When Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard issued orders for the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he did so with a slight French accent. And why not? A Creole from the old Louisiana Territory, Beauregard’s first language was French. Not long after Sumter, Beauregard helped orchestrate the Confederate victory at First Manassas in Virginia. His achievement at Manassas was abetted significantly by the Louisiana Tigers, destined to attain mythic status as Southern warriors. (It was a myth grounded in reality; their Hibernian-Gallic ferocity, their appetite and talent for fighting, made the Tigers, man for man, possibly the most feared and formidable of any Confederate soldiers.) Beauregard would serve credibly, if not always with unmixed distinction and success, in every major theater of the war. (He even recommended the pattern for the Confederate battle flag.) In 1864, he blunted a Federal thrust at Petersburg, and so prolonged, by several more murderous months, the agony involved in restoring the Union. According to the distinguished Civil War scholar T. Harry Williams, during the war years and for several decades following, Beauregard ranked among a very select group of gray-clad leaders who served as the symbolic embodiments of the Old South and the Lost Cause. 1
Williams was probably right. And it may be that Beauregard also serves as a useful symbol of La Cession de la Louisiane—its promise and its price. As soldier and engineer, Beauregard had employed his services ably on behalf of the United States before Sumter. After 1861, he-with thousands more from the former Territory-did all in his power to undo the nation and to reverse La Cession. Stated another way, while the Louisiana Purchase had doubled the nation’s expanse in 1803, Beauregard endeavored to halve it again less than 60 years later.
Thomas Jefferson’s admirers boasted in his own time, and across the years, that the Louisiana Purchase represented an unrivaled historic achievement. What other leader could celebrate doubling a nation’s size with so little cost? Other empires were purchased with wars, deceit, destruction, and bloody recriminations. Jefferson’s yeoman paradise had been gained for pennies an acre, a pittance, and peacefully. In retrospect, it does seem that a more nuanced appreciation of the Purchase is required. In Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase, Roger G. Kennedy goes much further, contending that the Purchase carried staggering costs from the very day Napoleon decided to sell the Territory, costs paid in blood, treasure, environmental ruin, and national trauma. For Kennedy, the Confederacy was only among the last of the “host of horrors” enmeshed with Mr. Jefferson’s remarkable bargain. With vivid language and an impressive marshaling of primary sources, Kennedy challenges, often effectively, any notion that the Purchase was an unmixed triumph.
As with so many recent treatments of the Purchase, Kennedy concentrates on what would become the state of Louisiana. And for good reason; it was New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Valley that so captured the attention of almost all the interested parties of the time. Visionaries and explorers may have cast wistful and even eager eyes at the prairies and rivers and mountains beyond, but for Jefferson and the other key actors, the crux of the problem-and the beckoning opportunity-was the exotic region south of Natchez, especially New Orleans and its hinterland.
Kennedy asserts that the men who bought the Louisiana Territory were driven by compelling economic appetites. Their appetites were sufficient, in Kennedy’s
perspective, to prompt a base, brutal, and conspiratorial purchase-process. At the heart of this dark continental conspiracy were the Virginians. Not just any Virginians, but a ruling and rapacious élite, determined to acquire the
Territory as a means of replacing their own ruined ancestral lands. And if they did not intend to move westward personally, then they intended to speculate in the western lands and dispose, very profitably, of their excess slave population in the verdant cotton and cane fields of the Territory.
Presiding over this greedy, grandiose scheme was none other than the Sage of Monticello. Kennedy tells us that Jefferson needed to satisfy the Old Dominion’s planters (by giving them Louisiana) as a partial expiation for his poor performance in the Revolutionary War. His less than heroic conduct as Virginia’s wartime governor made his manhood suspect, and pleasing the planters would make him, again, somehow, a man in his own community. Not that the planters were themselves interested in the Territory as a means of reaffirming their masculinity; they wanted the place for its potential economic value. To repeat, Kennedy’s planters were land hungry, money-minded men, entirely willing to bribe, threaten, coerce-and conspire. This Enronesque plantation clique included James Madison, James Monroe, and a host of lesser lights, all encouraging the philosophical, conflicted Jefferson to act (for once in his life) aggressively, so that the new western empire would be safely in the hands of men who knew how best to use it.
In buying and opening this vast dominion for slaves and slaveholders, Jefferson had set the nation on an unavoidable collision with a bloody destiny. Kennedy’s Jefferson should have known better. There were clear warnings that purchasing the Territory, and turning it over to the Virginia nabobs, was a bad idea. Notably, a number of prominent and influential New England politicians suggested secession, of their states, if the Virginians got their way-and got the Territory. It is a tantalizing fact that secession sentiment, albeit of certain northern states, was present when the Purchase was aborning. Surely Jefferson knew that opening new vistas to slaveholders and their toiling, suffering minions could only root slavery more firmly in the Republic’s culture and economy. But Kennedy’s Jefferson was, by 1803, long past any genuine convictions about the evil of slavery. And Jefferson was manifestly and equally indifferent to the degradation of the landscape-the concomitant, Kennedy argues, of plantation agriculture.
So, as the president, Jefferson merged his own psychological and political needs with a vigorous racism-and environmental disdain-and consummated his pact with a vicious European dictator; the rest is the stuff of Greek tragedy. Well, not entirely; the tragedians required a protagonist, some noble, if fatally flawed, hero. There are no real heroes in Kennedy’s book, only a few ineffectual Cassandras, an exotic, equally ineffective idealist or two along the way, but no one strong enough or moral enough to curb the planters’ lust for, and use of, the Territory. What makes the story all the more tragic for Kennedy is his perspective that the Territory, including what would become the slave states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, could have been turned into something very close to the plowman’s paradise.
Kennedy’s provocative and creative revisionism is part of a venerable tradition and has (or should have) a welcome and useful place in historical discourse. It seems certain that the history of the Purchase has been enriched and enlivened-permanently-by his work. And yet, it must be said that much of his evidence is inconclusive and might as easily sustain other viable interpretations.
To be sure, Thomas Fleming’s small book lacks anything approaching the stark Manichaean construction offered by Kennedy. Rather, Fleming’s brief, eloquent treatment of the subject, The Louisiana Purchase, captures something of the random, pressing circumstances that made the Purchase possible. Significantly, Fleming pays much attention to the slave rebellion in Haiti. This desperate struggle stunned Napoleon, making him wary of entanglements in the Western Hemisphere and more likely to cut his losses, and potential losses, by selling the Louisiana Territory.
How bitterly ironic that the rebellion of slaves in Haiti would help assure the expansion of American slavery! Fleming, like Kennedy, is quite certain that the Purchase fueled slaveholding interests. And that ambitious and greed-motivated men would capitalize on the opportunity at hand is not lost on Fleming, but he also sees how the necessities and opportunities of the historical moment-including a vision of a more secure, prosperous, and democratic nation-fully complemented those baser motives. Without glossing over the trials and tragedies associated with the Purchase, Fleming’s book gives balance to the discussion.
In his concise bibliographic essay, Fleming cites Dumas Malone’s massive, unsurpassed study of Jefferson. Malone’s conclusion that, for Jefferson, the Purchase reflected the President’s profound concerns for national security is a point well worth considering.2 Malone’s reading of the Purchase resonates in Peter J. Koster’s The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America. For Koster, the Purchase derived from very legitimate national concerns for security and stability. Moreover, Koster sees in the Purchase a driving force behind the maturation of an American national spirit grounded upon ideals of republicanism, inclusiveness, and religious pluralism. This maturing nationalism advanced rapidly in response to the need for the incorporation of the alien culture and community of Louisiana. Tragically-to revisit that theme-the incorporation/ nationalization process advanced apace, in Koster’s estimation, largely because white Louisianans already generally shared in the American consensus concerning white supremacy.
It is worth noting that Koster dismisses notions that the Purchase represented a continuation of some abstract frontier imperative. To the contrary, Koster argues effectively that most Americans of the time evidenced a profound ambivalence regarding territorial expansion and only embraced expansion when such a process was driven-as they saw it-by necessity. In this conclusion, Koster counters fashionable notions of an American character marked from the beginning by imperial appetites.
There is ample room for controversy concerning Koster’s salient conclusions. Notably, his emphasis on the full, settled incorporation of Louisiana into the Union during the second decade of the 19th century seems overstated, given the dis-incorporation of Louisiana, and much of the old Territory, in 1861. But even on this point, Koster poses an intriguing, if undeveloped argument: that sectionalism actually represented the successful nationalization of the Territory. According to Koster, “in becoming southern Louisianans also became American.”
Another invaluable addition to recent scholarship on the Purchase is the CD-ROM The Louisiana Purchase/La Cession de la Louisiane, a rich collection of maps, paintings, and documents supplemented with a timeline and brief commentary by project director Sylvia Frey and other distinguished historians, with links to more digital and archival sources on the topic and superb study guides appended for younger students and readers. (Like Koster’s book, The Louisiana Purchase/La Cession de la Louisiane engages fully and objectively the significance of Catholicism in the Territory.)
In this embarrassment of riches, one can start almost anywhere. Imbedded in the large selection of digitized documents that complement the maps, pictures, and commentary, is the reproduced page of a Territorial court journal from the year 1810. The document records the successful suit of a woman of color, Adelle. She was suing for nothing less than her freedom. The loser in this case was another Beauregard, perhaps an ancestor of the general.
Once again, the promise and price of the Purchase seems apparent. That Adelle won her suit suggests the possibility that the Territory might have followed a trajectory that led away from more repressive black codes and an even deeper submergence of Louisiana into the culture of slavery. But Adelle’s victory was far from being a portent. In fact, the slightly less malignant racial realities of colonial and early Purchase Louisiana barely lasted a decade after incorporation into the United States.
The hardening of racial lines must also be considered in connection with the surge of migrants from revolutionary Haiti who inundated New Orleans and its adjacent parishes at the time of the Purchase, their own influential racial ideologies fully formed. An 1811 slave uprising near New Orleans, the Deslondes Revolt, may have been inspired by the recent infusion of Haitian bondsmen. And the ferocity of the white response, described by Koster, may also have been influenced by events on Haiti. That the Haitian refugees, white and black, added to the complex history of the Territory is inarguable; though the precise measure and meaning of their contribution to that history is far from clear.
More certain is the reality that the Louisiana Purchase represents one of the few most important events in American history. Taken together, all of the works cited in this review make clear that Mr. Jefferson’s bargain carried both intended and unintended implications and opportunities of continental proportions. These implications, of course, carried well beyond the generation that guided and shaped the Purchase. Such an array of future results and ramifications could not have been foreseen or imagined by even the most prescient of that generation. Indeed, the epic story of the Purchase was still far from finished when the Great Creole sheathed his sword, at last, in 1865.
Kenneth M. Startup is academic dean at Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. He is the author most recently of “‘A Mere Calculation of Profits and Loss’: The Southern Clergy and the Economic Culture of the Antebellum North,” in God and Mammon, Protestants, Money and the Market, 1790-1860, ed. Mark Noll (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
1. The details on Beauregard’s life and his symbolic significance are taken from T. Harry Williams, P.G.T. Beauregard, Napoleon in Gray (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1955). See especially pp. 1-12.
2. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 255-256.
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