A Wilderness So Immense
Read A Wilderness So Immense Online
Authors: Jon Kukla
Acclaim for Jon Kukla’s
A Wilderness So Immense
“A story of fascinating international intrigue and fallible human beings dealing with issues far beyond their comprehension. It is the best book on the subject yet available.”
—
The Baltimore Sun
“As exciting and readable a narrative of the Louisiana Purchase as we are likely to get in the foreseeable future.”
—
The New Republic
“Enlightening. … Kukla is good at showing what a ferment of ideas and resultant activities the world was going through at this time.”
—
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A thoroughly readable, entertaining, and informative history of the incredible period that led to the purchase of a land that doubled the size of the United States. … A wonderful book, not to be missed.”
—
The Decatur Daily
“A well-researched study.… Packed with fast-moving descriptions of the complicated negotiations. Kukla has a fine sense of context and detail.”
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The Roanoke Times
“A wonderful story, wonderfully told.”
—W. W. Abbot, Editor Emeritus of
The Papers of George Washington
“Engaging and authoritative…. Kukla is at his best in reconstructing the politics and diplomacy…. His mastery of developments (and sources) in European capitals as well as in New Orleans is unparalleled.”
—
American Historical Review
JON KUKLA
A Wilderness So Immense
Jon Kukla received his B.A. from Carthage College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has directed historical research and publishing at the Library of Virginia and has been curator and director of the Historic New Orleans Collection. In 2000 he returned to Virginia as director of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation. He lives in Charlotte County, Virginia.
ALSO BY JON KUKLA
Patrick Henry: Voice of the Revolution
(2001, with Amy Kukla)
Speakers and Clerks of the Virginia House of Burgesses,
1643–1776
(1981)
EDITOR:
The Bill of Rights: A Lively Heritage
(1987)
A Key to Survey Reports and Microfilm of the Virginia Colonial
Records Project
(1990, with John T. Kneebone)
A Guide to the Papers of Pierre Clement Laussat,
Napoleon’s Prefect for the Colony of Louisiana,
and of General Claude Perrin Victor
(1993)
Will republicans, who glory in their sacred regard to the rights of human nature, purchase an immense wilderness for the purpose of cultivating it with the labor of slaves?
—
The Balance and Columbian Repository,
September 20, 1803
Louisiana is ours! If we rightly improve the heaven sent boon, we may be as great, and as happy a nation, as any on which the sun has ever shone. The establishment of independence, and of our present constitution, are prior, both in time and importance; but with these two exceptions, the acquisition of Louisiana, is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states.
—Dr. David Ramsay, May 12, 1804
No event in all American history
—
not the Civil War, nor the Declaration of Independence, nor even the signing of the Constitution
—
was more important.
—Bernard DeVoto, March 21, 1953
For Amy,
for Jennifer,
and for Elizabeth
ONE
Piece by Piece
TWO
Carlos III and Spanish Louisiana
THREE
Poor Colonel Monroe!
SEVEN
Questions of Loyalty
EIGHT
Banners of Blood
NINE
A New Era in World History
ELEVEN
Affairs of Louisiana
TWELVE
The Embryo of a Tornado
THIRTEEN
Selling a Ship
FOURTEEN
Midnight in the Garden of Rue Trudon
FIFTEEN
An Immense Wilderness
SIXTEEN
Fluctuations of the Political Thermometer
EPILOGUE
A Various Gabble of Tongues
Appendixes
A Treaty of 1795 Between the United States and Spain
C Louisiana Purchase Conventions
D Draft Amendments to the Constitution, July-August 1803
The
Mississippi
will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1,000 miles by water, but only 500 by land…. The Mississippi, below the mouth of the Missouri, is always muddy….
The
Missouri
is, in fact, the principal river, contributing more to the common stream than does the Mississippi, even after its junction with the Illinois. It is remarkably cold, muddy, and rapid….
The
Ohio
is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted… three or four miles below Louisville.
—Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
1785
1
I
N THE PINE WOODS
of northern Minnesota, about one hundred eighty miles inland from Lake Superior and the port of Duluth, the Mississippi River begins its winding journey of 2,552 miles from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. As it flows out of the lake to begin a pilgrimage through the heartland of North America, the shallow brook is about a dozen yards wide. Passing tamarack bogs and the burial mounds of the Anishinabe, the river gains width and depth. Fed by scores of glacial ponds and lakes, the Mississippi tumbles over the Falls of St. Anthony, between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Navigable from there to the Gulf, the mighty river swells with the water of tributary creeks and streams that drain more than a million square miles of farmland and forest. As lesser rivers converge into the larger tributaries that join the Mississippi—the St. Croix River at Point Douglas, Minnesota, the Wisconsin at Prairie du
Chien, and the Illinois at Grafton—the Mississippi sprawls to half a mile wide or more to greet its peers, the Missouri at St. Louis and the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois. Born of this trinity, the Mississippi River below Cairo rolls omnipotently across the alluvial land that it deposited after the last ice age.
2
The power and destiny of the Lower Mississippi is scarcely imaginable along the north shore of Lake Itasca, where picnic tables sheltered by tall pines dwarf the tiny stream. Here, fifty years ago, a tow-headed and dimpled midwestern child splashed from rock to rock across the shallow brook, cheerfully ignorant that he was ankle deep in the first tide of a turbulent force of nature and history. Everything impressive about the Mississippi River lay far downstream in his distant future. In time the child who splashed over stepping-stones at Lake Itasca swam against the lazy summer current at Wyalusing State Park. He heard calls for volunteers to pack sandbags against the angry flood near Prairie du Chien. And he stood on the levee at Jackson Square, far below the tributary streams of his childhood, watching the all-powerful and unforgiving river send enormous oceangoing ships skidding through the treacherous bends at New Orleans. As age, distance, and experience revealed the connections between that tiny crystal brook at Lake Itasca and the mighty muddy flood of the Lower Mississippi, the man who long ago played in the clear waters of the Upper Mississippi came to realize that the story of the Louisiana Purchase had its tributaries, too.
At the end of the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase lay hidden far beyond the horizon, twenty years downstream into the future. The background stories that comprise its tributaries were as distant from one another as are the easternmost headwaters of the Ohio River—on the Allegheny near Coudersport, Pennsylvania—from the mountain creek near Dillon, Montana, that eventually becomes the Missouri. Like gravity pulling water through a great river system toward the sea, time brought together the stories from Paris, Madrid, New Orleans, New York, Kentucky, and Haiti that finally converged in the monumental events of 1803.
In 1803 the destiny of North America was formally decided by men who never set foot in the Mississippi Valley, who never walked the narrow streets of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, and who never laid eyes on the rivers that drain an expanse of field and forest slightly larger than Western Europe. Thomas Jefferson never traveled west of the Shenandoah Valley, Robert R. Livingston never got beyond the Catskills, James Monroe never made it west of Nashville, Tennessee. Napoleon Bonaparte never visited America, and his ministers knew only the Atlantic Coast. François
Barbé-Marbois once visited the Mohawk Valley from his diplomatic post in New York City during the last years of the American Revolution, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord sat out the Reign of Terror in Philadelphia. The key participants in the diplomatic story of the Louisiana Purchase were statesmen in Europe and America who knew the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers only as lines on a map, and the Missouri River only as a legend at third hand. The territory of Louisiana itself was a wilderness so immense that its boundaries remained indefinite for years.
The destiny of America was decided by women and men who crossed the Appalachians into Kentucky and floated their produce to New Orleans on flatboats and bateaux, but their determination was shaped by statesmen with maps and imagination. None of them studied or dreamt more grandly than Thomas Jefferson. No one knew it at the time—least of all Jefferson himself—but elements of the Louisiana Purchase first began to take shape in his map-strewn study near the Champs-Elysées at the edge of Paris in January 1786.