The Louisiana Purchase

Arguably the greatest accomplishment of Jefferson’s presidency was the acquisition of Louisiana, bought from France for $15 million. The province was enormous at 828,000 square miles, and it contained some of the richest farmland in the world. Louisiana was comprised of New Orleans, a bustling city, St. Louis, a small city; a few isolated French settlements along the Mississippi; and some scattered Indian tribes. Other than that it was virtually uninhabited.

The story of its acquisition is a familiar one to most students of American history. After hearing of the Spanish retrocession of Louisiana to France, Jefferson instructed the American minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, to negotiate for West Florida and New Orleans. If that failed, he was to try to acquire some land on the lower Mississippi for an American port; and if that failed, he was to seek a French guarantee for free navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans.

In January 1803, Jefferson named James Monroe as minister plenipotentiary to France and sent him to Paris prepared to offer $10 million for New Orleans and West Florida. Just as Monroe was arriving in Paris, Talleyrand shocked Livingston by offering to sell not only New Orleans but the whole of Louisiana to the United States. Recognizing the advantages of such a purchase, Livingston negotiated a treaty. Both Livingston and Monroe signed the treaty and sent it to Jefferson.

When news of the Louisiana treaty reached Jefferson and Madison, they were exultant. Not only did the cession obtain New Orleans, but it secured the free navigation of the Mississippi River, removed a potentially hostile power from the west bank of the Mississippi, and provided a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of land for American settlement. It was fully in accord with Jefferson’s policy of making the country secure without resorting to war or funding an expensive military and naval establishment. They also believed that it would help preserve the agrarian character of the American confederation for generations to come.

How much credit does Jefferson deserve for acquiring Louisiana? Many Federalists charged that he deserved none at all, that he just happened to be president when Napoleon made his unexpected offer. While that is true, it is also true that Napoleon would never have offered the province to a pro-British Federalist administration. Napoleon regarded the Republicans as anti-British and in basic sympathy with his country. Napoleon hoped to cement ties of friendship with the Americans, to increase their debt of gratitude, and to entice them into joining France in a military alliance against the British Empire. Jefferson’s policy of neutrality and his well-known French sympathies created an environment in which Napoleon could feel safe in parting with Louisiana and could even hope to gain from it.

The Federalists opposed the purchase on two grounds. First, they warned that such a vast enlargement of territory would endanger the cohesion and the existence of the union. Jefferson responded by arguing that the confederal nature of the American republic made expansion safe.

Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions; and in any view, is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children, than by strangers of another family? With which shall we be most likely to live in harmony and friendly intercourse?[16]

The “federative principle” was the principle of divided, or decentralized, power between the national and the state governments, under which the former was “charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states” while “the states themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation.”[17] Jefferson was asking why, given such a decentralized and flexible system, the union could not be doubled or even tripled in size? And in addition, the acquisition actually made it easier for the federal government to fulfill its constitutional responsibility of providing for the common defense.

The Federalists also objected that the treaty was unconstitutional. After all, the Constitution conferred no power on the federal government to acquire foreign territory and incorporate it into the Union. On this point, Jefferson reluctantly concurred. He believed that the Louisiana treaty required not only Senate ratification but additional constitutional authorization through an amendment. In fact, soon after receiving news of the treaty on June 30, he drew up an amendment which stated that “the province of Louisiana is incorporated with the United States and made part thereof,” and he distributed it to his cabinet.[18] His cabinet did not seem to think that an amendment was necessary. His attorney general, Levi Lincoln, was indecisive; so was Madison; and Gallatin was emphatic that it was not needed at all. Earlier in the year, the latter had written Jefferson explaining that “the United States as a nation have an inherent right to acquire territory,” and “Congress have the power either of admitting into the Union as a new State, or annexing to a State with the consent of that State.”[19]

Jefferson, however, remained convinced that an amendment was both necessary and prudent.

There is a difficulty in this acquisition which presents a handle to the malcontents among us, though they have not yet discovered it. Our confederation is certainly confined to the limits established by the revolution. The general government has no powers but such as the constitution has given it; and it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory and still less of incorporating it into the Union. An amendment of the constitution seems necessary for this. In the meantime we must ratify and pay our money, as we have treated, for a thing beyond the constitution, and rely on the nation to sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous authority.[20]

This passage from an August letter to John Dickinson represented Jefferson’s settled opinion on the matter, which he had arrived at after conferring with his chief constitutional advisers—Madison, Gallatin, and Lincoln. He expressed the same idea in a letter to his friend John Breckinridge of Kentucky but added that an amendment adopted after the treaty had been ratified and paid for would constitute a popular endorsement of the acquisition and actually “confirm and not weaken the Constitution, by more strongly marking out its lines.”[21]

Upon receiving a warning from Livingston in Paris that Napoleon might change his mind, Jefferson urged his cabinet and political associates to keep quiet for a time about the constitutional question so as not to give Napoleon a pretext for withdrawing his offer. Jefferson wanted the treaty ratified as soon as possible. However, he still thought it wise and necessary to adopt an amendment sanctioning the treaty. The draft amendment he distributed to members of his cabinet stated that

Louisiana as ceded by France to United States is made a part of the United States. Its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States.[22]

His draft also authorized the incorporation of Florida into the United States “whenever it may be rightfully obtained.”

Jefferson found himself almost alone in insisting that the Constitution did not sanction the acquisition of new territory, whether through conquest, purchase, or treaty. Not only was his cabinet not behind him, neither were his chief congressional supporters. The stalwart John Randolph, the Republican majority leader in the House, saw no constitutional difficulty in the purchase. Neither did Senator Breckinridge of Kentucky, nor Representatives Joseph Nicholson of Maryland or Caesar Rodney of Delaware.[23] Jefferson’s friend and political supporter Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas even wrote the president, urging him to drop his constitutional scruples. He warned that if Jefferson’s opinion were made public, it could produce mischief by creating a precedent for future infractions and giving the Federalists an issue with which to assail the administration. But creating a precedent was exactly Jefferson’s fear, and he did not think it a proper solution to pretend that they were not subjecting the Constitution to a very liberal reading when that was exactly what they would be doing. Nicholas argued that the Constitution already authorized incorporating new territory outside the territorial limits of the U.S. in 1783. Jefferson’s reply is one of the most cogent and eloquent expressions of the doctrine of strict construction ever penned.

I do not believe it was meant that they might receive England, Ireland, Holland, etc. into it, which would be the case on your construction. When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe and precise. I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless. Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives. It specifies and delineates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution. . . . Nothing is more likely than that their enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us go on then perfecting it, by adding, by way of amendment to the Constitution, those powers which time and trial show are still wanting. . . . I confess, then, I think it important, in the present case, to set an example against broad construction, by appealing for new power to the people.[24]

However, Jefferson conceded that he would not insist on his view but would acquiesce in the prevailing opinion of the Republican Party, for he trusted “that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects.”[25] Jefferson’s concession would prove to be a fatal one, for the evils of broad construction would begin to work their mischief under Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, and “the good sense of the country” on this question would fall silent.

Henry Adams argued that “the Louisiana treaty gave a fatal wound to ‘strict construction,’ and the Jeffersonian theories never again received general support.”[26] This is simply not true. The “Jeffersonian theories” continued for sixty years to be the heart and soul of American political culture, and strict construction was by no means dead. Yet even if the wound were not fatal, it was serious; for the idea was planted that legislation for the good of the country should not be obstructed by an overly scrupulous adherence to the terms of the compact. Although he fails to note that the Federalists were the first to commit a serious breach of the Constitution when they chartered the first National Bank, the historian Henry Cabot Lodge understood the damage that the Jeffersonians had done.

Thus the first example was given of both the will and desire to violate the Constitution, if the popular feeling would sustain the executive and legislature in so doing; and in this fact lies the pernicious and crying evil of the Louisiana Purchase. It was the first lesson that taught Americans that numerical majority was superior to the Constitution and was a safe protection against it when violated, and that when policy approved the necessity of change, it was easier to break than to legally and regularly amend the provisions of our charter.[27]

It is also true that the easy ratification of the treaty without even a discussion of an amendment made the Republicans seem inconsistent and hypocritical and provided ammunition for those consolidationists who saw the Constitution as an impediment to their dreams of national greatness. John Quincy Adams declared that the purchase of Louisiana represented

an assumption of implied power greater in itself and more comprehensive in its consequences, than all the assumptions of implied power in the twelve years of the Washington and Adams administrations put together. . . . After this, to nibble at a bank, a road, a canal, the mere mint and cumin of the law was but glorious inconsistency.[28]

Jefferson acquiesced when he should have stood firm. While party leaders were not supportive, he still could have appealed directly to the people by penning a special message imploring them to ratify a new amendment specifying which territories could be incorporated in the Union and spelling out the exact procedure for admitting them as new states. Jefferson failed to understand that the Constitution was written to protect the people from themselves and that to rely on those very people to correct defects in the Constitution, only when those defects had been already exploited for ulterior purposes, was foolish indeed.