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CHAPTER 1
PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON
ENVISIONING AN "EMPIRE OF LIBERTY"
Thomas Jefferson never ventured west of the Shenandoah Valley. Yet the possibilities of North America's far-western rivers, plains, forests, mountains, and people arrested his fertile imagination. As the Jeffersonian historian Donald Jackson has observed, no one of Jefferson's generation envisioned America's western potential more creatively or translated such a vision into a rational policy of western exploration and settlement more effectively. Jefferson forged a continental, if not global, vision of western enterprise and expansion. By rationalizing the chaotic process of western settlement, shaping policy with Indian tribes and rival European claimants, and sponsoring exploratory journeys to gain intellectual and political mastery of the West, Jefferson implemented his vision of an "Empire for Liberty" that had far-reaching consequences.
Western places and possibilities entranced Jefferson from childhood. He was, in the opinion of geographical historian John Logan Allen, a natural-born geographer. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a prominent landowner, surveyor, and cartographer in Virginia's Piedmont region. When Thomas was ten, Peter and several partners hatched an ambitious plan to explore the "western branches" of the Mississippi River with the objective of finding a "short and easy communication" with the Pacific Ocean and the East Indies. The outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1754, and Peter's death in 1758, halted their plans. But Peter Jefferson ensured his son's continuing geographical education by appointing one of his partners Thomas's guardian and another his schoolmaster.
Jefferson's career in law, agriculture, and politics, and particularly his role in launching the American Republic, prevented him from contemplating the West too deeply between 1758 and the 1780s. Yet during the Revolutionary period he developed two important themes that underpinned his later political and intellectual activism. The first was that small landholding farmers constituted the foundation of a free republic. In his Notes on Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson wrote that self-reliant farmers were "the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people." Jefferson was wary of cities, commerce, and the encumbrances created by commercial debt. America's vast reserves of land, he insisted, guaranteed self-sufficiency for generations of American farmers, while their ownership of individual land plots ensured that democracy would continue to expand along with the growing nation.
In order to preserve democracy's growth, Jefferson predicted that America would establish an "Empire of Liberty" that could compete with Britain for commercial control of North America, and ultimately export American models of freedom and democracy across the globe. Jefferson's conception of an Empire of Liberty and his agrarian republicanism provided a powerful ideological grounding for American expansion and underpinned his politically risky decision to purchase the vast, virtually unknown Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.
Researching and writing Notes on Virginia both enhanced and focused Jefferson's understanding of western geography. The master of Monticello amassed an unparalleled collection of books and maps detailing almost everything known or surmised about the West. As a child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson supported the production of what he and his contemporaries deemed useful knowledge. He tutored himself until he became the nation's foremost authority on the trans-Mississippi West. Yet, despite almost three hundred years of European exploration on the continent, the knowledge at his disposal was surprisingly limited. Rumors and speculation abounded; various accounts described a western landscape populated with active volcanoes, mountains of salt, herds of mastodon, even Welsh- and Hebrew-speaking Indians. Jefferson could observe for himself that east-flowing rivers descended from a height of land — the Blue Ridge Mountains — and drained into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a relatively simple matter for travelers to cross the divide and strike a tributary of the Ohio and, from there, float straight to New Orleans. Drawing on centuries of speculation about a fabled all-water Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Jefferson presumed that western rivers behaved similarly. In his mind, only a modest height of land divided the Missouri River Basin with interlocking tributaries of the Columbia, Rio Grande, or Colorado. Beyond lay the Pacific, and the treasures of Asia.
As a member, then president, of the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson worked to fill the gaps in his knowledge. He backed two ambitious, but unsuccessful, expeditions to the Far West in the 1780s. As United States Secretary of State in the 1790s, he wrote a detailed set of instructions to the famous French botanist André Michaux to guide an investigation of the upper Missouri River and a possible path to the Pacific.
During the same period, Jefferson played a leading role in developing a practical land distribution system for establishing his Empire of Liberty in the West. While serving as a congressional delegate from Virginia in the Continental Congress in 1784, Jefferson introduced legislation requiring that all states transfer their trans–Appalachian territorial claims to the United States and authorizing up to seventeen new states north of the Ohio River. A revised 1785 law, also guided by Jefferson, created a system for allocating and settling the land by dividing parcels into townships, ranges, and sections, and providing reasonable terms to settlers. Southerners narrowly defeated a provision of the 1784 ordinance that would have prohibited slave-owning west of the Appalachians, but were unable to block a similar article in a 1787 revision. The laws ushered in six new states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), banned slavery north of the Ohio River, provided the basis for a public land survey system, generated funds to support public education, and formulated a national concept of "public domain" that in turn paved the way for the 1862 Homestead Act and its successors. Based strongly in Jefferson's ideal of rational, orderly settlement by a society of small free-holding farmers, the Northwest Ordinances were as revolutionary in their own way as the Declaration of Independence.
By encouraging American settlement, Jefferson ran up against one of the insoluble truths of pioneering: The lands into which settlers flowed were already occupied. Like his attitudes toward slavery, Jefferson's views on American Indians were complex, multifaceted, and often ambivalent. He was a lifelong student of Indian ethnography and a strong admirer of Indian culture. And he prized the potential for commerce between Indian and American traders. In a paternalistic sense, he thought that Indians had the capacity to become as proficient in the arts of farming and civilization as Europeans. He welcomed a future time when Indians and Europeans would intermarry to create a new American race. In order to provide the time and space to bring this about, Jefferson encouraged eastern Indians to sell their land and move west of the Mississippi, where they would learn to become self-supporting agriculturalists away from the pressure of white settlement.
Jefferson's vision of a benevolent and mutually beneficial Indian policy never entirely worked. The president assumed that Indians wanted the same things he wanted for them. When they articulated different desires, he reluctantly condoned threats, bribery, and the liberal application of alcohol to acquire their acquiescence. He failed to recognize that many Indians already knew how to plant and farm, and he was unwilling to adjust his plans to accommodate the traditional cultures that he avidly admired. He also misjudged the American juggernaut of settlement and displacement. Historian Donald Jackson has generously observed that Jefferson's gradual policy for assimilation might have worked, provided that "he also could have controlled the temperament and unabating land hunger of the American people. As always, events ran ahead of Jefferson's schedule."
As president of the United States, Jefferson remained vigilant to external threats to the nation's political and economic independence. One such threat appeared in the report written by the British explorer Alexander Mackenzie relating his 1793 overland expedition through Canada to the Pacific. Mackenzie's feat had alarming implications. Thanks to the discovery of the mouth of the Columbia River by the American sea captain Robert Gray in 1792, the United States enjoyed a strong claim to the Pacific Northwest and all that it implied in terms of access to the North American interior and trans-Pacific trade with Asia. Yet Mackenzie's account made it clear that agents of the British Empire could, and would, travel through Canada to establish a rival claim to the Columbia. So the United States had to get there first.
Therefore, when Napoleon Bonaparte offered to sell France's claim to Louisiana to the United States for $15 million in 1803, Jefferson quickly accepted. The surprise deal not only removed France as a potential North American rival; it also doubled the size of the United States, opening up unimaginable possibilities for agricultural and economic growth. The Louisiana Purchase provided justification for plans that Jefferson had already secretly set in motion. Since 1802 he had been laying the groundwork for an overland military expedition up the Missouri River, across the Continental Divide, and on to the Pacific. So much has been written about the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–06 that it hardly bears repeating here. Suffice to say that Jefferson had several strong reasons to send the explorers across the country. The first was to find and chart the mythical northwestern water passage across the continent — an objective that failed, to Jefferson's bitter disappointment. The second was to establish an American political and commercial claim to the Pacific Northwest that gave the United States additional incentive to explore and develop routes across the continent. The third was to shed light on three centuries' worth of rumor and speculation by assembling a systematic, scientific catalogue of western flora, fauna, geography, and geology. The final objective was to inventory the Indian tribes of the Far West, to note their customs and political alliances, to test their appetite for trade with the United States, and to impress them with the might of the American nation.
That three of the four objectives of the Lewis and Clark expedition succeeded beyond all expectations cemented Jefferson's reputation as the Founding Father of the American West. Subsequent Jeffersonian explorations, including Zebulon Pike's forays to the headwaters of the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, further strengthened claims to an expanded western border while adding useful knowledge to science and commerce. Even as Lewis and Clark descended the Missouri River in 1806, they encountered upstream-bound trappers spurred on by the opportunities promised in the expedition's earlier reports.
Jefferson didn't whet the American appetite for expansion, but he focused it and gave it form. Through the land ordinances of the 1780s, he organized the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi; he provided for its settlement by formulating land distribution policies that presaged the Homestead Act.
By sponsoring journeys such as the Lewis and Clark expedition, he collected and deployed empirical knowledge to shape an American empire. And he articulated a vivid and enduring vision of a nation of citizen-farmers. That we still think of ourselves as the heirs of Jefferson, long after we embraced the opposing commercial view of Alexander Hamilton, shows how deeply the Virginian's imagination intertwines with our own. Jefferson's vision of the West, his force of personality, and his political strategy laid the groundwork for all that followed.
CHAPTER 2
PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
FINESSING BORDER AGREEMENTS FOR PEACE
When John Quincy Adams became secretary of state in 1817, he knew that the United States still lived in a dangerous neighborhood. The nation was just forty-one years old. It shared extensive, but undefined, borders with the North American colonies of Spain, Russia, and Great Britain. Most Americans had only a vague notion of where their nation ended and the western claims of European rivals began. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Empire was crumbling, creating additional chaos on American frontiers. Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela had achieved independence between 1815 and 1822. Still fragile, they were struggling to establish stable governments and solid economies and to protect themselves against further colonial aggression from Spain, Britain, France, and other nations with imperial designs. America's own territorial holdings seemed vulnerable. No clear boundary separated Louisiana Territory from British Canada between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean, nor did a clear line exist between American Louisiana and New Spain.
During his eight years as secretary of state, from 1817 until 1825, Adams labored to set these concerns to rest. In a pair of landmark treaties with Great Britain and Spain, he expanded American territory, established stable international borders, and minimized the chances that territorial friction would ignite an unwelcome war, thus setting the stage for western migration on a massive scale. As the architect of the Monroe Doctrine, Adams asserted the United States' role as the guarantor of republican freedom in the Western Hemisphere. And as a political leader in Congress more than twenty years later, he remained true to the wishes of the founding fathers by opposing western territorial acquisition as a means to expand slavery.
The son of revolutionary leaders John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams first accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission, to France in 1778, at the age of ten. At thirteen, the precocious New Englander served as secretary to the American minister of Russia, and then to his father, who was U. S. ambassador to France. John Quincy expanded his diplomatic portfolio when President George Washington made him U. S. minister to the Netherlands in 1794. Other appointments followed — he was named U. S. minister to Portugal, then Prussia, and served as a senator from 1803 until 1808.
In the Senate, Adams broke with his own Federalist Party to support the Louisiana Purchase engineered by his father's rival, Thomas Jefferson. Pressured to resign for this and other actions sustaining the Jeffersonian Republicans, Adams became the American minister to Russia during the James Madison administration. President Madison put Adams in charge of the peace commissioners authorized to negotiate the treaty ending the War of 1812. A term as U. S. minister to the Court of St. James followed. In 1817, President James Monroe recalled the seasoned diplomat to join his cabinet as secretary of state. As the son of patriots, Adams was an ardent nationalist, and he firmly believed that western expansion was both natural and inevitable. All of North America, including territories claimed by rival European nations, he argued, was the country's "natural dominion." He predicted that Americans would eventually spread westwards all the way to the Pacific, converting "howling deserts into cultural fields and populous villages" and strengthening both the institutions of liberty and the bonds of union.
Both Adams and President Monroe believed that western expansion would increase America's strength and enhance its stability. But nothing good would come from expansion if it triggered a disastrous war with America's Canadian neighbors, or even with the faltering Spanish Empire. The recent war with England deeply impressed upon both leaders the vulnerability of a young United States. In order to buy time and space for territorial and commercial expansion, the U. S. had to minimize the possibility of a border crisis. So Adams set to work negotiating border agreements that would preserve the peace.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Out Where the West Begins Volume 2"
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