A Wilderness So Immense (57 page)

A
T DAWN
on Saturday, May 11, 1804, cannon sounded a “Grand National Salute” from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan and the fort on nearby Governors Island as New York City launched a grand celebration of the first anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. The event was orchestrated by the city’s new mayor, and former United States senator, De Witt Clinton. American flags were visible everywhere, flying over the principal buildings of the city and from the masts of all the ships in the harbor. As church bells pealed in triumph, Mayor Clinton, the sheriff, and scores of municipal officials gathered in City Hall Park for a
gigantic parade. Rank upon rank of militiamen—cavalry, infantry, and artillery—marched through the streets of Manhattan behind their commander, who rode a profusely decorated white stallion as he held up the front end of a very long white silk banner inscribed with the words: “Extension of the Empire of Freedom in the Peaceful, Honorable, and Glorious Acquisition of the Immense and Fertile Region of Louisiana, December 20th, 1803, 28th Year of American Independence, and in the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson.”
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Behind the soldiers and politicians came the members of New York’s Tammany Society, carrying a fifteen-foot-long white muslin map of the Mississippi River and the territory of Louisiana. As the procession marched through lower Manhattan, cannons roared salutes to the three nations, and bands played rousing music, including “Hail, Columbia,” an unnamed “Spanish piece,” and “Bonaparte’s March.” At last the parade turned back up Broadway and arrived again at City Hall Park, where the soldiers fired crisp salutes and the assembled populace gave three resounding cheers for Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase.
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Seven hundred miles to the south on the next day, May 12, the southern Federalist Dr. David Ramsay, the most able historian of the nation’s founding generation, was mounting the pulpit of St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to deliver his
Oration on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States.
Ramsay was one of dozens of orators in cities and towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard raising their voices in a jubilee of oratory in the spring of 1804 to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.
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“Louisiana is Ours!” David Ramsay proclaimed. As to the significance of America’s acquisition of that vast territory, Ramsay acknowledged “the establishment of independence, and of our present constitution” as “prior, both in time and importance; but with these two exceptions,” Ramsay believed, “the acquisition of Louisiana, is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states.”
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Historical perspective had not changed much one hundred forty-nine years later when the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and “Easy Chair” columnist for
Harper’s
magazine, Bernard DeVoto, wrote an essay commissioned by
Collier’s
magazine about the Louisiana Purchase upon the occasion of its sesquicentennial in 1953. Because he lived after the shots at Fort Sumter and surrender at Appomattox, DeVoto added one event to the comparative list, but otherwise his opinion about the Louisiana Purchase echoed Ramsay’s:

DeVoto wrote about westward expansion, exploration, and commerce, and he wrote about constitutional change and the Civil War, and he came close to proving his point. But Bernard DeVoto knew that something was missing. “However it may be put,” he lamented, the peaceful transfer of sovereignty from Spain, to France, to the United States for nine hundred thousand square miles of territory was a story “still too momentous to be understood.”
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Despite some misgivings about the constitutional issues, most Americans agreed that the Louisiana Purchase was, in Talleyrand’s words, “a noble bargain”—
la bonne affaire!
The Mississippi and its western tributaries alone drain a million square miles. The price of securing the Ohio-Mississippi waterway and doubling the size of the United States was 80 million francs ($15 million) financed for twenty years by the Barings Bank of London and Hope & Co. of Amsterdam. International negotiations, completed in 1819, refined the boundaries between American and Spanish territories and also transferred Florida to the United States.

Still, $15 million was a lot of money at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially to strict-constructionist Jeffersonians paying off the national debt that Alexander Hamilton had created to strengthen the central government. “Some people have expressed fears lest our government may have given too much for Louisiana,” a New Jersey wit advised the editors of the Trenton
True American:

They would have made a killing. When the 6 percent loans were repaid, the total cost of Mississippi navigation and the whole Louisiana Territory was $23,527,872.57—about 4 cents an acre.
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Millions of acres of cheap fresh lands drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries were ideal for cotton—a commodity with a lucrative new market in the steam-driven mills of Manchester, a fiber readily processed
by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, and a crop well suited to plantation agriculture and slave labor. Along the Lower Mississippi, enterprising planters switched their cash crop from indigo to cotton with amazing speed. In 1798 Julien Poydras was sending a barge back and forth from Pointe Coupée to New Orleans carrying thirty barrels of indigo on each trip and exporting thirty-nine thousand pounds of indigo to London at 10 bits per pound. That November, however, he sent one boat to New Orleans “loaded with cotton for an American.” By the following October, Poydras was “applying myself entirely to cotton.” “The price of indigo does not interest me this year,” he told one merchant, “I hardly made any and will get little from others”—“we are all over head and ears in cotton.” By December 1799 Poydras was bragging about his “superb double mill to gin the cotton” and his brisk business buying up cotton at 24 piastres a hundredweight and shipping and selling it quickly “to profit by the present high prices.” The price of indigo, meantime, had fallen to 6 bits “but there is hardly any.”

Within two years Poydras had a cotton press and a bevy of gins and was sending his boat to New Orleans filled with cotton every fifteen days. By August 1800 he had a contract with James Freret to export 100,000 250-pound bales of cotton and another for 22,000 bales through Lisle Sarpy—and he could assure both merchants that “should I not have enough of
my
cotton to fill your order, I have on hand a supply of other cotton to do so.” In two short years, Julien Poydras had gone from exporting twenty tons of indigo to an annual wholesale trade of fifteen thousand tons of cotton.
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Poydras may have been unusually quick to plant cotton, but American planters and other crops were not far behind.

When William C. C. Claiborne’s ancestors had landed at Jamestown in 1616, English colonists regarded the lands they took in North America (as earlier in Ulster) as a wilderness peopled only with savages, the remnants of Native American tribes decimated by European disease. Thomas Jefferson lived in a plantation community of two hundred people on his mountaintop at Monticello. He walked daily among faces that exhibited a whole range of tones, even within his own family, but Jefferson saw only white and black, free and slave. The “amalgamation” of black Americans “with the other color,” he wrote in 1814, “produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”
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His representatives and his countrymen brought similar attitudes to their 1803 encounter with the racial diversity of Louisiana.

Claiborne and the twelve thousand Americans who flooded into Louisiana in the decade after 1803 almost overwhelmed New Orleans’s baffling patterns of race, language, law, and culture. Jefferson and his countrymen had always assumed that the Creoles would be displaced, assimilated, or marginalized by English-speaking settlers—and they might have been, except for the aftermath of the Haitian and French Revolutions. Between May 1809 and January 1810, New Orleans welcomed ten thousand French-speaking refugees from St. Domingue by way of Cuba—equal numbers of whites, slaves, and free people of color whose arrival made the city even more Caribbean, reinforcing everything that Claiborne and his countrymen found exotic and dangerous about New Orleans for decades to come.
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Controversies over race, religion, law, language, and culture not only delayed Louisiana’s statehood until 1812, they worked like the rumblings of an earthquake along the vulnerable fault lines of nineteenth-century American society and government. By 1818–1819, when treaties among the United States, Spain, and Great Britain gave America the rest of Florida and drew the final boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, the second half of our national history was well under way. The land north of the thirty-third parallel was now called the Missouri Territory, to avoid confusion with the State of Louisiana south of it.

As Americans brought their internal improvements and their slaves to New Orleans and the new territory, the nation’s long-deferred debate over slavery grew increasingly angry. The consequences of the Louisiana Purchase scoured at the mortar of the Constitution, as the New Engenders’ arguments for state rights and secession—arguments that surfaced during the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1786, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803–1804, and again during the War of 1812—went south.

In 1820, when the Missouri crisis erupted over the creation of another slave state from the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, a grand compromise was necessary to preserve the union: henceforth the new states were admitted in pairs, one slave and one free, to keep a balance of power in the Senate. This Missouri Compromise worked until the 1850s, but the Missouri Question (as the “Louisiana Question” had come to be known, to avoid confusion) haunted the conscience of America until the cannon roared at Fort Sumter—and long beyond.

Americans today live their lives in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. It reshaped our hemisphere so completely that we cannot easily imagine anything different. It spurred exploration and expansion. It lured the
republic toward the temptations of empire. Lewis and Clark tracked the northern reaches of the vast territory in 1804–1806 and staked a claim to the Pacific Northwest. Zebulon Pike and others headed south and west. The landscape inspired artists from George Caleb Bingham and George Catlin to Thomas Hart Benton, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O’Keeffe. A nation that once may have been resigned to sharing the Mississippi with a foreign neighbor now embraced the Pacific Coast as its “Manifest Destiny.” But DeVoto knew all this in 1953 when he said the event was “still too momentous to be understood.” He knew the Louisiana Purchase brought geographic expansion, discovery and exploration, and sectional and constitutional conflicts that led to the Civil War. And he sensed that something was missing.

As we mark the two hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, our vantage point suggests that David Ramsay and Bernard DeVoto were too close to their subject—too close in time—to comprehend its momentous implications. Even as recently as 1953, one hundred fifty years after the event, some of the long-term consequences of the Louisiana Purchase were not yet apparent. Today, as its two hundredth anniversary converges upon the four hundredth anniversaries of Jamestown Island and Plymouth Rock, our perspective may be clearer simply because we and our children have lived longer with the results of the Louisiana Purchase.

How different the United States was for our parents and grandparents in 1953: Eight of ten Americans then lived on a farm or in a small town; today eight of ten live in urban areas. The Korean War was ending. French soldiers were losing a war in Vietnam. Joseph Stalin was in the final year of his life, and Joseph McCarthy in the final year of his credibility. Fidel Castro was an obscure prisoner in a Cuban jail. Neither the Berlin Wall nor the Watergate Hotel had been built. Color television was experimental, and only 29 percent of American women worked outside the home, compared with 57 percent today. Spanish was a foreign language. Segregation was the law in the American south and widely practiced throughout the country.
Brown v. Topeka
was in the lower courts. The Salk vaccine was in field tests, and the Pill was just a dream. Today, in short, we have a vantage point denied to David Ramsay in 1804 and Bernard DeVoto in 1953.

In the two centuries of Anglo-American colonial history from Jamestown to the Louisiana Purchase, American public life had become the domain of Protestant, agrarian, English-speaking men. Whites were free, blacks were slaves, and Native Americans did not count. Starting at
New Orleans in 1803, five million Americans along the Atlantic Seaboard accelerated an encounter with diversity that has been sustained by geographic expansion and immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ramsay and DeVoto could not yet see it, but the Louisiana Purchase was a turning point at America’s halfway mark toward an inclusive national history. Looking back from the year 2003, Americans should marvel at who we have become—the very antithesis of John Winthrop’s Boston, Timothy Pickering’s Salem, James Monroe’s Virginia, or Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman republic. We may wonder what the next two centuries have in store.

Travelers who actually visited New Orleans two centuries ago probably came closest to seeing the human significance of the Louisiana Purchase that eluded David Ramsay and Bernard DeVoto. The Jeffersonian polymath Benjamin Henry Latrobe, for example, arriving in 1819 to complete the construction of waterworks for the city of New Orleans, encountered “a more incessant, loud, rapid, and various gabble of tongues … than was ever heard at Babel.” He found the three-caste society of New Orleans “wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America”
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—a bustling urban place filled with Catholics, Creoles, French, Spanish, Africans, Native Americans, West Indians, and Anglo-Americans. With Irish, Germans, and countless others soon to arrive. At the Cabildo in New Orleans on December 20, 1803, the United States began a long encounter with diversity that has forced us, and that should inspire us, to think and to live far differently than the Founders expected.