"Jefferson and the Empire of Liberty"


Jefferson and the Empire of Liberty
From Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 185-89, 196-99, 202-208.


Drew McCoy


Many years after his first election to the presidency, Thomas Jefferson commented that "the revolution of 1800" was "as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form." Jefferson was undoubtedly using the term "revolution" not in the modern sense of a radical creation of a new order, but in the traditional sense of a return to first principles, of a restoration of original values and ideals that had been overturned or repudiated. For him, the election of 1800 was a revolution because it marked a turning back to the true republican spirit of 1776. Jefferson was excited by the prospect of the first implementation of the principles of America's republican revolution in the national government created by the Constitution of 1787, since in his eyes a minority faction consisting of an American Walpole and his corrupt minions had captured control of that government almost immediately after its establishment.... Jefferson's fundamental goal in 1801 was to end this threatened "Anglicization" of both American government and society. In so doing he would restore the basis for the development of a truly republican political economy....

Within the Jeffersonian framework of assumptions and beliefs, three essential conditions were necessary to create and sustain such a republican political economy: a national government free from any taint of corruption, an unobstructed access to an ample supply of open land, and a relatively liberal international commercial order that would offer adequate foreign markets for America's flourishing agricultural surplus. The history of the 1790s had demonstrated all too well to the Jeffersonians the predominant danger to a republican political economy of corruption emanating from the federal government. They were especially troubled by the deleterious political, social, and moral repercussions of the Federalists' financial system, which they regarded as the primary vehicle of corruption both in the political system and in the country at large....

In itself, the electoral revolution of 1800 promised to remove the primary threat to a republican economy posed by the machinations of a corrupt administration. But the Jeffersonians also had to secure the other necessary guarantors of republicanism: landed and commercial expansion. Although the pressure of population growth on the supply of land in the United States had never been a problem of the same immediate magnitude as political corruption, the social and economic dislocations of the 1780s had prompted some concern with this matter. Through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, undoubtedly the greatest achievement of his presidency, Jefferson appeared to eliminate this problem for generations, if not for centuries, to come. But the third and thorniest problem, in the form of long-standing restrictions on

American commerce, proved far more frustrating and intractable. Through an embargo and finally a war the Jeffersonians consistently tried but failed to remove this nagging impediment to the fulfillment of their republican vision.

The presidential administrations from 1801 to 1817 appear more consistent when viewed from this perspective -that is, as a sustained Jeffersonian attempt to secure the requisite conditions for a republican political economy. Securing such a political economy, as the Jeffersonians conceived of it, required more than merely capturing control of the government from a corrupt minority faction; it also required the elimination of specific dangers and the maintenance of certain conditions, and these concerns largely shaped the Jeffersonian approach to both domestic and foreign policy. There was never any question that positive, concrete measures would have to be taken to forestall the development of social conditions that were considered antithetical to republicanism. Hamilton and the Federalists had threatened to make American society old and corrupt long before its time. Now the Jeffersonians set out to reverse the direction of Federalist policy in order to maintain the country at a relatively youthful stage of development. Hoping to avoid the social evils both of barbarous simplicity and of overrefined, decadent maturity, the Jeffersonians proposed to escape the burden of an economically sophisticated society without sacrificing a necessary degree of republican civilization. Their aspiration to evade social corruption and the ravages of time was a fragile and demanding dream, and the quest to fulfill it was not without its ironies.

On the one hand, the Republican party attracted political support from scores of Americans whose outlook can properly be termed entrepreneurial. Opposition to the Federalist system was never limited to agrarian-minded ideologues who unequivocally opposed a dynamic commercial economy. Many Jeffersonians were anxious to participate in the creation of an expansive economy and to reap its many rewards. Frustrated by the failure of Federalist policies to serve their immediate needs, ambitious men-on-themake, engaged in a variety of economic pursuits, enlisted under the banner of Jeffersonianism in a crusade to secure the advantages and opportunities they desired. Perhaps some of them saw no contradiction between their personal material ambitions and the traditional vision of a simple, bucolic republic articulated by the leader of their party. Assessing the economic psychology of many of these enterprising Jeffersonians, one scholar has suggested the complex paradox "of capitalists of all occupations denying the spirit of their occupations," adding that "it appears that many Republicans wanted what the Federalists were offering, but they wanted it faster, and they did not want to admit that they wanted it at all." Such a characterization cannot be applied, however, to Jefferson and Madison, and in their case we observe a more poignant irony. As their experience as policymakers soon demonstrated, the Jeffersonian endeavor to secure a peaceful, predominantly agricultural republic demanded a tenaciously expansive foreign policy - a foreign policy that ultimately endangered both the peace and the agricultural character of the young republic....

The Mississippi crisis of 1801-1803, which culminated in the Louisiana Purchase, affected crucial and long-standing American concerns. Since the 1780s most Americans had regarded free navigation of the Mississippi River and the right of deposit at New Orleans as essential to the national interest. Without the access to market that these conditions permitted, westward expansion would be stalled, because settlers in the trans-Appalachian regions necessarily depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries to sustain them as active and prosperous republican farmers. The Pinckney Treaty of 1795 temporarily resolved this nagging problem, since the Spanish agreed in the treaty to grant the United States free navigation of the Mississippi with a three-year right of deposit at New Orleans. This treaty, along with the Jay Treaty of the same year, cleared the way for a burst of western settlement. By 1801 the Mississippi River provided the primary access to market for the produce of more than half a million Americans living in the trans-Appalachian West, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee. When Spain made a secret agreement in 1800 to transfer possession of Louisiana back to France, however, the old problem took on a new and more ominous dimension. As Jefferson and most Americans immediately recognized, Napoleonic ambitions in the Mississippi valley posed a far more serious threat to the westward course of American empire than Spain ever had.

To add insult to injury, before formally transferring Louisiana to Napoleon, the Spanish intendant at New Orleans revoked the American right of deposit in violation of the Pinckney Treaty. Many Americans, including eastern Federalists as well as westerners, responded with outraged belligerence and threats of war. Jefferson shrewdly contained this war fever and proceeded cautiously, employing a strategy that ultimately contributed to the convergence of circumstances that made the Louisiana Purchase possible. The Purchase solved once and for all the Mississippi problem that had festered for twenty years-the United States gained formal control of the river, both its eastern and western banks, and of New Orleans.

In the minds of many Americans, the question of the Mississippi River involved much more than a narrow concern with the prosperity or profits of western farmers. What they saw to be at stake in the Mississippi crisis of 1801-1803 was the very character of western society itself. This concern with social character, especially with the interdependence of economic life and the moral integrity of the individual personality, was part of a fundamentally republican world view. To Americans committed to the construction of a republican political economy, it was imperative that public policy be directed toward the creation of social conditions that would permit and even foster the maintenance of a virtuous people.... What the Louisiana Purchase made possible, according to many commentators, was the existence of a republican civilization in the American West.

Most important, control of the Mississippi permitted westerners to engage in a secure and dynamically expanding foreign commerce and, as always, Americans saw the significance of commerce in very broad social and moral terms. It was repeatedly asserted that an active commerce that provided a secure and dependable access to foreign markets was absolutely necessary to establish and maintain the republican character of western society. A primary concern here was the familiar emphasis on "industry" as the cornerstone of the republican personality. Obstructions to foreign commerce, it was argued, always "palsied" the labor of American farmers and discouraged their industry by destroying incentives to production. Eventually, such obstructions led to indolence, lethargy, dissipation, and barbarous decadence -characteristics hardly befitting a republican people....

By rectifying the chronic problem of an uncertain, rapidly fluctuating demand for western agricultural surpluses, the Purchase thus served an important social and moral purpose. "No ruinous fluctuations in commerce need now be apprehended," noted another western commentator, for "agriculture may depend upon those steady markets which trade shall open to industry." There could be no doubt that a "want of markets for the produce of the soil" always had disastrous consequences, for "it saps the foundations of our prosperity; subverts the end of society, and literally tends to keep us in that rude, uncultivated state, which has excited the derision and contempt of other communities." "As long as this is the state of our country," the same observer queried in familiar fashion, "what encouragement is there for the mind to throw off its native ferocity?" By permanently securing control of the Mississippi River and the promise of boundless foreign markets beyond, the Louisiana Purchase did more than pave the way for economic prosperity. By providing the incentive to industry that shaped a republican people, it laid the necessary basis for the westward expansion of republican civilization itself....

If the American republic was in a race against time, as many Republicans believed, the Louisiana Purchase indeed offered a boost to the republican cause. "The history of the world," noted Abraham Bishop, a prominent Connecticut Republican, "teaches that nations, like men, must decay. Ours Will not forever escape the fate of others. Wealth, luxury, vice, aristocracies will attack us in our decline: these are evils of society, never to be courted, but to be put to as distant a day as possible." Viewed in this light, the acquisition of Louisiana was of crucial importance to all Americans, not just to southerners and westerners, for it pushed far into the future that dreaded day when America would become a densely populated society characterized by inequality, luxury, and dependence. "We see in Louisiana an assurance of long life to our cause," Bishop exulted. "The Atlantic states, as they advance to that condition of society, where wealth and luxury tend to vice and aristocracies, will yield to that country accessions of enterprising men. The spirit of faction, which tends to concentrate, will be destroyed by this diffusion." Expansion across space was the only effective antidote to population growth, development through time, and the corruption that accompanied them. "What territory can be too large," David Ramsay asked rhetorically in 1804, "for a people, who multiply with such unequalled rapidity?" "By enlarging the empire of liberty," noted President Jefferson in 1805, "we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of our country which gave them birth."

Jefferson's notion of a continuously expanding "empire of liberty" in the Western Hemisphere was a bold intellectual stroke, because it flew in the face of the traditional republican association of expansion and empire with luxury, corruption, and especially despotism. The familiar bugbear of the Roman Empire and its decline through imperial expansion was the most common source of this association. According to Jefferson and most American republicans, expansion would preserve, rather than undermine, the republican character of America. In addition to forestalling development through time and diffusing the spirit of faction, expansion was crucial to American security in its broadest sense. Removing the French from Louisiana also removed the need for a dangerous military establishment in the face of a contiguous foreign threat. It greatly reduced, too, the likelihood of American involvement in a ruinous war that would impose on the young republic the vicious Old World system of national debts, armies, navies, taxation, and the like. For a plethora of reasons, in short, peaceful expansion was sustaining the Jeffersonian republic.

But if the Louisiana Purchase removed some serious obstacles to the realization of Jefferson's republican empire, it also exposed some of the tensions and contradictions within that vision. Since the proper functioning of the empire required both westward and commercial expansion, an assertive, even aggressive, foreign policy would often be necessary to secure the republic. The Jeffersonians frequently boasted of the isolation and independence of the United States; curiously, this claim obscured the fact that American republicanism demanded both an open international commercial order and the absence of any competing presence on the North American continent. The United States could isolate itself from foreign affairs and the potential for conflict only if it was willing to resign its tenacious commitment to westward expansion and free trade. To do this, however, would be to abandon the two most important pillars of the Jeffersonian vision of a republican political economy. Indeed, given the commitment to that vision, the national independence and isolated self-sufficiency boasted of by the Jeffersonians were illusory....

The Jeffersonian vision of an expanding republican civilization demanded this unimpeded access to foreign markets-for economic, social, and moral reasons-and to this extent the republic was something less than the fully autonomous and self-sufficient entity the Jeffersonians usually portrayed it to be. If the necessary guarantors of the Republican vision included an interventionist foreign policy, territorial aggression, Indian removal or management, and even war, might not the means of achieving an escape from time subvert their fundamental purpose? Ultimately, as the events of Jefferson's second administration and Madison's presidency demonstrated, the struggle to secure the Jeffersonian republic culminated in the need to wage a second war for American independence.