The Louisiana Purchase
More than America at the time could imagine
I was reading the other week an article talking about Puerto Rico, a United States territory that we acquired from Spain in the 1890’s. That made me think about lots of things, but one thing it made me think about again was the first time the United States acquired territory from a foreign power: Louisiana.
"Louisiana" was much more than just the modern state: it was the entire western Mississippi river basin. This huge Louisiana Purchase paved the way for America to become the continent-spanning power it is today - and also for American culture to become what it is today.
Until the mid-1800's, the only way to ship sizeable amounts of goods from the western United States (between the Appalachians and the Mississippi) was to send them downriver to New Orleans. Since 1762 (after the French and Indian War), New Orleans and Louisiana were owned by Spain. Spain didn't have much interest in the territory - its focus was much farther south in Mexico. So, it let American settlers deposit their goods there for reshipment between rivergoing and seagoing ships without paying any taxes.
However, in 1800, Spain ceded Louisiana to France. The French Emperor Napoleon currently had an army in Haiti; he appeared much more interested in America. Even though the American President Jefferson had been sympathetic to France, he instantly saw Napoleon owning New Orleans as a threat.
So, Jefferson sent an embassy to ask to purchase the city. By that time, Napoleon's Haitian expedition had failed, and he needed cash - so he offered to sell all Louisiana. Stunned, the American minister (Robert Livingston) agreed.
Congress, also stunned, ratified the treaty.
So, the United States got not only so much more than it had asked for, but more than it'd imagined. President Jefferson sent a special expedition - under Captain Meriweather Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark - to even get some sense of what the country had bought. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was phenomenal, and it preserved those days in (among other names) the headwaters of the Missouri: the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers. But it still only saw a portion of the new territory.
It was even unclear how much the United States had bought. It took years for the borders of Louisiana would be eventually demarcated by the 1818 Anglo-American Convention (to the north) and the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty (to the southwest). Of course, treaties and wars with the local American Indians continued long after.
After buying Louisiana, Americans thought it would take generations to fill up the West. Jefferson had already said the continent would have "room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation". Of course, Western expansion had already outpaced earlier estimates - Ohio was already a state in 1803, only a few years after it had first been settled in 1788. But the Plains were a far larger territory.
Many Federalists in Congress, and some people in New England, opposed the Louisiana Purchase from fear of what the West might become in the United States. Their fears had some grounds - the West had its own version of American culture. But, the West was already growing faster than they thought. As settlers poured across the Appalachians, it was already becoming a major force in American life. Louisiana ensured this westward expansion would continue.
Many people had thought that it was impossible for the United States to stretch across the continent as a single country. Jefferson fully expected the Pacific coast to become its own independent republics, friends with the United States but separate. Many Founding Fathers expected even the trans-Appalachian region to become independent, and the great tensions between it and the East gave them good reason. The United States now owned Louisiana - but it wasn't yet truly part of the United States, and it was still unclear whether it could ever truly be part of it.
Frankly, their doubts made sense. I would’ve shared them at the time, given the technology of that day. It took almost two years for Lewis and Clark to travel from St. Louis to the Pacific (at modern Astoria, Oregon). Later in 1810-1811, it took six and a half months for the American Fur Company to reach Astoria by sea (around Cape Horn). How possible would it be to maintain a unified country under these conditions?
When we think of the West, we think of the Oregon Trail. But that was decades later, after new sorts of wagon had been developed that could stand up to the conditions of the trail. And, even that trail took great expense to construct and most of a year to travel... and it would have been much harder without railroads to bring settlers and supplies to Missouri at the start of the trail.
Those railroads - and telegraphs - are what truly knit America together. I've talked before how they made it possible to fight a war on the scale of the American Civil War, but I believe there wouldn't have been a country in the first place without them. At least, there wouldn't have been one anywhere near as large as America. Without them, I'm sure California and Texas and Oregon would have remained independent, perhaps paying nominal allegiance to Mexico or Britain. Even Upper Louisiana might well have been independent.
As it was, the Orleans Territory - the modern state of Louisiana - had enough French settlers that it did take some time to assimilate to America. As late as the Civil War, much of the state still had a discernably different culture from the rest of the American South.
But Upper Louisiana - Missouri, Kansas, and points west - was barely Spanish or French. Northwest of St. Louis, there was essentially no one except American Indians. It was easy to turn that land as American as it had ever been Spanish or French. Actual settlement would follow gradually over time, as the frontier moved west, by the same waves of railroad-drawn immigrants that peopled the rest of the American West.
All this, of course, was far in the future when Jefferson bought Louisiana and hastily organized an American government for it. He couldn't have guessed what railroads and telegraphs could bring. (Given his love for inventions in Monticello, I'm sure he would've liked them as such - though he would've disliked the larger cities that railroads encourage.)
But he - and his contemporary Americans - knew they were opening a door for America.
Without the Louisiana Purchase, the United States might still have acquired Louisiana. In 1818, Spain was hardly able to defend Florida against an American invasion. If Spain still owned Louisiana then, I could easily imagine America similarly conquering it. Or perhaps not - the 1818 invasion of Florida was backed up by a treaty secured by Western votes; an invasion of Louisiana might not be able to get that treaty.
Or perhaps American settlers would have poured into Spanish or French Louisiana anyway and raised a revolution there, as they historically did in many other places: Texas, California, the Yucatan, Nicaragua, and Hawaii. Many of those revolutions succeeded... but not all. Also, perhaps they wouldn't have raised a revolution - there were many American settlers in British Canada who didn't.
But without Louisiana, the United States wouldn't have had much of the West. America would have been a much smaller country, with its development handicapped for several crucial decades until railroads bridged the Appalachians. Without the West beckoning, American culture would have been so different I can barely speculate. The "manifest destiny" of the United States to expand "from sea to shining sea" would not have been so manifest.
And without Louisiana being purchased as early as 1803 - even if it fell into American hands later - all these concepts would not have been taken for granted in American culture.
That is why the Louisiana Purchase was so crucial to America.
Point of order: in a lot of ways, south Louisiana is still culturally distinct from the rest of the South, though much less so than it used to be.
Louisiana Purchase was maybe greatest waste of taxpayer money ever. How many French soldiers were in the territory? What was the basis of their "claim". We could have just walked in and taken it.