Reviewed by Leonard J. Sadosky | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Leonard J. Sadosky | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 350. $30.00.) Reviewed by Leonard J. Sadosky , Iowa State University
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was a mistake. Certainly, it was thought to be so at the time. President Thomas Jefferson had authorized his ministers, Robert L. Livingston and James Monroe, to purchase, not the vast western drainage basin of the Mississippi River, but only the Floridas and the environs of the city of New Orleans. Beyond the violation of diplomatic instructions, Jefferson, his cabinet, and both Republicans and Federalists in Congress questioned the constitutionality and the desirability of such a vast territorial acquisition. The treaty that authorized the Purchase was ratified in autumn 1803, but many Americans continued to doubt the wisdom of the measure. This view of the Louisiana Purchase as a contingent moment in early American history, laced with uncertainty and anxiety, has animated several works commemorating and capitalizing on the Purchase's recent bicentennial.¹	1
Like many in early-nineteenth-century America, Roger G. Kennedy believes the Louisiana Purchase was a mistake, but for far different reasons. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause has much in common with an older strain of historiography that saw the Purchase as a product of a latent American imperial design.² Although he invokes the Louisiana Purchase in his title, Kennedy is primarily concerned with the larger structural forces that gave rise to the Purchase. For Kennedy, a then-unseen, and now underappreciated, confluence of economic, political, and environmental factors pushed the United States westward in the decades following the American Revolution. Fundamentally, it was cotton, and the political-economic complex devoted to its production and exportation, that drove the American empire westward. With the development of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, cotton cultivation, and its handmaid, enslaved labor, became a hidden and subtle, yet ultimately dominant, force in shaping American political and economic development.	2
Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause is thus about far more than the Louisiana Purchase. It is an extended set of ruminations and speculations on the first fifty years of the Independence of the United States, and it seeks to locate in the actions of the elites of the founding generation a host of ills—the origins of the antebellum South's "Cotton Kingdom" and its harsh regimes of African American slavery and soil-exhausting extracting monoculture as well as, albeit more obliquely, the Civil War, modern American racism, and the continuing degradation of the American environment.	3
The figure of Thomas Jefferson defines the period. Kennedy examines Jefferson's articulations of an ideal yeomen republic in which "those who labor in the earth"—Jefferson's "chosen people of God"—would be granted access to land and political power in order to commence building an American Arcadia (pp. 60–61). This willfully forgotten Arcadia—"a Southland republic of free and independent yeomen"—constituted what Kennedy calls "Mr. Jefferson's lost cause" (p. 73). Kennedy identifies three places at three moments when Jefferson's lost cause, had he been serious enough about its future, could have flourished. The first was Virginia during the American Revolution, the second was the trans-Appalachian west in the mid-1780s, and the third was the lower Mississippi region between the 1790s and 1810s (pp. 73–81). In each moment, Jefferson did not push hard enough, or at all, to abolish the institution of slavery in the polity under construction or redefinition. Jefferson did not see, as Kennedy does, that the interests of the small freeholders he claimed to champion and the great planters were inimical to one another. Kennedy's belief is that, if Jefferson had been truly committed to the ideal of a yeomen republic, he would not have allowed slavery to spread unchecked through the young United States.	. . .

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