"Motives of Peculiar Urgency":
Local Diplomacy in Louisiana, 1803–1821

Peter J. Kastor

ROBERT R. Livingston and James Monroe were nothing if not diplomatic. This was true in dealing with their superiors in Washington just as it was in their negotiations with foreign emissaries. No sooner had they signed their names to the Louisiana Purchase in the spring of 1803 than they rushed a letter home explaining their actions. Writing to Secretary of State James Madison, Livingston and Monroe (the American minister to France and the minister plenipotentiary, respectively) acknowledged that "An acquisition of so great an extent was, we well Know, not contemplated by our appointment; but we are persuaded that the Circumstances and Considerations which induced us to make it, will justify us."1	1
Monroe and Livingston had good reason to be concerned. When Madison and President Thomas Jefferson had dispatched Monroe to Paris only two months earlier, they had made clear both the breadth of their strategic outlook and the limits of their territorial ambition. Jefferson and Madison hoped to secure the cession of New Orleans and the Floridas (an ill-defined geography following the Gulf Coast east of the Mississippi River). Instead, Napoleon offered all of France's holdings in North America, and the Americans soon learned he would sell nothing less.2	2
Most studies that consider the Mississippi Valley as a factor in American foreign policy and domestic politics end here, with the transfer of Louisiana to the United States.3 But American policymakers hardly stopped worrying about Louisiana in 1803, for they considered the Louisiana Purchase a flawed document and not just because it failed to deliver the Floridas.4 With the acquisition of "so great an extent" of land came a corresponding increase in population that the United States had to govern. The boundaries of that land remained in dispute, and the loyalty of that population could not be taken for granted.	3
In the process of extending American sovereignty to encompass both Louisiana and its residents, American foreign relations acquired a vital--and revealing--domestic component. Although historians of American borderlands have called attention to the diplomatic conditions of the North American interior, other scholars have rarely incorporated their work. Historians of the early American republic have certainly argued for the intersection of foreign policy and domestic affairs, but the linkage they describe usually emphasizes the domestic system that policymakers hoped to preserve through a successful foreign policy, not the way that foreign policy and domestic governance overlapped daily. That interpretations focusing on matters of ideology dominate the field of early American policymaking goes a long way toward explaining this perspective. So, too, does the emphasis on elite negotiations with European powers.5 And while diplomatic historians have shown little interest in domestic affairs, social and cultural historians have by and large eschewed a detailed consideration of diplomacy because it so often seems the preserve of the policy-making elite.	. . .