The Louisiana Purchase in the Age of Revolution

Transcript

In April of 1803 James Monroe and Robert Livingston signed a treaty for the purchase of more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory from France.  In what came to be known as the largest real estate transaction in history, Napoleon Bonaparte relinquished his claim to the last French territory in North America in exchange for fifteen million dollars, or about three cents an acre. 

The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States and ensured that settlers along the Appalachian Mountains had access to the Mississippi River.  Despite what this map indicates, however, the boundaries of the purchase territory remained in dispute until Spain and the United States reached an official settlement that clearly delineated the western boundary in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. 
Successful settlement of the western frontier in places like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory depended on settlers’ ability to get their goods to market.  Without navigation rights, or more importantly, without the “right of deposit” in New Orleans, it didn’t matter whether a frontier farmer had the richest, most bountiful land in the country because he had no way to get his goods to market. 

The most common explanation for why Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States is that Napoleon needed cash to finance the growing costs of his European wars.   But this explanation is only half true.  To understand Napoleon’s motivations, the sale of Louisiana has to be viewed in an Atlantic world context.  That is to say, the Louisiana Purchase was a by-product of larger events that shook the Atlantic world in the 1790s.

In 1789 the French Revolution, whose adherents promoted the Rights of Man and Citizen as well as the principles of liberty and equality, touched off a series of independence movements that quickly moved across the Atlantic and took root in Latin America and the Caribbean

To gain a more nuanced understanding of Napoleon’s relinquishment of Louisiana in 1803, you have to look back in time to the revolutionary events that unfolded on the island of Saint-Domingue-- or what we now know as present-day Haiti—at the turn of the eighteenth century.   

One of the perhaps unintended consequences of the French Revolution was the appropriation of the ideology of revolution and the language of rights by free people of color

and eventually by slaves in France’s Caribbean colonies.

When Napoleon came to power in the wake of the French Revolution, he had rather grandiose plans for a reconsolidation of French power in the Americas.  These plans explain Napoleon’s decision to regain control of Louisiana from Spain in 1800 via the secret treaty of San Ildefonso.  But central to his plans for a renewal of the French Empire in the Americas was the successful recovery of Saint-Domingue—a colony which had, before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, produced 30% of the world’s sugar and as such, had been France’s most lucrative colonial enterprise.

The recovery of Saint Domingue by Napoleon’s forces did not go as planned.
When General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, arrived in Saint-Domingue,

he met fierce resistance from Toussaint Louverture, a former slave who led the rebel forces. 

Though Leclerc had over 25,000 regular troops and an additional 10,000 militiamen at his disposal by early 1802, Leclerc faced serious challenges, the most egregious of which was the extraordinarily high level of mortality among his troops.  Coupled with their inability to effectively combat the rebels' use of guerilla tactics, Leclerc’s men also lacked adequate supplies—only 4,000 of his men had any shoes, the rest went barefoot over the island’s harsh terrain.  The troops suffered from sunstroke, sun poisoning, high levels of desertion, and most fatal of all, Leclerc’s men suffered from the near-constant presence of yellow fever, which had by June 1802 reduced the number of French troops able to fight by two thirds.  

Leclerc himself succumbed to the fever in November of the same year.

By the time the French withdrew from Saint-Domingue in defeat, nearly 50,000 French troops had perished on the island and Napoleon had lost his will to reconstruct a French Empire in the Americas. 

With the economic contributions of Saint-Domingue’s sugar and coffee plantations now officially beyond his reach, Napoleon decided to cut his losses in North America by offering up what he deemed a now relatively worthless Louisiana to the Americans.

 “Washington, Jan. 10, 1803.”

“Dear Sir,--I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at N. Orleans stimulated by the mercantile, and generally the federal interest threatens to overbear our peace. . .”

“. . . I shall tomorrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France, and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline; because the whole public hope will be rested on you.”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

When Thomas Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris in early 1803, he intended Monroe to join Robert Livingston, who was then serving as the United States Minister to France, in negotiations to purchase New Orleans, so that the burgeoning American merchant and agricultural interests along the Western frontier had access to the right of deposit at New Orleans.

But when Monroe arrived in France, Livingston revealed that Talleyrand, France’s foreign minister, had extended the sale to the whole of France’s Louisiana territory.  On April 30, 1803 Livingston and Monroe signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, an act that nearly doubled the size of US territory and guaranteed America’s economic and physical expansion across the Mississippi River Valley and beyond.

France had initially ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 via the secret Treaty of Fontainbleu after the Seven Years’s War, but Spain did not formally take possession until 1768. The Spanish administration lasted from 1768 to early 1803, although France technically regained Louisiana via the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800.  In November of 1803, Spain formally returned the colony to France who had by then already sold it to the United States.  In the last months of that year, the Spanish flag was lowered, the French flag was hoisted up, then down.  Finally, New Orleans witnessed the raising of the American flag on December 20, 1803.

Jefferson appointed two commissioners to receive Louisiana from the French Prefect, Pierre Laussat,

William Charles Cole Claiborne, who had, until Jefferson requested he serve as interim governor of the Louisiana Purchase Territory been the Governor of the neighboring Mississippi Territory. . .

. . . and General James Wilkinson, the highest ranking member of the United States’ Army, and a former spy for the Spanish government, whose loyalties could be described as ambiguous at best.

By the time the Americans raised their standard on December 20, the populace was surely suffering from an identity crisis that had no parallel even in Louisiana’s own rather tumultuous past. 

French Creoles, Spanish administrators,

African slaves, American traders,

Native Americans,

. . . and a burgeoning population of free people of color struggled to make sense of their world and of each other.  Divided as the population was by religion, politics, race, and language, the prospect of stable governance in the newly American city must have seemed slim. Yet from an economic perspective, Americans’ unrestricted access to the Mississippi River and to the port at New Orleans meant that the United States was entering a period marked by unprecedented optimism about the possibilities for expansion and prosperity.

[music]