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7KH/RXLVLDQD3XUFKDVHDQG$PHULFDQ(QJOLVK &RQQLH&(EOH American Speech, Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 347-352 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/as/summary/v078/78.4eble.html Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (21 Feb 2016 09:14 GMT) 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.