitution: “The constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory . . .” he acknowledged. “The Executive in seizing the fugitive occurrence, have done an act beyond the Constitution.” As Jefferson explained to Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, he had been placed in the awkward position of a guardian who, presented with an unprecedented investment opportunity, had decided to act without obtaining the consent of his clients, saying in effect, “I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.” But he was now under moral obligation to request a constitutional amendment from the Congress at the same time he forwarded the treaty for ratification.
⁷²

By the time the special session of Congress convened in October 1803, however, Jefferson had changed his mind. Reports from Paris indicated that the ever-impulsive Napoleon was having second thoughts; at the same time the Spanish were threatening to challenge the entire treaty on the ground that no one really knew the proper boundaries of Louisiana. Fearing that any delay might put the purchase at risk, Jefferson concluded that “the less that is said about my constitutional difficulty, the better; and that it will be desirable for Congress to do what is necessary
in silence.”
If the choice was between sustaining his strict interpretation of executive authority or losing half a continent, he chose the more pragmatic course, all the while expressing the hope that “the good sense of our country will correct the evil of [broad] construction when it shall produce ill effects.”
⁷³

The constitutional embarrassments became worse over the succeeding months. The huge Republican majority in Congress ratified the Louisiana Purchase, as one senator put it, “in less time than required for the most trivial Indian contract,” then passed enabling legislation that delegated to the president nearly autocratic power over decisions about a provisional government in the Louisiana Territory. John Quincy Adams, one of the few senators to oppose the legislation, observed that Jefferson would possess “an assumption of implied power greater . . . than all the assumptions of implied powers in the years of the Washington and Adams administrations put together.” The old enemy of George III now wielded more arbitrary power over the residents of Louisiana than any British king had wielded over the American colonists.
⁷⁴

Moreover, Jefferson chose to use that executive power to propose a blatantly nonrepublican territorial government. His outline for a proposed constitution was accompanied by a cover letter to Senator Breckinridge, swearing him to secrecy. “You must never let any person know that I have put pen to paper,” he warned, “and should destroy the original” immediately after making a copy. “I am this particular,” Jefferson explained, “because you know with what bloody teeth and fangs the federalists will attack any sentiment or principle known to come from me, and what blackguardisms and personalities they make it the occasion of vomiting forth.”
⁷⁵

The chief reason for Jefferson’s apprehension was that the provisional government of the territory he proposed consisted of a governor appointed by the president and a nonelected council or senate, which Jefferson called the “Assembly of Notables.” This was precisely the kind of constitutional arrangement one might have expected from John Adams, who was more comfortable with aristocratic entrustments of authority, preferred ornate titles and might have argued that the predominantly French residents of Louisiana would appreciate a familiar political framework reminiscent of the
ancien régime.
But this was also precisely the kind of government Jefferson had condemned the Federalists for preferring, since it deprived the residents of any elective rights and, as Madison privately admitted, “will leave the people of that District for a while without the organization of power dictated by the Republican theory.”
⁷⁶

During the debate over Jefferson’s proposal in the Senate, John Quincy Adams, undoubtedly enjoying the irony and fully aware the Republicans would vote whatever Jefferson wanted, attempted to add a provision protecting the rights of the Louisiana residents against being taxed without their consent. The following year a delegation of three agents from the territory came to Washington to present a remonstrance, protesting the violation of their rights and their de facto status as colonists. “Do the political axioms on the Atlantic become problems,” they asked rhetorically, “when transplanted to the shores of the Mississippi?” Jefferson avoided any contact with the delegation or conversation about their remonstrance. In his private correspondence he explained that “our new fellow citizens [in Louisiana] are as yet incapable of self-government as children, yet some cannot bring themselves to suspend [republican] principles for a single moment.” The suspension was only temporary, he promised, until he could be assured that the political temperature had sufficiently lowered to avoid the risk of insurrection.
⁷⁷

From the long-term historical perspective, and with all the advantages of hindsight, Jefferson’s controversial decisions about the Louisiana Territory can be—most of them indeed should be—defended as wise. The decision to bypass the constitutional issue was unquestionably correct, for the practical reason that the debate over a constitutional amendment would have raised a constellation of nettlesome questions—about slavery and the slave trade, Indian lands, Spanish land claims and a host of other jurisdictional issues—that might have put the entire purchase at risk. The hard-boiled and dismissive attitude toward Spanish arguments about borders, especially in West Florida, followed naturally from a realistic assessment of Spanish impotence and American demographic destiny. Even the decision to install an essentially arbitrary and despotic provisional government over the Louisiana Territory to carry it through the early years of assimilation cannot be condemned outright, since both the sheer size of the region and the ethnic diversity of the Creole population posed governance problems that justified a firmer hand at the start.
⁷⁸

The issue, then, is not whether Jefferson’s policies toward Louisiana were right or wrong but rather how he managed to implement decisions that defied in so many ways his long-standing commitment to limitations on executive power and the near-sacred character of republican principles. Two of the more conventional answers to this question do not ring true: First, Jefferson was not simply seized by power-hungry impulses once he assumed the presidency, since in a broad range of other policy areas he exhibited considerable discipline over the executive branch and habitual deference to the Congress; second, he did not suddenly discover a pragmatic streak in his political philosophy, since on issues like the debt and, later on, the embargo he clung tenaciously to Jeffersonian principles despite massive evidence that they were at odds with reality. The pragmatic interpretation fails to explain why he was capable of putting his belief in “pure republicanism” aside in this instance and not in others.

The answer would seem to be the special, indeed almost mystical place the West had in his thinking. When history presented him with an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to eliminate forever the presence on America’s western border of any major European power (Spain did not count here), it triggered his most visionary energies, which then overrode his traditional republican injunctions. For Jefferson more than any other major figure in the revolutionary generation, the West was America’s future. Securing a huge swatch of it for posterity meant prolonging for several generations the systemic release of national energy that accompanied the explosive movement of settlements across the unsettled spaces. (The Indians, like Spain, did not count in this calculus.) What Frederick Jackson Turner later called a safety valve was for Jefferson more like a self-renewing engine that drove the American republic forward. The West was the place where his agrarian idyll could be regularly rediscovered, thereby postponing into the indefinite future the crowded conditions and political congestions of European society. Jefferson liked to think of the West in much the same way that some modern optimists think of technology, as almost endlessly renewable and boundlessly prolific. It was the secret weapon that made the American experiment in republicanism immune to the national aging process, at least for the remainder of the century. It was America’s fountain of youth.
⁷⁹

As a result, any issue involving the fate of the American West possessed the potential to trump his other political convictions. Jefferson’s visionary sense of what the West meant for America also made him virtually immune to the doubts, prevalent among Federalists and even shared by some of his Republican colleagues, about the country’s capacity to assimilate the vast Louisiana Territory. After all, when such a massive area had come under British control after the French and Indian War in 1763, it had led directly to political problems that eventually resulted in the American Revolution and the dissolution of the British Empire in America. While easterners, especially New England Federalists, worried that their influence would erode as more western states entered the Union, the predominant fear was fragmentation, that the expanded version of the United States would split up into several regional units in the European mode. Jefferson’s reaction to such fear was almost cavalierly dismissive: “Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children and descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this.”
⁸⁰

This was a remarkable statement since it conveyed an almost ostentatious nonchalance toward the preservation of national union, the dominant political issue of the next half century. Jefferson did not worry about the integration of the West into the United States because he thought about the process more dynamically and as part of a larger transformation. From his perspective, the United States was not just integrating the West into the Union; the West was actually integrating the older United States into a newer and ever-changing version of America. In spirit, if not in fact, Jefferson was a westerner, captivated by the apparently endless horizons and the exciting unknowns that Meriwether Lewis might bring back to nourish the present with news of the future. It also helped that the vast majority of westerners were likely to prove staunch Republicans.

SCANDALS

I
F THE WEST
was that future place where the creative juices of the expanding American republic flowed most freely, then New England was the past, where, as Jefferson saw it, Federalism stewed in its own poisonous juices while adjusting to its abiding irrelevancy. Unfortunately for Jefferson, whose impressive intellectual range did not extend to an appreciation of the compressed energies of New England Puritanism, his declaration of war to the death against the “incurables” of Federalism alienated some of the most formidable figures among the best-educated population in the country. Jefferson was an excellent hater and a skillful polemicist, but he more than met his match in the Federalist press and pulpit, where the expiring condition of Federalism as a viable political movement only intensified the desperation of its defenders. Later in life, after Jefferson and Adams had reconciled and resumed their correspondence, they kept up a running joke about which one could assemble the larger volume of vindictive criticism directed at him during his presidency. This was one area of playful competition where Jefferson was the indisputable winner. The assaults on his character were unparalleled in the history of the early republic.
⁸¹

That does not mean they were unprecedented. During the presidential campaign of 1800 Adams had been subjected to several attempts at character assassination, the chief blow coming from Hamilton, who published a lengthy indictment of the president’s explosive personality. The gist of the charge was that Adams was mentally deranged and fully capable of destroying the infant American republic during one of his spasms of lunacy. Even the godlike Washington had become a target of abuse during his second term, when he was accused of senility as well as pro-Hamilton favoritism that derived from the groundless but sensational allegation that Hamilton was secretly his illegitimate son. Hamilton himself was charged with a variety of indiscretions, the most scandalous being that his sexual affair with a married woman exposed him to blackmail by the woman’s husband, who demanded political favors for his silence. Ever the master of audacity, Hamilton took out newspaper space to announce that the charges of infidelity were sadly true but that, despite this personal failure, his public virtue as a government official had never been compromised. The line of demarcation that he attempted to draw between his private life and his public integrity was precisely the line that newspaper editors and political pundits refused to recognize. By the time Jefferson ascended to the presidency, then, the private lives of public figures were clearly regarded as fair game by the press, and Jefferson, who had been active behind the scenes in paying off hired character assassins in the party wars of the 1790s, knew perfectly well that he could expect the same treatment. “They say we lied them out of power,” he observed in reference to the Federalists, “and openly avow they will do the same by us.”
⁸²