| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon Kukla. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2003. Pp. x, 430. $30.00.

The diplomatic crisis leading up to the Louisiana Purchase centered on control of New Orleans and the Mississippi watershed, not on the immense wilderness to the west. To facilitate a deal, American minister and negotiator Robert R. Livingston floated the possibility of including the trans-Mississippi region in the purchase so that the United States could in turn offer the Bonaparte family a private land grant. Neither Livingston nor the Jefferson administration could see much other use for this wilderness, Jon Kukla writes in his engaging and authoritative new history. Napoleon Bonaparte's brothers (in this case, Joseph) might be susceptible to bribes, but the first consul's interest in the region depended on the success of his tragically abortive campaign to suppress the insurrection in St. Domingue and establish a "colonial empire in the Caribbean" with Louisiana as its breadbasket. "As many as sixty thousand French soldiers" lost their lives in the 1802–1803 campaign, climaxing a "decade of carnage" in which "some three hundred fifty thousand Haitians of all colors" also died (p. 225). Anticipating resumption of the war in Europe, Bonaparte abandoned Louisiana. The sale turned what promised to be a total loss into a welcome infusion of sixty million francs in cash; another twenty million francs of the total purchase price of eighty million francs ($15 million) covered American claims resulting from French maritime depredations in the 1790s.

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