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American Speech, Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 347-352 (Article)
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THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
AND AMERICAN ENGLISH
CONNIE C. EBLE
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Historians of language customarily recount development and change
in a language in relation to historical events that affect its form or use.
Among the important dates and events learned in the study of the English
language are the treaty in 886 between King Alfred of Wessex and Guthram
the Dane, which gave speakers of Northern Germanic dialects a place in
England; the Battle of Hastings in 1066, which put speakers of Norman
French in important positions in church and state and changed the functions of the English language; the Black Death of 1348, which eventually
killed at least a third of the population of every station and changed the
economic structure of England; and British colonization, which brought
various dialects of English to North America. That these remote events had
linguistic consequences is generally accepted, though scholars are still
examining just how these events contributed to specific developments in
the language. The consequences of more recent events, of course, are even
harder to discern. With the passage of a half century since World War II,
Jan Tillery and Guy Bailey (2003, 164) and others are beginning to identify
developments in Southern American English that seem to have been set in
motion by changes to the South and to Southerners brought about by
World War II.
This issue of American Speech focuses on the linguistic effects of the
Louisiana Purchase, an event that some historians consider second in
importance only to independence and the adoption of the Constitution.
On 20 December 1803, on the Place d’Armes in New Orleans between
the Mississippi River on one side and the St. Louis Cathedral and Cabildo
on the other, the flag of France came down for the last time in North
America and replaced by the flag of the United States of America. On that
day, the size of the nation doubled, and free navigation of the Mississippi
and its tributaries opened the center of the continent to American commerce and migration. The Louisiana Purchase also guaranteed American
English passage across the Mississippi and eventually across the continent,
making it the language of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
For the three centuries preceding the Louisiana Purchase, four European powers had claimed the land that now constitutes the 48 contiguous
American Speech, Vol. 78, No. 4, Winter 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the American Dialect Society
347
348
american speech 78.4 (2003)
states: the British in the east, the French in the lands drained by the
Mississippi River, the Spanish in Florida and the west, and the Russians in
the northwest. In the early 1600s the first three sought to solidify their
claims by permanent settlement: Jamestown began in 1607, Quebec City in
1608, and Santa Fe in 1609. The land they settled was already peopled by
indigenous tribes, whom the European colonists variously warred with,
formed fragile alliances with, and killed off in great numbers through
European disease. Disputes among the European powers in North America
arose in part from wars and threats of wars in Europe, which culminated in
the 1750s with war on both sides of the Atlantic, called the French and
Indian War in America and the Seven Years’ War in Europe. In 1762, when
France had lost Canada and faced the prospect of losing the Louisiana
territory, France ceded the territory by secret family treaty to Spain. In
1763, by the Treaty of Paris, France lost its remaining North American
colonies to Britain. Britain and Spain split the Louisiana territory at the
Mississippi, and Spain kept Florida.
By 1800, when First Counsel Napoleon Bonaparte turned his attention
to restoring France’s overseas empire, the 13 British colonies had won
independence and the territory south of Canada and west to the Mississippi. The American population was rapidly expanding west of the Appalachians. Full access to and control of the Mississippi and its tributaries were
vital to American growth and required having the port of New Orleans. In
1795 the United States had made an agreement with Spain to allow the
United States free navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at
New Orleans for three years, with the possibility of renewal. President
Thomas Jefferson knew that the agreement with Spain was temporary and
unsatisfactory, and he began planning the acquisition of New Orleans.
However, by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in late 1800, Napoleon had
forced Spain to return Louisiana to France.
Napoleon’s plans for the French empire in Louisiana were thwarted by
Britain’s growing dominance of the seas and by the decimation of his
armies in St. Domingue (Haiti), where Toussaint L’Ouverture had recently
led the blacks of St. Domingue in a successful uprising against the whites
who controlled their lives. In 1801 Napoleon sent 40,000 French troops
there under the command of his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel
Leclerc to reinstate slavery and French rule. The fierce fighting of the freed
slaves combined with yellow fever to defeat the French forces utterly. When
Napoleon received word in January 1803 of Leclerc’s death and defeat, he
quickly revised his plans for Louisiana, which he realized he could not
hold. It would go either to the British or to the Americans.
The Louisiana Purchase and American English
349
For almost two years American diplomats had been notifying Secretary
of State James Madison of the rumors of the repossession of Louisiana by
France, and Jefferson and his advisors had been making plans. On 12 April
1803 Robert Livingston, the U.S. ambassador to France, was joined in Paris
by James Monroe, whom Jefferson had sent as special minister. On 1 May,
Livingston and Monroe met with Napoleon at the Louvre to hear his assent
to the Louisiana Purchase treaty and its two conventions, dated 30 April
1803. Two months later, the news reached the United States. Much debate
ensued. Many questioned Jefferson’s assumption of legislative authority
and therefore the constitutionality of the purchase. Nevertheless, by the
end of October, the Louisiana Purchase received the necessary congressional approval. In Louisiana itself, the transfer from Spain had not yet
taken place. That happened on 30 November. Three weeks later, in the
same room in the Cabildo, Governor William C. C. Claiborne and General
James Wilkinson received Louisiana for the United States. The year 2003
marks the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, the peaceful transfer of
827,192 square miles of territory (see fig. 1) from France to the United
States, for $23,527,872.54, or four cents an acre (Kukla 2003, 335).
This year’s celebration of this anniversary has included the magnificent
exhibit Jefferson’s America and Napoleon’s France (Feigenbaum 2003) at the
New Orleans Museum of Art, the ongoing publication of volumes in The
Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History by the Center for
Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and many
books reassessing the event, its causes and consequences, and its principal
players (e.g., Cerami 2003; Kukla 2003). In these works, the topic of
language is mentioned only in passing.
The Louisiana Purchase was an event of rare linguistic consequence.
Seldom, if ever, has a single language driven by a single political power
expanded so rapidly over such a vast area, replacing or reducing to clearly
minority status all the established languages in its path. The result was an
English-speaking nation. This was the vision of Thomas Jefferson, writing
to James Monroe on 24 November 1801: “It is impossible not to look
forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . and cover the whole northern, if not the southern, continent with a
people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by
similar laws” (Lipscomb and Bergh 1903–4, 10: 296). The four essays in
this special issue offer four glimpses of ways in which the Louisiana Purchase affected the dispersal and features of that “same language,” American English.
Sinaloa
and
Sonora
Unorganized
Spanish
Territory
(portions claimed by spain,
great britain, russia,
and the united states)
Oregon Country
a n i s h Tre
a t y Li
ne of 1819
Cali
forn
ia
Nueva
Vizcaya
Coahuila
Claimed by spain
and the united states
Nuevo
México
Sp
Md.
North
Carolina
South
Carolina
Virginia
(claimed by spain
and the united states)
East Florida
(spain)
Georgia
West Florida
Mississippi
Territory
Tennessee
New
York
Penn.
Upper
Canada
Lower
Canada
N.H.
Massachusetts
Nova
Scotia
Cape
Breton
New P.E.I.
Brunswick
Delaware
Rhode Island
Connecticut
New Jersey
Vt.
Claimed by great britain
and the united states
Ohio
Kentucky
Indiana
Territory
Nuevo Santander
Nuevo León
Texas
Louisiana
Purchase
British Treaty Line of 1818
Rupert’s Land
(Hudson Bay Company)
figure 1
The Louisiana Purchase, 1803
350
american speech 78.4 (2003)
The Louisiana Purchase and American English
351
Missing from this issue is discussion of the dire linguistic consequences
of the Louisiana Purchase for the indigenous people of the territory. To
some American leaders at the time, the acquisition of so much territory
west of the Mississippi that whites had not yet settled offered the opportunity to delimit an area for the containment of Native Americans (or of exslaves). The Indian Removal Act of 1830 designated as “Indian Territory” a
portion of the Louisiana Purchase territory now in Oklahoma and forced
thousands of Native Americans of different cultures and languages to
relocate there. The Louisiana Purchase also contained the Great Plains,
which in 1803 was the home of indigenous groups as well as some native
peoples from the eastern part of the continent that had been dispossessed
of their lands by European settlers. Their way of life was not to survive
American expansion in the nineteenth century. Governmental policies
forced Native Americans onto reservations and limited their educational
opportunities to English-only schools. Ultimately, the Louisiana Purchase
diminished the number of speakers of indigenous languages and brought
many of their languages to the brink of extinction. For almost all Native
Americans now, some variety of American English is their native language.
The first of the four essays in this issue does trace the survival of
indigenous languages in some placenames. William Bright’s “Native American Placenames in the Louisiana Purchase” shows the layering of languages
and cultures in a set of about 50 toponyms in use in English in 1803. These
placenames were originally Native American words that were then borrowed into French and from French into English.
New Orleans, the most multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual city
in North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, grew and
prospered as an American city. It became the second greatest port in the
nation. In the 40 years before the Civil War, more than half a million
immigrants entered the United States through New Orleans. Richard W.
Bailey compares antebellum New Orleans with the tumultuous linguistic
situation of mid-fourteenth-century London, where rapid change and
great dialect diversity emerged in uniformity. In “The Foundation of English in the Louisiana Purchase: New Orleans, 1800–1850,” he sees New
Orleans as the source of English for the American heartland.
The Louisiana Purchase opened distant, unknown lands to Americans.
Neither the American purchasers nor the French sellers knew anything
about the area that was to become eastern Colorado. The Spanish had
never established permanent colonies there, and only a few Americans
trickled in until gold was discovered in Colorado in 1859. Lamont Antieau,
in “Plains English in Colorado,” describes the current English dialect of
this remote portion of the Louisiana Purchase.
352
american speech 78.4 (2003)
When Governor Claiborne addressed the inhabitants of New Orleans
in English early in his term, they could not understand him because their
language was French. By the time of the Civil War, English was widespread
in New Orleans and on the plantations of Louisiana. In “Anglophone
Slaves in Francophone Louisiana,” Michael D. Picone suggests that English-speaking slaves imported into the state from the east exerted pressures on communication that hastened the shift from French or Creole to
English.
REFERENCES
Cerami, Charles A. 2003. Jefferson’s Great Gamble: The Remarkable Story of Jefferson,
Napoleon, and the Men behind the Louisiana Purchase. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks.
Feigenbaum, Gail. 2003. Jefferson’s America and Napoleon’s France: An Exhibition for the
Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art.
Kukla, Jon. 2003. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of
America. New York: Knopf.
Lipscomb, Andrew A., and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. 1903–4. The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson. 20 vols. Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association.
Tillery, Jan, and Guy Bailey. 2003. “Urbanization and the Evolution of Southern
American English.” In English in the Southern United States, ed. Stephen J. Nagle
and Sara L. Sanders, 159–72. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.