Madison and Jefferson (134 page)

56.
Madison laid out his theory in detailed letters to Charles Pinckney, minister to Spain, and to his fellow Virginian Wilson Cary Nicholas. Madison’s view was shaped by James Monroe’s intelligence when he was minister to France under Washington. Madison also sent a strongly worded letter regarding Louisiana to Rufus King, warning off Britain. See JM to Pinckney, June 9, 1801; to Nicholas, July 10, 1801; to King, July 24, 1801; Monroe to JM, June 1, 1801, in
PJM-SS
, 1:315, 275–76, 394, 407; 2:309.

57.
Rufus King to JM, October 9, 1801, November 20, 1801, in
PJM-SS
, 2:167, 254–55; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson,
Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson
(New York, 1990), 112, 114, 127, 129. Tucker and Hendrickson state that Jefferson’s threats of an alliance with Great Britain were a diplomatic “feint” because London had no intention of disrupting the peace agreement with France over Louisiana. Jefferson’s threats did not stop the French—only weather and a renewed British blockade stopped Napoleon’s army from heading to Louisiana. In his correspondence with Tobias Lear, Madison confirmed that England was not opposed to the French expedition, and he expected a part of that force to head to Louisiana. See JM to Tobias Lear, January 8, 1802, February 26, 1802,
PJM-SS
, 2:373, 490.

58.
JM to Robert Livingston, September 28, 1801,
PJM-SS
, 2:145; Tucker and Hendrickson,
Empire of Liberty
, 208–9. Jefferson told Pichon on December 3, 1801, that the French would fail if they tried to reinstitute slavery; see Matthewson,
Proslavery Foreign Policy
, 107. Lear agreed with Jefferson that blacks would never submit to the yoke of slavery. See Lear to JM, January 17, 1802,
PJM-SS
, 2:404–5.

59.
On the demand for an end to the trade, or embargo, see Robert Livingston to JM, March 27, 1802, and Louis André Pichon to JM, March 17, 1802; Pichon hoped the U.S. Treasury would buy French government bills for $400,000 to be used for purchasing supplies for the Leclerc expedition; for Madison’s rejection of this request, see Louis André Pichon to JM, March 22, 1802, and April 4, 1802; for Madison’s protests against the unjust treatment of the two captains, see JM to Livingston, May 7, 1802; for his condemnation of the French policy and his subtle rebuke of Leclerc’s high-handed measures,
see JM to Livingston, July 6, 1802; for Leclerc’s public accusation that the United States was in the service of Toussaint, see Livingston to JM, July 3 and July 30, 1802, all in
PJM-SS
, 3:42–43, 62–63, 78, 98, 196–97, 365–68, 373–74, 443–45; Matthewson,
Proslavery Foreign Policy
, 109–10; Hendrickson and Tucker,
Empire of Liberty
, 127–28; Lokke notes that Napoleon in his secret instructions told Leclerc to expect supplies from American merchants—a conclusion based on Jefferson’s earlier statement to Pichon. See Lokke, “Jefferson and Leclerc Expedition,” 328.

60.
See TJ to Livingston, April 18, 1802,
TJP-LC.
Madison did not discount the utility of threats, but he urged that they be used with “delicacy,” as he told Livingston in his official instructions before the start of the diplomatic mission. See JM to Livingston, September 28, 1801,
PJM-SS
, 2:144–45. For a compelling discussion of this moment in diplomacy, see James E. Lewis, Jr., “A Tornado on the Horizon: The Jefferson Administration, the Retrocession Crisis, and the Louisiana Purchase,” in Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, eds.,
Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase
(Charlottesville, Va., 2009), 117–40.

61.
King to JM, June 1, 1801; JM to Livingston, September 28, 1801; JM to TJ, May 7, 1802,
PJM-SS
, 1:251; 2:144–45; 3:195.

62.
Tench Coxe to JM, November 28, 1801,
PJM-SS
, 2:181–83; TJ to James Monroe, June 1, 1802,
TJP-LC.
Talleyrand had used the threat of recognizing Toussaint and the new “black Frenchman” in his effort to convince Great Britain to sanction the French expedition to St. Domingue. See Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of Democratic Revolutions,”
William and Mary Quarterly
63 (October 2006): 659–60. When he appealed to Madison to impose an embargo on American merchants, Pichon used racial unity as a point of argument. See Louis André Pichon to JM, March 17, 1802, in
PJM-SS
, 3:41–43.

63.
Rush to TJ, May 12, 1802,
Letters of Benjamin Rush
, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton, N.J., 1951), 2:847–48.

64.
Douglas R. Egerton,
Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993).

65.
Gary B. Nash,
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), esp. chap. 6.

66.
Jefferson did not believe that the capture of Toussaint would end the conflict. “Some other black leader will arise, and a war of extermination ensue,” he wrote, “for no second capitulation will be trusted by the blacks.” John Chester Miller,
The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
(Charlottesville, Va., 1991), 138–39; TJ to Robert Livingston, April 18, 1802,
PTJ-LC.

67.
Davis,
Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America
, 366–67.

68.
Linda K. Kerber,
Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), chap. 2, quote at 324; Garry Wills, “
Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power
(Boston, 2003).

69.
Massachusetts Spy
, April 28, 1802, originating in the
Courant.

70.
Charleston Daily Advertiser
, April 14, 1802; also,
The Republican or, Anti-Democrat
, May 10, 1802.

71.
Weekly Wanderer
(Randolph, Vt.), April 17, 1802; also
Pittsfield Sun.

72.
TJ to Livingston, April 18, 1802,
TJP-LC;
JM to Livingston, May 1, 1802; to Pinckney, May 11, 1802,
PJM-SS
, 3:174–78, 215–16; Malone, 4:286–91.

73.
Laurent DuBois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” in Kastor and Weil, eds.,
Empires of the Imagination
, 93–116.

1.
Donald Jackson,
Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello
(Urbana, Ill., 1981), esp. chap. 7; James P. Ronda, “ ‘A Knowledge of Different Parts’: The Shaping of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,”
Montana: The Magazine of Western History
41 (Autumn 1991): 4–19; Ronda, “Dreams and Discoveries: Exploring the American West, 1760–1815,”
William and Mary Quarterly
46 (January 1989): 145–62; William E. Foley, “Lewis and Clark’s American Travels: The View from Britain,”
Western Historical Quarterly
34 (Autumn 2003): 301–24.

2.
Charles A. Miller,
Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation
(Baltimore, 1988), 238–43.

3.
TJ to Lewis, January 13, 1804,
TJP-LC;
Jackson,
Thomas Jefferson and Stony Mountains
, 128–29. Jefferson was interested not only in the Northwest but in the Southwest too. That expedition, tackling the Red River and testing Spanish power, did not fare as well. See Dan Flores, “Jefferson’s Grand Expedition and the Mystery of the Red River,” in Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne,
A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest
(Fayetteville, Ark., 2005), 21–39.

4.
Harold Hellenbrand, “Not ‘To Destroy But to Fulfil’: Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
18 (Autumn 1985): 539, 542; Bernard W. Sheehan,
Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), esp. 89–91, 245–48; Eve Kornfeld, “Encountering the Other: American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s,”
William and Mary Quarterly
52 (April 1995): 287–314; Francis Paul Prucha,
American Indian Policy in the Formative Years
(Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 215–17, 225–27; Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 276–80. Brian Steele has recently addressed Jefferson’s sense that Indian culture remained inferior if it “forced” women to labor in the fields; once Indian women were removed from hard labor, they could “literally reproduce the nation,” by equaling the fertility rates of white women. See Steele, “Thomas Jefferson’s Gender Frontier,”
Journal of American History
95 (June 2008): 19–24. On Jefferson’s ease in sacrificing Indian lands and cultures to whites’ manifest destiny, see Robert J. Miller,
Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny
(Westport, Conn., 2006), chap. 4. On the banishment of Indians from the narrative of American character, see Steven Conn,
History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
(Chicago, 2004).

5.
Peter Gay,
The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom
(New York, 1969), 348–53; Miller,
Jefferson and Nature
, 205–6; Ketcham, 417–20. The observation that Jefferson conceived of an empire without a metropolis comes from Peter S. Onuf,
Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 45. Jefferson’s physiocratic thinking was consistent with his neurologically based theory of partisan differences. It was axiomatic for him that Republicans were
naturally
of “sound minds
and bodies.” In 1802 he classified those he identified with as “the healthy, firm and virtuous feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources.” Federalists, by contrast, were “timid,” constitutionally predisposed to yield to strong, subversive leaders or welcome a return to monarchy. It could well be that in Jefferson’s mind, Federalists’ lesser identification with agricultural enterprise related to how their neurological health suffered due to their contentment with the status quo. Though a tireless, wide-ranging reader, Jefferson needed fixed models to back up what he might have put more simply, in purely political terms: Federalists resisted mass movement west because they feared a loss of control, the breakdown of class barriers, and the imagined results of democratic uplift. See Andrew Burstein,
Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
(New York, 2005), esp. 201–2; TJ to William Branch Giles, undated, but sometime after October 15, 1795,
PTJ
, 28:423–27; TJ to Joel Barlow, May 3, 1802,
TJP-LC.

6.
Jerry W. Knudson,
Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty
(Columbia, S.C., 2006), 102–4.

7.
Madison’s thinking here relates, as well, to checks and balances in the federal system put in place in order to diffuse destabilizing concentrations of power.

8.
TJ to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803,
TJP-LC.

9.
TJ to Breckinridge, August 18, 1803; TJ to Wilson Cary Nicholas, September 7, 1803,
TJP-LC.
In his letter to Nicholas, Jefferson referred to an “unusual kind of letter” from the French minister to Madison, admitting that he would “acquiesce with satisfaction” if Congress ignored the need for an amendment. The phrase “safe & precise” also comes from the letter to Nicholas. Also see Ketcham, 421.

10.
Henry Adams,
Life of Albert Gallatin
(Philadelphia, 1879), 320–22.

11.
William Plumer of New Hampshire pointedly observed that only the Senate rules requiring a treaty to be read three times, and once a day, had prevented the treaty’s passage on the first day. According to Plumer, the president was handed his “vast wilderness world” without having to face any opposition. See
William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807
, ed. Everett Somerville Brown (New York, 1923), 13–14; also
RL
, 2:1290–91; James E. Scanlon, “A Sudden Conceit: Jefferson and the Louisiana Government Bill of 1804,”
Louisiana History
9 (Spring 1968): 141.

12.
Aurora General Advertiser
, November 7, 1803;
American Citizen
, November 7, 1803;
Republican Star
[Easton, Md.], November 8 and November 15, 1803;
Alexandria Daily Advertiser
, January 9, 1804.

13.
Aurora General Advertiser
, January 6, 9, and 19, 1804;
Republican Advocate
[Fredericktown, Md.], February 10, 1804; “The Governor’s Address to the Citizens of Louisiana,” (New Orleans, December 1803); Brant, 4:159.

14.
TJ to Breckinridge, November 12, 1803. Congressman George Washington Campbell of Tennessee also claimed that the new government would put residents “under the lash of despotism,” reduced to “chattel.” See
Annals of Congress
, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 1060, 1064–65; and Scanlon, “Sudden Conceit,” 142, 144, 149.

15.
Peter J. Kastor,
The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America
(New Haven, Conn., 2004), 36–41, 55–66.

16.
TJ to Clinton, December 2, 1803,
TJP-LC.

17.
TJ to Monroe, November 24, 1801,
TJP-LC.

18.
Claiborne to JM, January 23, 1802,
JMP-SS
, 2:416; Adam Rothman,
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 45–51; Lacy Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838,”
Journal of American History
95 (June 2008): 103–4.

19.
TJ to Breckinridge, November 12, 1803; JM to TJ, August 20, 1784, [draft portion of letter,]
PJM
, 8:108; Steven Deyle, “’The Irony of Liberty: Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade,”
Journal of the Early Republic
12 (Spring 1982): 43–44, 60–61; Lewis Kerr to Isaac Briggs, March 24, 1804, cited in Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South,” 105–6.