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Louisiana Purchase
Key quotes from A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla that give a
view of the political feeling of American leaders about Louisiana.
•
“Louisiana is ours! If we rightly improve the heaven sent boon, we may be as
great, and as happy a nation, as any on which the sun has ever shone. The
establishment of independence and of our present constitution, are prior, both in
time and importance: But with these two exceptions, the acquisition of Louisiana,
is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states.” Dr. David
Ramsay, May 12, 1804
•
Louisiana was “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except
wolves and wandering Indians.”
Fisher Ames, Leader of the Federalists
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“New Orleans is a place inhabited by a mixture of Americans, English, Spanish,
and French and crowded every year…with two or three thousand boatmen from
the back country remarkable for their dissipated habits, unruly tempers, and
lawless conduct…and where the white population bears so small a percentage to
the black… and that the Blacks have already been guilty of two or three
insurrections two or three years back.
Federalist reporting to Alexander Hamilton from Natchez, Mississippi
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Federalist regarded inhabitants of Louisiana with disdain. They said, “GalgaloHispano-Indian Omnium gathering of savages and adventurers whose morals are
expected to sustain and glorify our republic. Never before was it attempted to play
the fool on such great a scale.
Alexander Hamilton concerning the Louisiana Purchase
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“Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Indians,” with the prospective immigration of United
Irish and rogues,” or with any “red, yellow or black brethren beyond the
Mississippi, the treaty changes the identity of our nation, - the United States are
no longer the same.”
From the Columbian Centinal and the Massachusetts Federalist
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“a howling wilderness, an immense wilderness, an untrodden waste for owls to
hoot, and wolves to howl in, the realm of alligators and catamounts, an empire
that is boundless, whose bounds are as yet unexplored.”
Federalist critics of the Louisiana Purchase
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“Upon what footing will the free quadroon mulatto and black people stand? Will
they be entitled to the free rights of citizens or not? They are a numerous class in
this city – say ½ to ¾ of the population, many very respectable and under [the
Spanish] government enjoy their rights in common with other subjects.”
New Orleans merchant, Benjamin Morgan (upon hearing of the purchase)
•
On January 16, 1804, the leaders of the free colored militia petitioned William C.
C. Claiborne, the United States was faced with what to do with the mixed
population of Louisiana. Thomas Jefferson in a cabinet meeting decided, “that the
militia of Colour shall be confirmed in their posts, and treated favorably, till a
better settled state of things shall permit us to let them neglect themselves.”
Thomas Jefferson on February 18, 1804.
(Note: I am typing here an entire page from Jon Kubla’s book. It gives some
significant historical background of the feelings of people to the purchase of
Louisiana and the dilemma that it posed to the nation.) When William C. C.
Claiborne had landed at Jamestown in 1616, English colonists regarded the lands
they took in North America peopled with only savages, the remnant of Native
American tribes decimated by European disease. Thomas Jefferson lived in a
plantation community of two hundred people on his mountaintop at Monticello.
He walked daily among faces that exhibited a whole range of tones, even within
his own family, but Jefferson saw only black and white, free and slave. The
amalgamation of black Americans with “the other color” he wrote in 1814,
“produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence
in the human character can innocently consent.” His representatives and
countrymen brought similar attitudes to their 1803 encounter with racial diversity
of Louisiana.
Claiborne and the 12,000 Americans who flooded into Louisiana in the
decade after 1803 almost overwhelmed New Orlean’s baffling patterns of race, language,
law and culture. Jefferson and his countrymen had always assumed that the Creoles
would be displaced, assimilated or marginalized by English speaking settlers – and they
might have been, except for the aftermath of the Haitian and French Revolutions.
Between May 1809 and January 1810, New Orleans welcomed 10,000 French speaking
refugees from St. Domingue by way of Cuba – equal numbers of whites, slaves and free
people of color whose arrival made the city even more Caribbean, reinforcing everything
Claiborne and his countrymen found exotic and dangerous about New Orleans for
decades to come.
Controversies over race, religion, law, language, and culture not only
delayed Louisiana’s statehood until 1812, they worked like the rumblings of an
earthquake along the vulnerable fault lines of nineteenth-century American society and
government. By 1818-1819, when treaties among the United States, Spain, and Great
Britain gave America the rest of Florida and drew the final boundaries of the Louisiana
Purchase, the second half of our national history was well under way. The land north of
the thirty-third parallel was now called the Missouri Territory, to avoid confusion with
the State of Louisiana south of it.
As Americans brought their internal improvements and their slaves to
New Orleans and the new territory, the nation’s long-deferred debate over slavery grew
increasingly angry. The consequences of the Louisiana Purchase scoured at the mortar of
the Constitution, as the New Englanders’ arguments for states’ rights and secession –
arguments that surface during the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1786, after the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803 - 1804, and again during the war of 1812 – went south.
•
In 1820, when the Missouri crisis erupted over the creation of another
slave state from the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, a grand compromise was
necessary to preserve the Union: henceforth the new states were permitted in pairs, one
slave and one free.
Pages 336, 337 “A Wilderness So Immense” by Jon Kubla