Madison and Jefferson (71 page)

The same writer gave Madison credit for every important advance in the cause of union. In the “Old Congress,” he had moved for a general convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. He had gone on to help draft the Constitution, the greater part of which was in his own words. “The Constitution owes more to Mr. Madison than to any other man,” the author declared. Though Madison was not yet being hailed as the “Father of the Constitution,” this was as close as he had yet been to having his paternity established.

In this published portrait, Madison comes across as something of a prophet. On Hamilton’s economic plan, it read, Madison “early perceived the
anti-republican
tendencies of that
deep laid
system. He considered it a deviation from the spirit of the Constitution.” During the battles over funding and assumption, it was not Jefferson but Madison who discerned the problems, and Madison again whose oppositional politics was “artfully ascribed to a spirit of rivalship with Mr. Hamilton.” The mini-biography converted Jefferson into a figurehead, with Madison as the prime mover behind the current administration’s policies and the man whom Hamilton was right to think of as his main rival: “Long may our country be benefitted by his patriotic services.”
⁷¹

The Louisiana Purchase was a collaboration involving Madison, Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and James Monroe; no one man deserves preponderant credit for the literal doubling of America’s territory. It was Madison who, in the spring of 1802, started the ball in motion by asking Livingston, America’s minister in Paris, to ascertain what Napoleon’s price would be for the city of New Orleans. Madison assigned relative values to the real estate he most desired: East Florida was worth half as much as West Florida (the latter consisting, more or less, of the land between Pensacola and Baton Rouge); and the Floridas combined were one-fourth as valuable as New Orleans. With his own penchant for calculation, Jefferson expressed
to Livingston his firm belief that the Crescent City was of supreme commercial importance, because “the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market” through it.

Jefferson’s words to Livingston summed it up. “Spain might have retained [New Orleans] quietly for years,” he wrote. But not the “new” France. “The impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her character,” had made it imperative that the United States redirect the course of Franco-American relations. “We must be very improvident,” cautioned Jefferson, “if we do not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis.” Without warning, in November 1802 the Spanish authority closed New Orleans to American vessels—a purely local decision, as things turned out, and not an idea emanating from Madrid.

Since Thomas Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795, Spain had granted Americans unrestricted navigation of the Mississippi and a duty-free right of deposit at New Orleans. Madison wrote urgently to Charles Pinckney, cousin of the earlier negotiator and present U.S. minister in Madrid, that he was deeply concerned about what France and Spain were cooking up. He had already alerted Pinckney that the administration was committed to acquiring all of the land from East Florida to the Mississippi, and that no nation with claims in North America should consider denying the United States access to any navigable river. With some subtlety (though he meant something far more aggressive), he said that the administration desired “a natural and quiet boundary with Spain.”

Having reached this point, Madison and Jefferson resolved to send their trusted friend Monroe to France to augment Livingston’s efforts to purchase New Orleans. Coordination between Washington and European capitals was difficult. Given the length of time required for transatlantic communication, the president and his secretary of state could not be certain that some intelligence might not arrive in the meantime that would end up redirecting their efforts. They had no greater priority and every reason to worry.
⁷²

Soon, however, they would find out that Napoleon had resolved to forgo further efforts to resecure St. Domingue. Another pending conflict with Great Britain made whatever vision he had of a North American empire appear impractical. Talleyrand, once (at the time of XYZ) and yet again the French foreign minister, approached Livingston with a proposition: selling not simply New Orleans but the entire Territory of Louisiana. Livingston and the newly arrived Monroe circumspectly regarded this unexpected opportunity. Unnecessarily, though understandably, the process
was complicated by the New Yorker’s resentment that the Virginian, a far younger man, had arrived on the scene, at this pregnant moment, with diplomatic seniority over him.

The cast of characters in the Louisiana drama included the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, at whose behest Jefferson had written
Notes on the State of Virginia
and with whom Madison and Lafayette had once traveled at length through New York’s Indian country. Having since that time held a key post in St. Domingue, and having opposed the abolition of slavery there, Marbois had a unique perspective on current events. It was as a top aide to Napoleon that he visited with Livingston and Monroe and reconfirmed the offer, leaving the impression that Napoleon might change his mind if the United States delayed its decision. Despite their strained personal relations, which lasted for as long as both remained in Europe, Livingston and Monroe combined to complete the historic transaction.
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AT SOME POINT DURING 1802 AND CULMINATING AT THE START
of 1803, President Jefferson resolved in his own mind to accelerate the policy of securing U.S. control over western territory. But he would have to be quite clever if he was to move in this direction without Federalist interference and without alerting European governments to his actual motives. He could not just outwait the British, French, and Spanish; he had to outwit them.

Even before the Louisiana Purchase was finalized, while French and British territorial claims still overlapped a good portion of the presumed route, Jefferson devised what became the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The
young army captain from Albemarle, Meriwether Lewis, had been the president’s trustworthy private secretary; William Clark, Lewis’s old army buddy, was the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary War hero whose ambitions Jefferson had warmly supported.

The president had recently read Alexander Mackenzie’s
Voyages from Montreal
, in which the author-explorer openly appealed to Great Britain to invest more in strengthening its position in western North America. This could only have exacerbated Jefferson’s existing fears. So when he approached the British representative in America, Edward Thornton, and his French counterpart, Louis Pichon, he secured passports for his explorers by camouflaging his intentions and convincing both that the mission was scientific. It made perfect sense that the naturalist who had authored
Notes on Virginia
would want to mark his presidency by acquiring a better understanding of the continent’s plant and animal life.

In approaching Congress to fund a federal mission of discovery, Jefferson was more practical and honest. He confided that the explorers were principally meant to map a river route to the Pacific for the expansion of commerce and U.S. settlement. He slyly told Thornton and Pichon that he would have to emphasize commerce when he went to Congress or else face strong public opposition to so whimsical an expenditure as the one he had planned.
¹

At this time only Kentucky and Tennessee were considered western states and their populations were growing fast. Ohio attained statehood in 1803, its state seal featuring a rising sun, a sheaf of wheat, and a bundle of arrows. Within two decades the river city of Cincinnati would have a greater population than Washington, D.C. Jefferson, the son of a mapmaker, had grown up around the organizers of the Loyal Land Company in Virginia, which was small in scale next to what he now envisioned: the beginnings of a broad agricultural empire.

In April 1803 the quite sizable price tag of $15 million was agreed upon for Louisiana, encompassing the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Because the trans-Mississippi West was largely unmapped, Jefferson and most others imagined that the Rockies were far less formidable than they are, and that the Missouri and Columbia rivers joined in some way. The president was convinced that his explorers would find familiar settings matching the geography of western Virginia as well as pliant Indian tribes, curious new species of crops, and navigable waterways.
²

If $15 million for an unknown land was a gamble, it was an irresistible
one for Jefferson. Issuing instructions to Meriwether Lewis, he was not just fantasizing what the expedition would bring back; he was also thinking of domestic politics. “The acquisition of the country through which you are to pass,” he wrote the captain, “has inspired the public generally with a great deal of interest in your enterprize … The Feds. alone still treat it as philosophism, and would rejoice in it’s failure.” That “philosophism” was Jefferson’s acknowledgment that his enemies liked to portray him as a hopeless dreamer, and westward movement as a distraction from eastern commerce, the real lifeblood of the nation’s economy. Curiously, while Secretary Gallatin shared the president’s excitement over plans for the Lewis and Clark expedition, Secretary Madison added little to the president’s instructions to the two captains and remained largely uninvolved until the successful completion of their journey. But the trio was in the explorers’ minds when they named three rivers they discovered that branched off the Missouri: the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin.
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Here is where theory informed practice. The acquisition of Louisiana accorded with the theory Jefferson had advanced in his
Notes
, that an agrarian empire supported a republican political economy better than the urban-dominated manufacturing alternative.

For as long as he owned land, Jefferson could not divorce himself from the culture of the earth. In Washington, D.C., as at Monticello, the president charted growing seasons and changes in the weather, literally tracking when various vegetables were picked and came to market. He luxuriated in this kind of thinking and planning, as though keeping tabs on the predictable and unpredictable would lead to a more appreciable control over the course of life.

That same mind-set magnified when he conceived the mission to settle the West. The creative possibilities in land organization and land cultivation stood in marked contrast to the sterile progress he associated with a manufacturing economy. His “Revolution of 1800” was meant to redirect the people’s energies and to make positive use of America’s most tangible asset—land. For someone who had earlier denied to Madison having any interest in land speculation, Jefferson was presiding over the greatest land speculation in American history.

Outside the context of America’s competition with European colonizers,
westward expansion served other, equally critical purposes. Jefferson, who had fought to abolish entail and primogeniture, had never given up thinking about the tyranny of inheritance. A dozen years before, Madison had forced him to confront practical problems associated with his theory that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”—his ideal for canceling out debts to the past. But Jefferson continued to insist on the uniqueness of generational identity; he was persuaded that each generation needed a fresh start if it were to avoid being unjustly held back. He was not sure precisely what the West would look like in one or two or five generations, but he was convinced that it would be clay in America’s hands. He believed, as Benjamin Franklin had, that the strength of the continental nation could be measured by its fertility rate—presupposing, of course, that this growth took place in a healthy environment. The right thing to do was to grow the republic.

Attachment to a fertile, fruitful land was perhaps Jefferson’s strongest faith. America would be most peaceful and resilient as a breeder nation. The president’s political vocabulary was rich in allusions to affection, attachment, health, good air, natural abundance, and the almost hysterical rejection of bad blood. It all added up to propagation of a certain (white republican) species and the dissemination of those ideas that bred a healthy spirit of personal independence.

When the Louisiana Purchase became fact, the president decided that Indians would best breed west of the Mississippi. Here, he rationalized, they would find “asylum” from conflict with whites. Here, over time, they would develop “useful arts” and “civilized” habits. This convenient formula for producing assimilable “yeoman” Indians ignored what he already knew: that tribes south of the Ohio River were confirmed agriculturalists. From 1803 Jefferson’s salutations in letters addressed to tribal leaders changed from “Friends and Brethren” to “My children,” symbolizing a paternalistic turn. Indians could wait. White landed interests came first.

Cold and calculating as his policy was, he remained as convinced as he had been when writing
Notes on Virginia
that Indians were willing to accept instruction. They were prone to violence but easily weaned from it; they demonstrated a “natural” kindness toward strangers and a strong commitment to friendship. It was for those Indians who still needed time in the endless hunting lands of the trans-Mississippi frontier (for the “manly amusement” of the chase) that eastern Indians were to sacrifice their property that abutted white towns.