"Motives of Peculiar Urgency": Local Diplomacy in Louisiana, 1803-1821 Author(s): Peter J. Kastor Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 819-848 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674501 Accessed: 24-10-2018 05:55 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674501?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The William and Mary Quarterly This content downloaded from 64.9.59.169 on Wed, 24 Oct 2018 05:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Motives of Peculiar Urgency": Local Diplomacy in Louisiana, i803-i82i Peter J. Kastor R 0 BERT R. Livingston and James Monroe were nothing if not diplo- matic. This was true in dealing with their superiors in Washington just as it was in their negotiations with foreign emissaries. No sooner had they signed their names to the Louisiana Purchase in the spring of i803 than they rushed a letter home explaining their actions. Writing to Secretary of State James Madison, Livingston and Monroe (the American minister to France and the minister plenipotentiary, respectively) acknowledged that "An acquisition of so great an extent was, we well Know, not contemplated by our appointment; but we are persuaded that the Circumstances and Considerations which induced us to make it, will justify us."1 Monroe and Livingston had good reason to be concerned. When Madison and President Thomas Jefferson had dispatched Monroe to Paris only two months earlier, they had made clear both the breadth of their strategic outlook and the limits of their territorial ambition. Jefferson and Madison hoped to secure the cession of New Orleans and the Floridas (an ill-defined geography following the Gulf Coast east of the Mississippi River). Instead, Napoleon offered all of France's holdings in North America, and the Americans soon learned he would sell nothing less.2 Most studies that consider the Mississippi Valley as a factor in American foreign policy and domestic politics end here, with the transfer of Louisiana to the United States.3 But American policymakers hardly stopped worrying Peter J. Kastor teaches American culture studies and history at Washington University in St. Louis. He would like to thank Stephen Aron, Henry Berger, and David Konig for reading early drafts of this article, as well as Paul Lachance, Philip Morgan, and two anonymous review- ers at the William and Mary Quarterly for their thorough and constructive commentary through- out the editorial process. He is also indebted to James E. Lewis, Jr., Peter S. Onuf, and J.C.A. Stagg for their advice. Finally, he thanks the editors of the Papers of James Madison for their invaluable assistance in researching this topic. 1 Monroe and Livingston to James Madison, May 13, 1803, in Mary A. Hackett et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series, 5 vols. to date (Charlottesville, 1984- (hereafter cited as PJM-SS), 4:60i. 2 Madison to Livingston and Monroe, Mar. 2, 1803, ibid., 364-78. For the diplomats' com- ments on the final form of the Purchase, see Livingston to Madison, May I2, 1803, ibid., 590-94, and Monroe to Jefferson, May i8, 1803, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress Microfilm Collection, reel 45. 3 This holds true for most historians of American foreign policy, domestic politics, and political culture. For examples, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 202-03; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LVIII, Number 4, October 200i This content downloaded from 64.9.59.169 on Wed, 24 Oct 2018 05:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 820 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY about Louisiana in 1803, for they considered the Louisiana Purchase a flawed document and not just because it failed to deliver the Floridas.4 With the acquisition of "so great an extent" of land came a corresponding increase in population that the United States had to govern. The boundaries of that land remained in dispute, and the loyalty of that population could not be taken for granted. In the process of extending American sovereignty to encompass both Louisiana and its residents, American foreign relations acquired a vital-and revealing-domestic component. Although historians of American border- lands have called attention to the diplomatic conditions of the North American interior, other scholars have rarely incorporated their work. Historians of the early American republic have certainly argued for the inter- section of foreign policy and domestic affairs, but the linkage they describe usually emphasizes the domestic system that policymakers hoped to preserve through a successful foreign policy, not the way that foreign policy and domestic governance overlapped daily. That interpretations focusing on mat- ters of ideology dominate the field of early American policymaking goes a long way toward explaining this perspective. So, too, does the emphasis on elite negotiations with European powers.5 And while diplomatic historians have shown little interest in domestic affairs, social and cultural historians have by and large eschewed a detailed consideration of diplomacy because it so often seems the preserve of the policy-making elite. A focus on the American borderlands reveals a fundamentally different process at work in the early American republic, a process in which diplomacy was inextricably linked to daily life. Nowhere was this more true than in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Instead of acting through officials dedicated exclu- sively to diplomatic negotiations, policymakers in Washington had to rely on-and contend with-civil and military officials on the periphery charged New Nation: A Biography (Oxford, 1970), 760-62; and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making ofAmerican Nationalism, i776-i820 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 264-65, 275. 4 Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York, 1976), 213-i6; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford, i990), 117-56. For studies that have considered the long-term tensions associated with the Louisiana Purchase, see James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, i783-i829 (Chapel Hill, i998); Peter S. Onuf, "The Expanding Union," in David Thomas Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford, 1995), so-8o; Peter Onuf and Nicholas G. Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, i776-i8i4 (Madison, 1993), 104-13. 5 For recent surveys that have examined the problems facing the study of early American foreign relations, see Kinley Brauer, "The Need For a Synthesis of American Foreign Relations, I8I5-I86i," Journal of the Early Republic, 14 (I994), 467-76, and "A Call to Revolution: A Roundtable on Early U. S. Foreign Relations," Diplomatic History, 22 (i998), 63-120. For stud- ies that consider either borderland diplomacy or domestic issues of foreign relations, see Philip Coolidge Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-On/s Treaty of i8I9 (Berkeley, 1939); Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, i795-i830 (Albuquerque, i989); Lewis, American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood; and Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, i800-i82i (Tuscaloosa, I997). This content downloaded from 64.9.59.169 on Wed, 24 Oct 2018 05:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LOCAL DIPLOMACY IN LOUISIANA 821 with numerous responsibilities. Although federal leaders never surrendered authority altogether, their delegates enjoyed considerable latitude so long as their own interpretation of national policies coincided with sentiments in the cabinet. Meanwhile, frontier negotiating partners including Indian nations, European colonial officials, and the leaders of the emerging successor states to the disintegrating Spanish empire all attempted to press their own terms on the United States officials stationed on the borderlands. Diplomacy took shape in this confluence of local disputes and international revolution. This article considers that process by looking at Louisiana (both the State of Louisiana and its jurisdictional predecessor, the Territory of Orleans) during the two decades following the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana became home to a system that can be labeled "local diplomacy," in which international relations on the borderlands ran parallel to but were never entirely distinct from the elite negotiations that are the familiar stuff of diplomatic history. Foreign policy played itself out on the borderlands, and frontier residents in turn shaped the course of American foreign relations. Louisiana was surrounded by a European presence, much of it Spanish. Scholars have written social histories of the intercultural contact that abounded on American frontiers and have provided a particularly sophisti- cated understanding of the dynamics that reigned as people of French, Spanish, British, African, and Native American ancestry came into contact with one another.6 This study instead explores a subject that has received less scholarly attention: federal policymaking, both foreign and domestic.