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Book Review
| A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. By Jon Kukla. (New York: Knopf, 2003. x, 430 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40812-6.)Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii, 350 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-515347-2.)
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Many months after his inauguration, Thomas Jefferson observed,
"However our present interests may restrain us within our limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not southern, continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface." (in Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 1970, p. 746)
As Jefferson knew, the first step on that westward course of empire was the Louisiana Territory. In these provocative studies of Jeffersonian statecraft, Jon Kukla and Roger G. Kennedy examine the origins and consequences of the Louisiana Purchase. Their perspectives vary, and their conclusions about Jefferson's motives and the impact of Louisiana on the future of the Republic are equally divergent. |
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In A Wilderness So Immense, Jon Kukla examines the international forces and diplomacy that eventuated in the acquisition of Louisiana Territory. Deftly weaving the threads of a textually rich narrative that stretch from Paris and Madrid to Haiti and Washington into a seamless whole, Kukla stresses the centrality of European balance-of-power politics to America's expansion west across the Mississippi River. Spain valued the territory less for its economic potential than as a buffer against an expansive and expanding United States frontier that potentially threatened its rich and productive colony of Mexico. The machinations of the British descending southward from Canada, the designs of freebooting American frontiersmen whose desire for more territory seemed insatiable, and the demands of western merchants for access to the navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans all threatened Spain's control of Louisiana. Therefore, Spain was more than happy to cede the territory to France inasmuch as French control of the province would make a more effective barrier against possible British designs and real American aggression. |
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When Napoleon's plan for a reconstituted French empire in the Western Hemisphere perished in the bloodshed of the Haitian revolution, Jefferson, who had long coveted an empire in the West, was presented with a challenge and an opportunity. Heretofore willing to allow an enfeebled Spain to possess the territory until through the course of time events forced it to sell (at bargain prices) to the United States, he warned that in taking Louisiana France "'assumes to us the attitude of defiance'" and that its control of the Mississippi Valley made it "'our natural and habitual enemy'" (Kukla, p. 231). With an adroit manipulation of men, international power politics, and western economic interests, the president succeeded in obtaining the vast territory of Louisiana in one gulp (instead of many small bites), without bloodshed or hemorrhaging from the national treasury. Kukla's Jefferson is a man of guile, an astute judge of men and measures, a master of diplomacy and tact, and above all farsighted. |
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As he emerges in Roger Kennedy's
Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause, Thomas Jefferson is something
else again. Unwilling or unable to stand for the yeoman farmer whom
he idealized and against rapacious Virginia planters whose demand
for land was only exceeded by their wasteful (mis)use of it, he
lacked both a spine and the conviction of his principles. Anxious
both for the esteem of the planter elite who formed his political
base and for the presidency, Jefferson was long on revolutionary
rhetoric and short on practical followthrough. In an argument as
powerful as Kukla's is nuanced, Kennedy indicts and convicts Jefferson
for betraying the independent yeomen and the land they farmed to
pursue the bottom line of plantation agriculture, which was wasteful
in equal measure of humans and the soil they tilled.
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