The Louisiana Purchase, often considered Jefferson's greatest achievement as president, involved the purchase of the entire Mississippi basin from Napoleonic France in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States overnight, provided an outlet to the sea for the products of the western states, and ensured a place for the United States among the world's largest powers.
The Louisiana Purchase
The modern United States, with Louisiana Purchase overlay
Connection to the West
New western states of America were only loosely tied to the centers of national power in the East. The Appalachian Mountains separated the Atlantic seaboard from the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes, so in order to bring crops to market, western farmers and traders—the "men of the western waters," as they were called—rafted down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries to sell their goods in New Orleans, which is near the mouth of the Mississippi.
The Wilderness Road
For more than fifty years, European-American settlers used the Wilderness Road as the primary route to reach Kentucky from the eastern seaboard. Because the Appalachian Mountains formed a natural barrier and made passage to the West nearly impossible, Daniel Boone established the Wilderness Road in 1775, when he created a trail for the Transylvania Company from Virginia through central Kentucky. The Wilderness Road was steep and rough, and it only could be traversed on foot or horseback, making passage difficult.
Despite these dangerous and adverse conditions for westward travel, the high number of immigrants from Europe (particularly the Scots-Irish from Ulster) were motivated to move west in search of land to settle. In the span of a few decades, more than 200,000 settlers and invaders traveled via the Wilderness Road. The Road also served as the primary means of commercial transport for the early settlers in Kentucky: Horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs found a waiting market in the Carolinas, Maryland, and Virginia. By 1840, the Wilderness Road was largely abandoned, although modern highways still follow much of its original route.
Jefferson's Agrarian Vision
The Jeffersonians believed in democracy and equality of political opportunity (for white male citizens), and prioritized the yeoman way of life. Yeoman agriculture, as depicted by the Democratic-Republicans, was a system of farming in which an independent (white male) farmer owned his own land and the fruits of his labor (and therefore, could impartially participate in the political process). Democratic-Republicans considered the yeoman to be the backbone of American society because he emulated the values of independent farming, land ownership, and control of one's labor. The frugality, austerity, and self-reliance of the yeoman were virtues they believed should be emulated by the federal government. Jeffersonians hoped to embody a decentralized system of limited government and maximum individual liberty in order to circumscribe tyrannical powers.
Because of these values, Jeffersonians welcomed opportunities for the territorial expansion of the United States, believing it would produce new farm lands for yeomen. They also considered expansion an effective way of forcing western American Indian tribes to integrate into American society.
French Influence in the Americas
The city of New Orleans, originally French, had been governed by Spain since the end of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), when France ceded Louisiana to Spain. At the turn of the century, the war between France and Britain raged on. The revolutionary shockwaves that echoed from America to France also resounded in Saint-Domingue (near present-day Haiti), France's largest and wealthiest Caribbean colony, where a successful slave revolt had allowed those rebelling to take control of the island. Napoleon, temporarily at peace with Britain, decided to reconquer the island and, hoping to restore France's empire in the New World, convinced Spain to cede Louisiana back to France in the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800.
While Spain's sale of the territory back to France in 1800 went largely unnoticed, fear of an eventual French invasion spread throughout the United States when, in 1801, Napoleon sent a military force to secure New Orleans. In January 1802, France also sent General LeClerc to Saint-Domingue to reestablish slavery, reduce the rights of free people of color, and take back control of the island from slave rebels. This colony had been France's wealthiest in the Caribbean, and Napoleon wanted its productivity restored.
Alarmed by the French actions and its intention to reestablish an empire in North America, Jefferson declared neutrality in relation to the Caribbean, refusing credit and other assistance to the French but allowing war contraband to get through to the rebels to prevent France from getting a foothold again. Southerners also feared Napoleon would free all of the slaves in Louisiana, which could prompt slave uprisings elsewhere. Though Jefferson urged moderation, Federalists sought to use this against Jefferson and called for hostilities against France.
Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase
Jefferson disliked the idea of purchasing Louisiana from France: He believed that a U.S. president did not have the authority to make such a deal, as it was not specified in the Constitution. He also thought that to do so would erode states' rights by increasing federal executive power. On the other hand, he was aware of the potential threat that France could pose in that region and was prepared to go to war to prevent a strong French presence there.
Jefferson empowered his diplomats to approach the French with an offer to buy New Orleans for $10 million. The French armies were quickly wilting from tropical fevers and had been unable to defeat the skillful Haitian revolutionaries. Napoleon, hoping to cut his losses, decided to abandon the New World entirely and concentrate his attentions on a planned invasion of England. Desperate for revenue, he countered Jefferson's offer with an offer of $15 million for all of Louisiana, rather than just New Orleans. The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert's Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west.
Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre. The American delegates, dumbfounded by the offer, thought Napoleon might change his mind, and so they quickly agreed and signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty on April 30, 1803. Jefferson, too, set aside his strict constructionist principles and worked to get Republicans in Congress to approve the deal. The U.S. border moved a thousand miles to the west, and the United States took possession of the old French-speaking towns of St. Louis and New Orleans. All of these transactions were completed with little regard or respect for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited the lands for centuries.
Incorporating Louisiana
Louisiana was incorporated into the Union in a fashion similar to that of the Old Southwest (Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama) and, to a lesser extent, to that of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota). Territorial governments were established in which a governor was appointed in Washington and presided over a legislature elected by settlers. A territory could be proclaimed when its population reached 5,000 settlers.
Unlike the Old Northwest, where the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery, Louisiana already boasted an active plantation regime in its southern tier. All slave societies enacted codes to regulate the behavior of enslaved peoples, and with the transfer of power from the French to the Americans, the old French Code Noir, or Black Law, was replaced by the more restrictive Slave Laws of the Deep South. Louisiana would soon become home to some of the wealthiest and most exploitative plantation regimes. The question of slavery in the Louisiana Territory was left ambiguous in the North, and in later decades, this ambiguity would dominate American life.
Effects of the Purchase
Despite Jefferson's adherence to the ideal of a limited central government (which would not be empowered to negotiate such an expansive land deal) and his own commitment to policies for federal debt reduction (the United States paid France $15 million for the territory), the Louisiana Purchase symbolized the success of Jeffersonian democracy in several ways. Jefferson's vision of a decentralized agricultural society, in which yeomen acquired land across vast amounts of territory, seemed a possibility in 1803 with such a large amount of land being opened for settlement. With the Louisiana Purchase, new resources, trading routes, and extensive contact with other territories and provinces allowed for unprecedented opportunities for American farmers to cement their "independence" by populating western regions, regardless of the peoples who inhabited them.
Although the Louisiana Purchase brought new opportunities for U.S. expansion, it marked a major invasion into American Indian lands in the western part of the continent. With the Louisiana Purchase, American Indian tribes were forcibly removed to westernmost areas—facilitating the massive and coercive redistribution of American Indian land over the course of the nineteenth century. The purchase also had several long-term detrimental effects on the United States. State-formation out of the Louisiana territory would become a major issue for the federal government toward the mid-nineteenth century, as debates over the establishment of free versus slave states initiated a sectarian divide in Congress that eventually led to the Civil War.