The irony of Jefferson’s conception of a republican future for the United States was that the establishment and maintenance of a simple, peaceful, agrarian republic required an aggressive foreign policy that virtually ensured conflict with other peoples and nations.
I.
Like most of his contemporaries, Thomas Jefferson believed that republican government was, at best, fragile and precarious. It could succeed only if the people retained a steadfast devotion to the common welfare. Federalists and Democratic-Republicans agreed that a healthy republic required an economic, social, and political order that shaped, rewarded, and maintained a virtuous citizenry. The principal task of government was to secure social, political, and economic institutions that sustained moral character, and thereby aided in the preservation of the republic itself.
After the Americans won independence, when the thorny issues of social and economic development became central to political debate, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans also agreed that the new nation should be a republic. But within this broad and increasingly ambiguous consensus, members of the emerging political parties differed sharply over a wide range of issues. At stake always seemed to be nothing less than the character of the American people and the fate of the republic itself.
The election of 1800 that brought Jefferson to the presidency was one of the closest and ugliest in American history. The supporters of the Federalist candidate, incumbent John Adams, accused Jefferson of being a dangerous radical who, if he came to power, would inaugurate a reign of terror comparable to that of the French Revolution. Not to be outdone, the Democratic-Republicans portrayed Adams as a tyrant conspiring to become a king and establish a hereditary monarchy. They accused the Federalists in general of plotting to subvert liberty and to impose slavery on the American people.
Although in the end Jefferson owed his victory in 1800 to the outgoing Federalist Congress, when he took the oath of office on a blustery day in March 1801 the foremost task in Jefferson’s mind was to undo as much of the Federalist program as possible and to restore a political and economic order that he hoped would ensure the survival and prosperity of the American republic. He sought, as he put it, not to innovate, but to undo Federalist innovations. Yet, soon after taking office, Jefferson concluded that he could not easily dispose of Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal and economic programs. He had, for example, long expressed constitutional opposition to the First Bank of the United States, but did not dismantle it. He did resolve to retire the national debt as soon as practicable, to reduce government expenditures, especially military spending, and to repeal the battery of direct and excise taxes, including the hated tax on whiskey, that the Federalists had levied.
Since the Sedition Act expired the day before he took office and since the Alien Act was scheduled to expire in 1802, Jefferson did not concern himself with the most despised of all Federalist legislation. He did secure the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, which had enabled President Adams to appoint Federalists to major and minor judicial posts on his very last day in office. Jefferson also removed many Federalists from civil and governmental positions, replacing them with loyal Democratic-Republicans. Thus Jefferson’s domestic policy, at least at the outset of his first administration, was largely negative. It was in perfect accord with his republican convictions that government existed primarily to maintain social order at home, to protect the national interests abroad, and to encourage public virtue.
But Jefferson’s outlook as he ascended to the presidency was not entirely blissful. His concerns about the future of the republic tempered his general optimism. In his analysis of the problems attendant upon maintaining a virtuous republican order Jefferson recognized two sources of social and political corruption, decay, and collapse. The first derived from artificial and the second from natural causes. Catastrophe inevitably resulted from a degenerate political system that induced social inequality, a general exodus from the countryside and abandonment of the land, urban squalor, and the production and consumption of luxury goods. By gaining independence from Great Britain and undoing at least some the Federalist programs, Jefferson thought that he had removed many of the artificial sources that could spawn a potential crisis. The natural causes remained and were more serious.
The pressure of population growth on a limited supply of land offered an example of a natural cause of social and political mayhem. Jefferson worried that the United States would remain independent “only as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America” and people were not “piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe.”[1] He was confident that such circumstances would not arise in American for centuries. Jefferson nonetheless remained concerned about the problem of land. His confidence in the American future betrayed his assumption that American boundaries to the north, south, and especially the west could be regularly and continually extended, always bringing into America a fresh supply of virgin land. Should that expansion ever be challenged or stopped by a formidable European power, such Great Britain or France (Americans were less fearful of Spain), what had heretofore been merely a theoretical problem might quickly become an immediate and genuine threat.
For the United States to remain a viable republic, Jefferson declared, required two conditions to be met. First, there had to be unobstructed access to an inexhaustible supply of land. Second, there had to be ample markets at home and abroad to absorb the agricultural surplus. The quest to secure these twin necessities became the principal objectives of Jefferson’s domestic policy during his first term in office.
Through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, arguably the single greatest achievement of his presidency, Jefferson hoped to postpone for centuries the pressure that an expanding population exerted on a limited supply of land. Jefferson had long regarded free navigation of the Mississippi River and open access to the port of New Orleans as essential both to economic prosperity and national security. Without such advantages, he feared, Americans in the West accessible would lose access to eastern and foreign markets. Westward expansion would stall because settlers in the trans-Appalachian regions depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries to sustain them commercially as active, prosperous, and virtuous yeoman farmers, the very foundation of the American republic. At stake in preserving access to the Mississippi and New Orleans was nothing less than that character of the American people and the survival of the American republic itself.
When George Washington became president of the United States in 1789, Spain held title to New Orleans and controlled navigation of the Mississippi. A treaty that Thomas Pinckney, the American envoy extraordinary to Spain, negotiated in 1795, secured four important concessions for the United States when it was ratified on March 3, 1796. First, the Pinckney Treaty, formally known as or the Treaty of San Lorenzo, afforded Americans free navigation of the Mississippi River. Second, it granted permission to American merchants to deposit their goods for export at New Orleans without paying duties on them, guaranteeing the so-called right of deposit for three years. Third, it established the southern boundary of the United States at the 31st parallel and the western boundary at the Mississippi River. Fourth, both the Spanish and the Americans agreed to prevent the Indians living in their territory from making incursions into the territory of the other. The provisions of the Pinckney Treaty cleared the way for the burst of American settlement in the West. By the time Jefferson took office in 1801, the Mississippi River provided access to market for the produce of more than 50,000 American farmers.
Jefferson and his countrymen were as yet happily unaware that on October 1, 1800 the Spanish had signed the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso with the French. This agreement provided for the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France in exchange for much needed cash to fill the depleted Spanish treasury. For the Americans, the theoretical problem of access to the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans suddenly assumed more ominous dimensions. As Jefferson realized when he at last learned of the treaty, the French presence in the Mississippi Valley posed a far greater threat to American prosperity and security than the Spanish ever had.
Reliable but unofficial information that the French had acquired Louisiana came to Jefferson only in May, 1801, seven months after the Treaty of San Ildefonso had been adopted. He immediately protested to Louis Andre Pinchon, the French minister to the United States, informing him that the French presence was unacceptable to the United States. In the meantime, Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison instructed the American minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, either to prevent implementation of the treaty if still possible to do so or to protest if it were not. Under the latter circumstance, Madison told Livingston to spare no effort in restoring the arrangements that had existed under the Pinckney Treaty.
In a letter to Livingston dated April 18, 1802, Jefferson declared that “the cession of Louisiana & the Floridas by Spain to France works most sorely on the US. . . . It compleatly reverses all the political relations of the US. and will form a new epoch in our political course.” France, Jefferson reminded Livingston, was the “natural friend” of the United States, the one nation “with which we never could have an occasion of difference.” But the French acquisition of New Orleans, if it had come to pass, imperiled those cordial relations. As Jefferson explained, through New Orleans “the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from it’s [sic]fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants. France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance.” Spain, by contrast, might have retained New Orleans for years without jeopardizing American interests. “Her pacific dispositions, her feeble state,” Jefferson wrote, “would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us, and it would not perhaps be very long before some circumstance might arise which might make the cession of it to us the price of something of more worth to her.” French possession of New Orleans and French control of the Mississippi, on the contrary, demanded an immediate and vigorous response.
Jefferson feared that the French presence in New Orleans would be “a point of eternal friction” between France and the United States, and would “render it impossible that France and the US. can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position.” It would be imprudent for him as president to think that the confrontation with France could be resolved peaceably. “The day that France takes possession of N. Orleans,” Jefferson affirmed, “seals the union of two nations who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet & nation.” With regret, Jefferson concluded that such an unpalatable necessity was the only course remaining to the United States.[2]
In the meantime, Jefferson convinced Congress to allocate $10 million to enable Livingston to purchase New Orleans and West Florida, if it had also been transferred to French control. Nothing in Livingston’s instructions authorized him to acquire the Louisiana Territory. A skilled diplomat who pursued his assignments with a rare diligence and dedication, Livingston could read and write French with proficiency. But his ability to speak it was more limited. He was also profoundly deaf, which made it almost impossible for him to hear what others said in any language. The French delegation used Livingston’s disability against him by whispering to each other or by obscuring their faces when they spoke so that he could not read their lips. The French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, was vehemently anti-American as a result of his dealings with the American delegation in the XYZ Affair.[3] He kept insisting to Livingston that France and Spain had not reached an agreement about the transfer of New Orleans, which, of course, was a lie. For his part, Livingston did not believe Talleyrand, as his reports to Jefferson and Madison make clear. But French subterfuge and Livingston’s own debility made it impossible for him to conduct effective negotiations.
The French had problems of their own with which to contend. They had lost control of their colony on Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in a bloody slave revolt that began in 1791. Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to reclaim the island because, as the most lucrative overseas possession of France, it figured prominently in the New World empire he envisioned. He dispatched a garrison of 30,000 troops under the common of his brother-in-law General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc to subdue the rebellious slaves. The French neither defeated the former slaves nor the tropical climate. They proceeded to die of battle wounds or yellow fever in appalling numbers. The fate of Napoleon’s New World empire hinged on the success of Leclerc’s expedition to Saint-Domingue. The inability of the French to recapture Saint-Domingue was the principal reason Napoleon abandoned the idea of establishing an empire in the New World, and decided instead to sell Louisiana to the United States.
Upon learning of the French disaster in Saint-Domingue, Jefferson nominated James Monroe as envoy extraordinary minister plenipotentiary to join Livingston in France. Jefferson also arranged for the introduction of a motion into the House of Representatives to appropriate $2 million to purchase as much of the territory that Spain had ceded to France as possible. At the same time, he authorized Monroe to offer the French as much as $10 million.
On April 12, 1803, Monroe arrived in Paris. On the same day, Livingston met with Talleyrand and the French minister of finance, François de Barbe-Marbois To Livingston’s astonishment, Talleyrand asked how much the United States was prepared to pay not only New Orleans but also for the whole of the Louisiana Territory. Although they were exceeding their instructions and their authority, Livingston and Monroe quickly closed the negotiations, settling on a price of 60 million francs or $15 million. The actual price for the territory itself was $11,250,000. The remaining sum covered debts owed to the French government by American citizens, which the government of the United States now assumed.
When word of what had taken place reached Jefferson on July 3, 1803, he wasted no time in accepting the offer, even though the Constitution made no provision for the purchase and assimilation of foreign territory. The purchase added 828,000 square miles of territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains to the United States. Despite his constitutional misgivings, Jefferson understood that the Louisiana Purchase assured that, in time, the United States would become a continental nation, a prospect that he simply could not resist. [4]
II.
The more immediate result of the Louisiana Purchase was to remove a powerful foreign rival from American soil, thereby eliminating a major threat to the peace and security of the nation. Even many Federalists who had criticized Jefferson for not going to war with France to secure American access to the Mississippi and New Orleans, agreed that the Louisiana Purchase solved those problems once and for all. Still, the Federalists issued partisan objections and reproaches. In lauding Jefferson’s accomplishments, Alexander Hamilton also suggested that Jefferson had benefitted from a fortuitous concurrence of unforeseen and unexpected circumstances, and did not owe his success to any wise policies or vigorous measures on the part of his administration. With their Democratic-Republican counterparts in the Senate, the Federalists nevertheless ratified the purchase on October 20, 1803by a vote of twenty-four in favor and seven opposed.
Some Federalists continued to regard the purchase of an unbounded region west of the Mississippi as an unnecessary and dangerous risk to the country. A number of Federalists maintained that the United States already had more than enough land, much of it still unsettled. Even those who recognized the benefits of acquiring control of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, lamented that Jefferson had taken possession of a vast wilderness that “will. . . prove worse than useless to us.”[5] Arguing that republican government could not operate effectively over such a vast area, Jefferson’s Federalist opponents asserted that American ambitions should extend no further west than the Mississippi. “Now, by adding an unmeasured world beyond the river,” lamented Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, “we rush like a comet into infinite space.”[6]
The Federalists, of course, also had less philosophical and more practical concerns. They feared that the Louisiana Purchase would enable the Democratic-Republican majority to establish permanent dominance of American politics. But to Jefferson and many Americans, settling the “Mississippi Question” involved the preservation of the republican character of the United States. Jefferson posited an intimate connection between economic prosperity, moral integrity, social order, and political liberty. In the nation that he had helped to establish, Jefferson sought to reconcile the aspirations of individual liberty and self government with the requirements of social and political order, authority, and stability. The Louisiana Purchase, he reasoned, made possible the extension of republican civilization, and with it ordered liberty, across the continent.
A writer in the Kentucky Gazette identified as Phocion expounded on the consequences that Americans could anticipate from the purchase of the Louisiana Territory:
Only that our labour will continue in the old direction. But are we certain that any other would be more profitable, more advantageous, or more fortunate to our character and morals? The great body of the people at present obtain foreign manufacturers in exchange for their produce at less expence [sic] and trouble than they could, were they to manufacture themselves. And unless they should be determined to abandon the pure air of the country for the shop of the artizan [sic], to leave their farms for the sinks of vice (towns and cities) they must not think of manufacturing for themselves.[7]
Americans, of course, should not abjure manufacturing altogether. Yet, control of the Mississippi River and of New Orleans permitted them to engage in limited manufacturing and foreign and domestic commerce without abandoning the rural, agrarian way of life, along with the virtues that it cultivated and instilled.
An active commerce was essential in Jefferson’s mind to establishing and maintaining the ordered liberty that distinguished American society from its European counterparts. It was, after all, the agricultural class who in all ages had been peculiarly devoted to liberty. Jefferson worried lest obstructions to foreign and domestic commerce suffocated the industry of American farmers by eliminating the incentive to work. Eventually, they would grow lethargic, indolent, and barbarous, characteristics hardly befitting a free, independent and virtuous people. In his celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, a Kentucky lawyer named Allen Bowie Magruder summarized the view common among Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republicans:
There are innumerable circumstances that combine to render it absolutely necessary, that the Western Republics should enjoy an active commerce. Without it, even the natural luxuriance of the soil, would produce the worst impression upon the morals of the people. Without commerce to yield a market to the products of agriculture, that agriculture would languish, and the mass of society be thrown into a state of listless indolence and dissipation. The human mind must be active; and provided it is not excited by the more useful and inoffensive passions, it will yield to the dominion of the more dangerous and ferocious kind. The immense fertility of the soil, where human life is supported without that constant labor which requires as assiduous employment of time, would produce the same effect upon morals that acquired luxury does.[8]
For Jefferson, commerce was the solvent to idleness and the depravity that idleness bred. Such activity was especially necessary in region as fertile as the Mississippi Valley where the struggle for subsistence required little exertion. The alternative to vigorous commerce was subsistence agriculture and household manufacturing conducted at an undesirably primitive stage of economic, social, and political development. Without the market for their surplus produce, Jefferson thought, American farmers in the West would degenerate into savages because, unable to profit from their labor, they would have no incentive to elevate themselves.
By rectifying the chronic problem of an uncertain, fluctuating demand for the western agricultural surplus, the Louisiana Purchase served not only an economic but also a moral purpose. “No ruinous fluctuations in commerce need now be apprehended,” observed a writer in the Kentucky Gazette who called himself Arisitides, “for agriculture may depend upon those steady markets which trade shall open to industry.” Aristides pointed out that the “want of markets for the produce of the soil” had always and everywhere led to economic and moral disaster. The absence of markets and the failure of commerce, he concluded, “saps the foundations of our prosperity; subverts the end of society, and literally tends to keep us in that rude, uncultivated state, which has excited the derision and contempt of other communities. . . . As long as this is the state of our country,” Aristides wondered, “what encouragement is there for the mind to throw off its native ferocity?” [9]
Securing control of the Mississippi River, and the promise of access to nearly boundless domestic and foreign markets, the Louisiana Purchase, from Jefferson’s point of view, did more than open the way for continued economic prosperity. It provided the incentive to hard work that molded persons into virtuous and independent republican citizens. In addition, the Louisiana Purchase laid the necessary foundation for the westward expansion of the United States across the continent, virtually assuring a prosperous and stable future of the American Republic.
Americans were in a race against time. For Jefferson, the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory was of critical importance because it pushed far into the future that dreaded moment when the United States would become a densely populated society characterized by inequality, luxury, decadence, and vice. Jefferson found confirmation for his optimism in an unexpected source: Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population. To rebut the confident predictions of Thomas Godwin, the Marquis de Condorcet, and “other writers,” Malthus had anonymously published his work in 1798.[10] His thesis was forthright and uncomplicated. Malthus argued that population would inevitably exceed the productive capacity of the land. As marginal land was forced into cultivation, the production of food would decline, or at best would not keep pace with the increasing population. A substantial portion of humanity was thus condemned to misery and starvation:
That population cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident that it needs no illustration. That population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever existed will abundantly prove. And that the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice, the ample portion of these too bitter ingredients in the cup of human life and the continuance of the physical causes that seem to have produced them bear too convincing a testimony.[11]
All societies invariably proceed through the natural stages of birth, growth, maturity, old age, infirmity, and death.
Malthus’s initial conclusions about the United States could only have been disheartening to Jefferson. Even a nation with abundant land and widespread prosperity such as America could hope for no more than to stay decline. Those who entertained other possibilities, Malthus advised, “those who contemplated the happy state of the lower classes of people in America twenty years ago would naturally wish to retain them for ever [sic]in that state, and might think, perhaps, that by preventing the introduction of manufactures and luxury he might effect his purpose, but he might as reasonably expect to prevent a wife or mistress from growing old by never exposing her to the sun or air.”[12] Landlessness, inequality, poverty, crime, and despair, all of which Americans regarded as antithetical to a virtuous and thriving republic, were inescapable. God himself, according to Malthus, had inscribed such tribulations into the nature of things.
Coincidentally to the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803 Malthus published a revised edition of his essay that moderated the unrelenting pessimism of the original version.[13] Several considerations, he admitted, such as “moral restraint,” could limit unchecked population growth. Jefferson found Malthus’s amended essay more congenial, but still believed that Malthus’s principal argument were largely irrelevant to the United States. The burden of population on subsistence would never become acute in the United States because westward migration would alleviate the crisis before it emerged. In his correspondence with the French political economist Jean Baptiste Say, Jefferson recast his disagreements with Malthus into force of a general axiom:
The differences of circumstance between this and the old countries of Europe furnish differences of fact whereron to reason, in questions of political economy, and will consequently produced sometimes a difference of result. There, for instance, the quantity of food is fixed, or increasing in a slow and only arithmetical ratio, and the proportion is limited by the same ratio. Supernumerary births consequently add only to your mortality. Here the immense extent of uncultivated and fertile lands enables every one who will labor, to marry young, and to raise a family of any size. Our food, then, may increase geometrically with our laborers, and our births, however multiplied, become effective.[14]
The expansion across space rather than development over time, Jefferson thought, was the most effective antidote to population growth, urbanization, overcrowding, poverty, hunger, and the political, social, and moral corruption attendant upon these developments. Such a remedy, Jefferson asserted, was unique to the United States, rendering America exceptionally blessed among the nations of the earth.
“By enlarging the empire of liberty,” Jefferson exulted in 1805, “we multiply its auxiliaries and provide new sources of renovation, should it’s [sic] principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of the country which gave them birth.”[15] In America there would always be an opportunity for men and women to begin life anew and, in the process, to revitalize themselves and the nation. Jefferson’s notion of a continuously expanding “empire of liberty” was a bold intellectual stroke, for it challenged the traditional republican association of territorial expansion and empire with luxury, corruption, tyranny, and despotism. In Jefferson’s analysis, expansion, on the contrary, preserved rather than undermined the republican character of the United States. In addition to slowing, and in all likelihood preventing, the onset of national old age, expansion also diffused the spirit of faction that had proven so disruptive during the 1790s. Removing the French from Louisiana had removed the need to maintain an expensive and potentially dangerous military establishment to meet an ongoing foreign threat. The Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson concluded, thus reduced the likelihood of American involvement in ruinous wars that would impose on the United States the debts, taxes, and standing armies that had haunted the Old World. Not conflict, but peaceful expansion across the continent would sustain the American republic.
Yet, if the Louisiana Purchase removed the serious obstacles to the realization of Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” it also exposed some of the tensions and contradictions in that vision. Since the basis of the empire was continuous territorial and commercial expansion, an assertive foreign policy was also necessary to American security. Jefferson frequently boasted about the isolation and independence of the United States, but his assertion obscured American dependence on Europe. The United States could isolate itself from Europe only if Jefferson and his countrymen were willing to give up their commitment to territorial and commercial expansion.
Jefferson’s interest in obtaining the Louisiana Territory stemmed from his concern for the immediate and future security and prosperity of the United States. American commercial rights had to be protected and the integrity of American territory had to be upheld. It was imperative, in Jefferson’s view, that the United States control the rivers and the ports of the Louisiana Territory, for they provided the indispensible avenues of, and indispensible outlets for, the domestic and foreign markets on which American farmers in the West depended. Jefferson’s vision of an expanding “empire of liberty” rested on the twin pillars of territorial expansion and free trade.
For Jefferson, Madison, and other Democratic-Republicans, the Louisiana Purchase was only the beginning. As early as 1804, they took an interest in acquiring both Florida and Cuba from Spain. “Much remains yet to be done to establish the rights of ingress and egress to our rivers upon a secure foundation,” acknowledged Allan Bowie Magruder, “and to give to our Western commerce, the highest possible degree of prosperity.”[16] Even before the United States had secured the Louisiana Territory from France, Madison, in a letter to Livingston and Monroe dated March 2, 1803, insisted on the importance of gaining West Florida, if only to control its rivers and ports. “Our free communication with the sea through those channels,” Madison contended, “is so natural, so reasonable, and so essential, that, eventually, it must take place: and in prudence, therefore, ought to be amicably and effectually adjusted without delay.”[17] It was as critical and as urgent that the United States control West Florida as it was for the United States to acquire New Orleans and the Mississippi.
The irony of Jefferson’s conception of a republican future for the United States was that the establishment and maintenance of a simple, peaceful, agrarian republic required an aggressive foreign policy that virtually ensured conflict with other peoples and nations. To expand American territory, to secure access to markets, to preserve a prosperous, stable, independent, and virtuous republic committed Jefferson and future generations to belligerent policies toward Indians, Europeans, and any who impeded those essential ambitions. For in so doing, they endangered both the immediate and future welfare of the United States.[18]
[1] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787 in James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826, Vol. I (New York, 1995), 514.
[2] Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 1802, National Archives
[3] In an effort to stabilize relations and avoid war with France during the late 1790s, President John Adams sent a bipartisan legation composed of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a Federalist from South Carolina, John Marshall, a Federalist from Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry, a Democratic-Republican from Massachusetts, to negotiate a settlement. As a condition of beginning talks, three of Talleyrand’s agents solicited a loan to France from the United States and a bribe in the amount of $240,000 for French officials. The outraged Americans refused to make any such concessions. Instead, they reported the incident to Adams, who, in a message to Congress, denounced French insults and urged immediate preparation for war. When Adams submitted the commissioners’ report to Congress, he deleted the names of the French agents, designating them Messrs. X,Y, and Z. See John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1780-1801 (New York, 1960), 210-13.
[4] Essential sources for the discussion of the Louisiana Purchase are Arthur P. Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795-1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (New York, 1934); Paul A. Vaug, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (East Lansing, MI, 1963), chapter 8; Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, 1970), 745-54; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805, Vol. 4, (Boston, 1970), chapters 14 and 15.
[5] Quoted in Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803-1807 (New York, 1923), 6.
[6] Fisher Ames to Christopher Gore, October 3, 1803, in Seth Ames, ed., Works of Fisher Ames, (Boston, 1854) Vol. I, 323-24.
[7] Lexington Kentucky Gazette, October 11, 1803.
[8] Allan Bowie Magruder, Political, Commercial, and Moral Reflections on the Late Cession of Louisiana to the United States (Lexington, Kentucky, 1803), 50.
[9] “Reflections on Political Economy, and the Prospect Before Us, Addressed to the Citizens of the Western Country,” Lexington Kentucky Gazette, September 6, 1803 and September 27, 1803 .
[10] [Thomas Robert Malthus], An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798) . Malthus was originally inspired to write in response to Godwin’s essay “Avarice and Profusion.”
[11] Ibid., 11.
[12] Ibid., 107-108.
[13] Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed. (London, 1803).
[14] Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, February 1, 1804, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C., 1903-1904), 2-3.
[15] Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Chambers, December 28, 1805, National Archives.
[16] Magruder, Political, Commercial, and Moral Reflections , 104.
[17] James Madison to Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, March 2, 1803, in State Papers and Correspondence Bearing upon the Purchase of the Territory of Louisiana (Washington, D.C., 1903), 127.
[18] Jefferson obviously miscalculated the time required for the Republic to surrender to the sort of corruption and decadence he feared, although not from Malthusian causes. Whether those conditions are permanent remains to be determined.
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The featured image is Statue of Thomas Jefferson by Moses Jacob Ezekiel (October 28, 1844, Virginia – March 27, 1917). Located beside the Rotunda, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. this file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.