An Empire of Liberty?
Considerations on Jefferson’s Attempts to Spread a Love of Liberty Throughout the Louisiana Territory
During his September 21st lecture at the Kinder Institute, Gene Smith presented Thomas Jefferson as a man caught between his own principled idealism and his sense of pragmatic realism in the face of political opposition. In a telling saga, Smith suggested that the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 physically embodied Jefferson’s idealistic dream of an “Empire of Liberty,” where principled individuals could bask in the spread of liberty across the continent. What the Louisiana Purchase did not expedite, however, was the incorporation of the inhabitants of the territory into the United States in a way that defended the cultural mores of the young nation.
Fearing the corruption of a particular way of life is not unique to the 21st Century. In Jefferson’s day, as the ink was drying on the treaty with France, the United States was plunged into a debate familiar to us now: Will a large influx of people, foreign born and cultured, destroy the particular love of liberty that sustains the United States?
Jefferson’s answer, one which many might arrive at today, was that if these new people are conditioned to appreciate and conform to American institutional values (the Declaration, the Constitution, republican government), they may be slowly incorporated into the mass of citizens.
At the time, it was widely held, as Tocqueville suggests, that if individuals do not have the mores necessary to guide them in an appropriate use of their freedom, democratic society will quickly decay. But such a love of liberty is a vague concept, difficult to define or maintain. While Jefferson may have ideally envisioned a society of (culturally homogeneous) rational deists devoted to republican institutions, political expediency prevailed in a different direction.
The Louisiana Purchase: Justifications and Challenges
The Purchase brought together three forces, each vying with one another, often at cross-purposes. First, there was Jefferson’s own vision of the principles of American freedom spreading over the globe and his constitutional authority to make that happen. Second, the xenophobia of many citizens at the time loathed the influx of foreigners into the country who could not be trusted to hold true to beloved principles of conduct. Third, and most dangerous, those vested in the success and spread of the slave trade sought politically to incorporate the territory in a way friendly toward slavery to tip the national balance of power in their favor.
First, Jefferson’s famous land-grab quickly evolved into a massive and often heated debate among citizens across the United States. Critics were quick to, as Smith tells it, point out Jefferson’s deviation from his own strict constructionist approach to the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution did it say anything about the president purchasing land. Jefferson securing this transaction from France — it was uncertain whether France could even sell the land in the first place — seemed to step way outside the bounds of executive authority.
In response to his critics, Jefferson’s party adopted an “inherent powers” approach to Constitutional interpretation. When Jefferson had first assumed office, the United States was neighbored by potential enemies on all sides. The purchase of Louisiana, from an ally no less, served to insure the relative safety of the country in its natural expansion westward. In this act, Jefferson expanded the role of the president, something he had previously been loathe to do. Through the efforts of his loyal partisan supporters, however, he was able to justify this move as necessary for the protection of the nation.
In Smith’s painting, Jefferson the idealist was forced to convince his countrymen of his inherent authority to act in this manner — practically speaking, telling people he wanted an Empire of Liberty probably would not have gone over as well.
Second, the purchase brought with it demographic challenges as well. Many in New England and beyond were concerned about the native populations in Louisiana eschewing republican government and the cultural mores established at the Founding. In addition to xenophobic prejudice, however, there lurked another matter. Could the rule of law be upheld among people who had either gone to the territory to escape the law or found that they enjoyed the freedoms of living without government supervision?
The second interest was not easily resolved. The cry of too many foreigners spread throughout the country and threatened to undermine the supremacy of Jefferson’s party. How would these foreign individuals react when suddenly placed under American laws and customs? Furthermore, many of the inhabitants of what we know as Louisiana were Spanish Catholics, an ethnicity and religion both fundamentally disliked by many in the United States at the time. How could these people ever become one with the citizens of the Revolutionary United States?
Third, proponents of the slave trade wanted to use the new territory to gain political power over their northern anti-slave counterparts. The question inevitably bubbled up around the country: If the massive Louisiana territory were permitted statehood, in whole or in part, would slavery be permitted therein?
Opinions abounded. Uriah Tracy, a congressman from Connecticut, suggested that Louisiana be held as conquered territory and be forced to submit to the mores of the United States. How could a group of foreigners, raised in the arms of despotism, be trusted not to pervert the young republican government? It was congressman John Lucas from Pennsylvania who suggested rules of naturalization for the territory. As the indigenous people, Spaniards, Catholics, and other unwanted folks, incorporated American principles, they could gradually become naturalized citizens.
What followed was a governance act, which permitted the president to appoint a governor (James Wilkinson) and council to rule in the territory, to slowly bring them into the union. While the act created structure and prohibited the foreign slave trade, to public aplomb, it also permitted the continued sale of slaves westward on the continent. What this resulted in was the incorporation of Louisiana as a state into the union in 1812 (after 8 years of acclamation) with a republican constitution which permitted slavery. The rest of the purchased land became the Missouri Territory, which would soon be engulfed in turmoil.
The Ideal and the Real
Jefferson’s stretch of executive power to, according to Smith, secure land for his idealistic Empire of Liberty, forced him to face serious issues that plagued his political reality. In the debate over the future of the west, the decline of the influence of New England, and slavery, Jefferson found that political expediency often prevails over principles.
Whatever the intent of the Louisiana Purchase had been, it eventually devolved into a tense political debate over slavery, which would plague the United States until the Civil War. In a way, Jefferson got what he wanted — more room for liberty and the United States to grow. In another way, the subsequent chaotic struggles over the new land became a ladder for the proponents of slavery, who were able to secure several new slave-holding states soon thereafter.
In the end, political expediency won out, over the principle of extending liberty to the world and even over the inherent racism of the culturally vogue New England.
It was, at the time, widely feared that a large and heterogeneous republic would collapse in on itself — a reaction we may sometimes observe today. Of the many lessons we might derive from the Louisiana Purchase, let the first be a people’s tendency to gravitate toward political expediency, to take the easy path, even over deeply held principles (be they good or ill).
Did Jefferson’s Purchase extend an Empire of Liberty? The answer, left for us to decide, is undoubtedly muddled.
