Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
officeholders for cause. It was later denied that any such promises had come from Jefferson, but believing they had that comfort level, the Federalists arranged votes and abstentions within state congressional delegations that tilted the vote on the 36th ballot: 10 states for Jefferson to 4 for Burr, and 2 states unable to declare a choice. (Tennessee had become the 16th state in 1796.) The Jefferson Revolution had begun, and this opened the great, six-term reign of the Jefferson-Virginian Republicans. But it began narrowly and uncertainly. Jefferson and Madison had hinted at nullification of federal legislation, in Jefferson’s case on behalf of Kentucky, on the determination of the state alone; and in the electoral controversy, Jefferson and Monroe had corresponded on the possibility of an armed Virginian resistance to a Federalist, legislated election victor, not necessarily an unconstitutional solution. These were profound fissures in the constitutional beliefs of the main political groups, and that is without considering the implications of the smoldering issue of slavery.
In one of his last and most important presidential acts, Adams appointed the very able lawyer and secretary of state, anti-Jeffersonian Virginian John Marshall, as chief justice of the United States, a post he would distinguishedly occupy for 34 years. John Adams, a competent statesman and man of inflexible integrity and patriotism, retired to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, angry and disappointed, but having rendered conspicuous service, and generally respected if not afloat on waves of public affection. He would prove to be the first of four generations of his family of eminent, public-spirited Americans, and the longest-lived of any president of the U.S. until the twenty-first century.
Jefferson’s inaugural address foresaw the steady growth in the power, extent, and prosperity of the nation. He had been an advocate of a small federal government, and thought the Articles of Confederation could have been amended to make an adequate framework, and that the presidency, as created, was an elected monarchy, “a bad edition of a Polish king.”15 Jefferson immediately set an informal tone to proceedings, dressed casually, delivered messages in writing, and received anyone who wanted to see him, simply, often in slippers, and in the order they appeared, very congenially. He sold Adams’s elaborate coach and horses and traveled in a one-horse market-cart.
Whether the Federalists thought they had an understanding with Jefferson or not, he did shrink the army drastically, and with the very capable expatriate Swiss banker Albert Gallatin (who had been discommoded by the xenophobia of 1798) as Treasury secretary, vacated tax fields, reduced spending, and reduced debt steadily through his presidency, even as the country continued to grow rapidly. He considered his administration to be Whig against the Federalist Tories, and he mastered the appearances of popular government. He considered the Bonapartist coup seizing power for the new consulate to be confirmation of his aversion to large standing armies, and had never seen any need for such a force anyway. He established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to train Republican officers to replace the Washington-Adams military establishment, but ultimately to assure a non-political officer corps, a valuable and needed reform. Jefferson did allow himself to be persuaded by Gallatin of the merits of the Bank of the United States, and their various frugalities, especially reductions in the army and navy, helped cut the federal debt from $83 million to $57 million in eight years, despite a nearly 40 percent increase in the country’s population, to about seven million.
Jefferson continued a nationalist tradition in the defense of the nation’s interests in the world and its continued western expansion. Following the example of the British, the United States under its first two presidents had fallen into the habit of paying tribute to the Barbary pirates along the North African coast from Morocco east to what is now Libya. The Pasha of Tripoli (forerunner to Colonel Qaddaffi) increased his extortions for each ship and purported to declare war on the United States on May 14, 1801. Jefferson was less hostile to the navy than to the army, as it was less adaptable for use in domestic repression, and he dispatched a “Mediterranean squadron” that, led in the principal action by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, destroyed the Pasha’s principal vessel, the former USS Philadelphia. A blockade was imposed on the main pirate harbors, and the Pasha eventually thought better of it and signed a peace in June 1805. (Tribute, in reduced amounts, continued to be paid until 1816.)16
8. THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
Louisiana was the name for a vast territory bounded by the Gulf of Mexico and to the east by the Mississippi, and extending to the Canadian border in what would become Montana while broadening east to Lake Huron and west almost to Oregon. It was 828,000 square miles, including most of what has ever since Jeffersonian times been considered the heartland of America. The territory, as part of the settlement of the Seven Years’ War, was ceded by France to Spain in 1762, and as part of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions was taken back from Spain in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, which was confirmed with the signing of the Treaty of Madrid in March 1801. Jefferson, despite his incandescent Francophilia, was alarmed by this and feared such a powerful and contiguous French presence. He was also worried that the westward growth of the country could be stunted by restrictive French administration of the port of New Orleans and meddling with Mississippi traffic. The Spanish government in New Orleans, continuing in the name of France, revoked the right of Americans to unload cargo in New Orleans in 1802. Even Jefferson had been appalled at the conduct of the French in the Genêt and XYZ affairs, which were the two chief diplomatic encounters to date between the United States and France. Jefferson wrote the American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, in April 1802, that “The day that France takes New Orleans . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” This was an astonishing turn for the president, but demonstrated his clear-headed pursuit of the national and his own political interests when not permitted the luxury of his dilettantish biases. He told Livingston to negotiate an acquisition of a Gulf port and as much as he could of the lower Mississippi, or at least permanent and adequate rights in New Orleans.
On January 12, 1803, Jefferson named James Monroe—the former minister to France whom Washington had recalled, as Adams said, “in disgrace” for his fraternization with the Robespierrists and the Directory—as minister plenipotentiary to France to join Livingston in the negotiations and buy New Orleans and West Florida. The Congress had authorized $2 million, but Jefferson told Monroe to go to $10 million if he had to. By the time Monroe arrived in France in April, Napoleon had abandoned his ideas of a revived American empire, shocked at the unsuccessful decade-long effort to suppress a slave revolt in Haiti and wary of revived war with Britain, which continued to be invincible at sea. He did not wish to be starved out of North America as Louis XVI had been. Just before Monroe’s arrival, Talleyrand asked Livingston what the U.S. would pay for the whole Louisiana Territory. Monroe took this up on his arrival a couple of days later and boldly seized the opportunity. Agreement was reached and signed on May 2, antedated to April 30, buying the whole territory for $15 million, including U.S. government assumption of $3.75 million of French debts to private American interests. Monroe and Livingston exceeded their authority but Jefferson was delighted, and the acquisition was easily approved by the Senate in October. It slightly tested the president’s strict constructionist ideas, but, as always, he was able to adjust legal dogmas to suit a rational discharge of his office.
This was a brilliant, if entirely fortuitous, transaction that doubled the size of the country. Neither liberal historian Sean Willentz’s commendation of Jefferson for increasing the nation’s territory while shrinking its defense budget nor Theodore Roosevelt’s outrageous lampoon of Jefferson and Madison (the secretary of state) was justified. Roosevelt called them “timid, well-meaning statesmen . . . pitted against the greatest warrior and law-giver, and one of the greatest diplomats of modern times, . . . who were unable to so much as appreciate that there was shame in the practice of venality, dishonesty, mendacity, cruelty and treachery.” Napoleon and Talleyrand were as described,17 but Napoleon knew he couldn’t hold the territory against the British and Americans and correctly saw that the United States would rise up to rival and surpass the British. What he could not foresee was that the British would have the sagacity to tuck themselves in under the wing of the Americans as an indispensable ally when they could no longer lead the English-speaking world themselves. Jefferson’s and Madison’s and Monroe’s conduct in the matter was astute, opportunistic, and entirely successful. In less than 50 years since the start of the Seven Years’ War, the Americans had helped remove the French from their