EMPIRES OF THE IMAGINATION transatlantic histories of the louisiana purchase F Edited by Peter J. Kastor and François Weil University of Virginia Press | Charlottesville and London empires of the imagination Jeffersonian America Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Editors EMPIRES OF THE IMAGINATION transatlantic histories of the louisiana purchase F Edited by Peter J. Kastor and François Weil University of Virginia Press | Charlottesville and London University of Virginia Press © 2009 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2009 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Empires of the imagination : transatlantic histories of the Louisiana Purchase / edited by Peter J. Kastor and Francois Weil. p. cm. — (Jeffersonian America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-2807-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-2817-3 (e-book) 1. Louisiana Purchase. 2. United States — Relations — France. 3. France — Relations — United States. 4. United States — Territorial expansion — History — 19th century. 5. United States — Social conditions — 19th century. 6. United States — Civilization — French influences. 7. National characteristics, American. I. Kastor, Peter J. II. Weil, Françoise. E333.E57 2009 973.4'6 — dc22 2009011470 Contents Introduction peter j. kastor and françois weil 1 Prologue: Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood Peter S. Onuf 23 Empire The Louisiana Purchase and the Fictions of Empire Richard White 37 From Incorporation to Exclusion: Indians, Europeans, and Americans in the Mississippi Valley from 1699 to 1830 Cécile Vidal 62 The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana; or, Thomas Jefferson’s (Unpaid) Debt to Jean-Jacques Dessalines Laurent Dubois 93 A Tornado on the Horizon: The Jefferson Administration, the Retrocession Crisis, and the Louisiana Purchase James E. Lewis Jr. 117 Identity The Louisiana Purchase in the Demographic Perspective of its Time Paul Lachance 143 Refracted Reformations and the Making of Republicans Emily Clark 180 Slave Migrations and Slave Control in Spanish and Early American New Orleans Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec 204 “They Are All Frenchmen”: Background and Nation in an Age of Transformation Peter J. Kastor 239 Edward Livingston, America, and France: Making Law Mark Fernandez 268 Memory The Purchase and the Making of French Louisiana François Weil 301 Celebration and History: The Case of the Louisiana Purchase Jacques Portes and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol 327 List of Contributors 365 Index 367 empires of the imagination Peter J. Kastor and François Weil M Introduction n 2003, the United States and France found themselves at odds. As the United States prepared for war, France emerged as one of the most vocal critics of military operations in Iraq. It was a dispute that un- Ileashed passions in both countries, but also a certain degree of confu- sion. It had been years since France and the United States expressed such profoundly divergent foreign policies, and people struggled to decide just how to understand the dispute. Appropriately enough, the debate and the confusion unleashed by the Iraq War came just as people were commemorating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, an agreement that seemed (on the surface at least) to symbolize the way French-U.S. accord could benefit both coun- tries. Equally important, the diplomatic moments of 1803 and 2003 gained much of their power from their ability to touch raw nerves in both coun- tries. Yet the broader subject of how the United States and France have in- teracted with one another remained something of a mystery. The struggle to understand the French-U.S. dispute in 2003 and the problematic notion of French-U.S. accord in 1803 help to explain why. The commemoration of the Purchase proved far more important in the United States than in France. Of course, Americans are in the habit of commemorating bicentennials. They did so for the Declaration of In- dependence in 1976 and for the Constitution in 1987. In 2003, they did so again, this time for two events: the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. Much of the public commentary described the Pur- chase and the expedition as definitively American moments. Expansion into the North American West forced the citizens of the young republic to define what it meant to be American. If that process forced Americans to encounter anybody else, bicentennial commemorations usually fo- cused on Native Americans, and rightly so. Absent from so much of this discussion was the fact that the events of 1803 also constituted a profound moment in the relationship between the peoples and the governments of 2 peter j. kastor and franÇois weil France and the United States. The absence of a substantive discussion of that relationship was problematic in 2003 and remains revealing to this day, for it captures the difficulties that come with examining France and the United States in broad, connected terms. That remains the case despite the fact that the Louisiana Purchase was so clearly a moment when France and the United States together sought to transform North America. The basic statistics certainly suggest as much. In a single treaty, France ceded over 800,000 square miles that later became fifteen American states (either in whole or in part), doubled the size of the United States, and extended its border from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. The Purchase made the United States a con- tinental power, and began a process of territorial expansion that would eventually lead the United States to dominate North America and extend its reach on a global scale. The implications of the Purchase now appear simple, and they seem to reflect only the robust outlook of the United States. But what the Purchase meant in its own time was more subtle and more varied. While American policy makers proclaimed it a watershed, the negotiations came and went with relatively little fanfare in Paris, overwhelmed as the French were by the French Revolution and the war that, coming in the Revolution’s wake, consumed Europe for over two decades. The news came to New Orleans and Saint Louis — the centers of white settlement and colonial administration — in the months that followed. Residents in the northern Plains heard of the Purchase in 1805–6 from the American expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Still others did not learn for years, nor did they necessarily care, since the Purchase brought no immediate change to their lives. That seemingly simple act — receiving news of an international agreement — suggests the complexity at work in the Louisiana Purchase. That complexity notwithstanding, one thing is clear. Whether it was greeted with excitement, concern, or even disregard, the Purchase nonetheless came as a surprise to Frenchmen, who did not expect to sell Louisiana; to Americans, who did not anticipate buying it; to Spaniards, who had specifically demanded that Louisiana not be sold to the United States when they had been pressured to agree to return the colony to France; and to Indians, who marveled at the gall of whites who claimed ownership of land that Indians inhabited and controlled. And while the Purchase might have no immediate impact on residents of the Plains and the Rockies, residents of the Mississippi River suddenly found that the Introduction 3 balance of power in North America had shifted, to some advantageously and to others ominously. So unexpected was the Purchase that it could properly have entered American memories as the Louisiana Surprise, not the Purchase. But it did not. Over the two centuries that followed, the idea that the lands included in the 1803 treaty belonged as if naturally to the United States became pre- dominant, so predominant indeed that it excluded or crowded out people, stories, and events that did not fit into this master narrative. That story was well in place by 20 December 1903, when a celebration at the Cabildo on Jackson Square in New Orleans — the very site of the transfer of power exactly a century before — testified to the success of the triumphant na- tionalist interpretation of the events of 1803. The Purchase, it was argued at the time, announced and symbolized the glorious American expansion across the continent, which would ultimately result in the conquest of the continent and the making of the United States into a world power in the wake of the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898. The 1903 centennial celebration also sought to define racial categories. Whether they were cel- ebrating white settlers, showcasing a Native American history that seemed to be reaching its end, or ignoring the slaves and free persons of color of African and Afro-Creole descent who had been so conspicuously part of Louisiana in 1803, exhibition planners had a clear racial story they wanted to tell. While the limitations and problems with this triumphalist vision of the Purchase now appear obvious, efforts to revise that story have cre- ated their own set of problems. After a century and a half in which writers of all stripes tended to celebrate this story, scholars claiming to reject that outlook in the late twentieth century nonetheless kept certain as- sumptions in place. The United States remained a powerful nation shap- ing its own future, only that story functioned less as a form of celebration than as the basis of a critique for imperialism that explained everything from Indian Removal to the Vietnam War. The Louisiana Purchase was a story of empires, only instead of a story in which the Europeans and later the United States brought progressively greater forms of civilization to the West, those empires eradicated peoples, destroyed cultures, and crushed individual spirit.