The Louisiana Purchase

Napoleonic Newsdesk

by Paul Chamberlain

Jefferson was jubilant ... He was well aware of the importance of the vast territory known as the Louisiana Territory. It consisted essentially of the great valley watered by the Mississippi River and its tributaries and land stretching west to the Rocky Mountains. At one stroke the United States would double its size, an enormous tract of land would be open to settlement, and the free navigation of the Mississippi would be assured.

The Turnover of the Land

Pierre Clement Laussat came to New Orleans by command of the First Consul to administer the restored French Empire in North America, the re-arisen New France. There were delays and he smoldered with helpless anger in a still Spanish town.

The Spanish gentry and officials began by hating him but soon ignored and despised him. The French inhabitants were of many factions. Some, especially merchants who profited from the smuggling that was universal under the lax administration they were used to, adhered to the Spanish interest. Some looked forward to a terror to renew the liberty that seemed so antique a notion in the improved world of the Consulate.

Some appeared to have been debauched by American ideas. But, impotently waiting for the Province of Louisiana to be transferred to France, he busied himself making plans for its security and development – plans to substitute Napoleon’s firm control of maritime commerce for the fatuous Spanish makeshifts under with the Americans had prospered, to nourish French sympathies in the American West, to attach the Indian tribes to the American Southwest to French interest.

He forwarded his results, for its information and guidance, to a colonial office where they were tossed into the waste bin of yesterday’s debris. When in a moment of curiosity Talleyrand asked what he and his staff might be engaged in, the colonial minister replied, “Il peut etre mort.”

Almost as soon as Laussat arrived he had to deny a monstrous rumor which the Louisianas and the Americans who were resident among them came increasingly to believe. But it was, he shockingly found out, true.

On November 30, 1803 he received for the French Republic the enormous domain of Louisiana, transferred by His Catholic Majesty in accordance with a secret treaty made three years before, and this was the first of the duties he had been sent to America to perform. But he was a mere commissioner for the exchange of deeds and the administered Louisiana for just twenty days.

On December 20 he added his signature to those of an American governor “which charming private qualities” but “great awkwardness” and a general “full of queer whims and often drunk.” The American flag stuck halfway up the pole, then reached the top, and a small crowd of American cheered it uncouthly. It signified that a real-estate transaction of incalculable value had been completed, that the French Empire would never return to North America, and that one of the most mementos event in history had occurred.

Upper Louisiana remained. The dream had been that Laussat would direct it toward the prosperity latent in it for the health and strength of the restored Empire. (Who could help dreaming too that some day armies would march form it to raise the tircolor about the Citadel at Quebec where no French banner had flown for forty-four years?) Ended. St. Louis was, on the average, more than two months away and winter had set in. Laussat asked for the name of the American army officer at Kaskaskia whom the awkward governor and the queer general had appointed to receive the transfer of Upper Louisiana.

Thus Amos Stoddard, a Yankee who had been a lawyer but was now a captain in the Corps of the United States Artillerist, became Agent and Commissioner of the French Republic. He accompanied a detachment of that corps which, marching from Kaskaskia, reached Cahokia, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, on February 25, 1804. A cold wave came down form the north, the river filled with ice, and it seemed unwise to cross till March 9. They marched to Government House, where the whole population of the town (increased in the last few years by a startling number of Americans) had ssembled.

Commissioner Stoddard signed the documents for France, everyone made speeches of rejoicing and congratulation, and the flag of Spain was lowered. That of France was raised while the popguns of the old fort, whose foundation had been laid when the British threatened St. Louis during the Revolution, fired a salute.

The lieutenant who commanded the American detachment marched it to the fort, whose garrison was paraded under arms, and the stars and stripes replaced the tricolor that had attested French sovereignty for a few minutes. The Missouri River, all the lands it drained, and all the Indians who lived in them were America. So was the route to the Pacific Ocean.

The documents had also been signed by a captain of the First Infantry, the personal representative of the President of the United States. He had been on detached duty as Jefferson’s private secretary for two years but he was now in camp a few miles up the river on the Illinois side. He was Meriwether Lewis and with George Rogers Clark’s younger brother William he was commanding a United States Army organization which the President had ordered, thirteen months before, to ascend the Missouri and discover the water route to the Pacific. To the American view he had heroic stature in that he had made a Revolution and a Constitution, somewhat less so in that he had freed the slaves, and most of all is that his wars had worked to our safety and had much enriched our merchants.

This was the man of whom Wendell Phillips in an orgasmic burst of rhetoric said that the muse of history, dipping her pen in sunlight, would write his name in the clear blue of heaven above those of Brutus, Hampden, and Washington.

The intendant’s closure of the Mississippi brought both tensions to crisis. As a first move to resolve it Jefferson sent a minister plenipotentiary to assist the minister’s effort, now more than a year old, to buy New Orleans or, failing that, some other site at the mouth of the Mississippi and thus secure an outlet to the Gulf. Talleyrand had ignored the minister, played with him, scorned him, misled him, lied to him. But now, “I renounce Louisiana... Obstinacy in trying to preserve it would be madness.”

On April 11 1803 the minister, Robert R. Livingston, fatalistically beginning one more routine discussion with Talleyrand on the purchase of New Orleans, was greeted with a decisive question. What, Talleyrand asked him, what would the United States pay for all Louisiana? In the sector of partial measurements, two remarks of Napoleon’s, both quoted by Barbe-Marbois, the minister of finance who conducted the negotiations, are germane.

“This accession of territory consolidates the power of the United States forever, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.” The unifier of Europe and the remaker of the world, who had also ended forever the dream of a North American France, was here looking down a long arc of time with great clarity... And yet. The power added to the United States by the Louisiana Purchase is indeed beyond measurement, and its torque has been exerted on the nations increasingly since 1803.

Napoleon’s second remark shows that he missed something in it: he missed the core-meaning of what he had done.

“Perhaps,” he said to Marbois, “perhaps I will also be told in reproach that in two or three centuries the Americans may be found too powerful for Europe, but my forethought cannot encompass such distant fears. Besides, in the future rivalries inside the Union are to be expected. These confederations that are called perpetual last only till one of the confederating parties finds that its interest can be served by breaking them.”

He was wrong on his oath: Louisiana made the confederation perpetual. In July 1797, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Perigord replaced Charles Delacroix, brining with him a vision of western empire. An aristocrat who had been a bishop in the Catholic Church, he had lived in exile in the United States for more than two years as a land speculator and had returned to France with a fixed view of American as an expansionist people. Tainted with scandal and apparently sensing the collapse of the Directory, Talleyrand resigned from office in July 1799, with Louisiana still desired but beyond France’s grasp.

It’s hard to imagine what America would be like today, if it wasn’t for the genius of Napoleon who “…could abandon vast projects as easily as he conceived of them”. Napoleon had conceived of the vast Louisiana Territory to be a French empire that would be a source for the great wealth of the territory to be sold to France and for France to have a ready market for it’s growing exports.

While it may be idle to speculate on what might have happened if Napoleon had not sold Louisiana, there can be no doubt that the sale had an immediate impact on America. One year after the signing of the treaty, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark started out on the historic expedition across the continent to sur-vey the real estate so recently acquired at four cents per acre.

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