A Wilderness So Immense (50 page)

“The real truth is,” Hamilton continued after several paragraphs about Spain and France and St. Domingue, “Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled … to relinquish his darling plan of colonizing the banks of the Mississippi.” This alone enabled Jefferson’s administration to achieve “what the feebleness and pusillanimity of its miserable system of measures could never have acquired.” Moreover, “after making due allowance for great events,” if Hamilton were to assign credit for the Louisiana Purchase to anyone, “the merit of it… [was] due to our ambassador Chancellor Livingston [of New York], and not to the Envoy Extraordinary” from Virginia, James Monroe.
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Louisiana’s immense acreage was “extremely problematical” for Hamilton. New Orleans would have been “perfectly adequate to every purpose,” he thought, “for whoever is in possession of that, has the uncontrouled command of the river.” Perhaps in time the United States might barter the Louisiana territory “for the Floridas,” which Hamilton regarded as “obviously of far greater value to us than all the immense, undefined region west of the river.” Calculating that only one sixteenth of American territory east of the Mississippi was “yet under occupation,” Hamilton regarded expansion west of the river as “too distant and remote to strike the mind of a sober politician with much force.”
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Hamilton saw the dangers of the Louisiana Purchase as readily apparent. America was sure to suffer “all the injuries of a too widely dispersed population”—and worse. “By adding to the great weight of the western part of our territory,” Hamilton predicted, the Louisiana Purchase “must hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the Government.” And finally there was the existing population. “How they are to be governed is another question,” Hamilton wrote. “Whether as a colony”—with the risk of transforming the American republic into an empire—“or … an integral part of the United States”—despite differences of language, culture, religion, and ethnicity. “The probable consequences” of the Louisiana Purchase, Alexander Hamilton concluded,

In a parting shot at the president, Hamilton attributed all credit for the treaty to his fellow New Yorker, Chancellor Livingston. “The cession was voted in [Bonaparte’s] Council of State on the 8th of April,” Hamilton
wrote (adopting a chronology that must have been supplied by Rufus King), “and Mr. Munro did not even arrive till the 12th.”
²³

A week after Hamilton’s unsigned editorial appeared in New York, more strident opinions began to fill New England’s Federalist newspapers. On Thursday, July 13, a letter in Boston’s
Columbian Centinel
opened the litany of complaint. The author, who identified himself as Fabricius, was none other than the High Federalist of Dedham, Massachusetts, Fisher Ames. Forced into retirement in 1797 by the lung disease that would claim his life at the age of fifty on the Fourth of July 1808, Ames had led the Federalist party in the House of Representatives during the Washington administration. Through his brilliant newspaper essays and an extensive private correspondence, this self-described leader of the Essex Junto retained an influence among New England Federalists rivaled in 1803 only by Hamilton’s.
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Louisiana, Ames declared, was “a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” Although the exact figure had not yet been announced, Fabricius reckoned that the price was too high: “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much.” Fresh land in the west was sure to “drain our people away from the pursuit of… manufactures and commerce.” Worst of all, the watershed of the Mississippi “may be cut up into States without number, but each with
two votes in the Senate.”
Supported by their vassals in the west, the slaveholders of the Old Dominion would dominate the enlarged nation—“imperial Virginia, arbitress of the whole.”
²⁵

Fisher Ames and his Federalist friends regarded Virginia’s lust for possession of the Mississippi watershed—dating back to the congressional dispute over the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations of 1785–1786—as proof of the Old Dominion’s malevolent passion for preeminence in national politics. “The
great
state,” Ames wrote Timothy Dwight, editor of the
Hartford Courant
and the
Connecticut Mirror,
“has the ambition to be the
great nation.”
While New Englanders “make turnpikes and busy ourselves with local objects,” Ames complained to Rufus King, “Virginia rides the great horse.” The Old Dominion, Ames fretted in an essay published after his death, was large enough to subvert the American republic into an imperial monarchy. By expanding the nation into the “unmeasured world beyond that river,” he lamented to Boston Federalist Christopher Gore, the republic was rushing

“Is Virginia to be our Rome?” Ames asked, as he projected Jefferson into the role of Caesar or the Emperor Bonaparte. “Why should it be supposed,” he wondered,

Race and ethnicity—as well as calculations of regional self-interest—figured prominently in Federalist attitudes. “Virginia holds her preponderance, as mistress of the Union,” Ames complained in an essay for the
Repertory
that was reprinted in the
Boston Gazette,
because the three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the south an advantage in congressional representation and the Electoral College. “Without the black votes, Mr. Jefferson would not have been president,” Ames wrote, referring not to black
voters
but to the extra weight that the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution added to the votes of their masters. In order to terminate an “inequality [that] will be still more extended by the acquisition of Louisiana,” Timothy Pickering introduced a constitutional amendment to compute state representation solely on the basis of free population—but it died on the table in the United States Senate. Decisions about America’s future, Fisher Ames wrote in the
New-England Palladium,
were being decided by
“three fifths
of the ancient dominion, and the offscourings of Europe.”
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Federalists regarded the residents of Louisiana with similar disdain and Article III of the treaty with disgust. “Having bought an empire,” Ames asked, “who is to be emperor? The sovereign people? and what people? all, or only the people of the dominant states?” Otters, he fumed, were more capable of self-government than Louisiana’s

“New Orleans,” a meandering Federalist reported to Alexander Hamilton from the relative safety of Natchez, is

“Should this precious treaty go into operation,” warned Josiah Quincy, a future president of Harvard College, “I doubt not [that] thick skinned beasts will crowd Congress Hall, Buffaloes from the head of the Missouri and Alligators from the Red River.” The size of Louisiana and the diversity of its population were threats to the republic. “In a territory so extensive as the United States, comprising within its limits … peoples whose sentiments, habits, manners, and prejudices, are very different, and whose local interests and attachments are various,” a Fourth of July orator reminded the citizens of tiny Conway Massachusetts, in 1804, “it is not strange that the seed of division should exist.”
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When the Louisiana Purchase sent the big red playground ball of separatism bouncing once again through the adolescent republic, Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, and Rufus King held fast to the nationalist vision of High Federalism, never wavering in their commitment to the union. Many of their friends in Massachusetts and Connecticut, however, were ready (as King had been in 1786) to grab the ball and go home. “The Virginia faction have certainly formed a deliberate plan to govern and depress New England,” Salem-born Timothy Higginson, a founding director of the Bank of Massachusetts and member of the Essex Junto, told Pickering, “and this eagerness to extend our territory and create new States is an essential part of it.”
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The separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase was missing three veterans from 1786. Nathaniel Gorham had died in 1796, bankrupt after financing 2.6 million acres of New York land with depreciated state currency that Hamilton’s funding plan restored to its original value. Essex attorney Nathan Dane was on the sidelines, too deaf for politics and hard at work on a nine-volume
General Abridgment and Digest of American Laws,
which would establish his reputation in the field of American jurisprudence. Dane would attribute his subsequent participation in the separatist Hartford Convention of 1814 to the conviction that “somebody must go to prevent mischief.” Theodore Sedgwick had recently become an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and was opposed to any “abandonment of the union.” Sedgwick
agreed with his good friend Alexander Hamilton that the “Dismembrement of our Empire” offered “no relief to our real Disease; which is DEMOCRACY, the poison of which by a subdivision will only be … the more virulent.”
³⁰

At the head of the separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase was Massachusetts senator Timothy Pickering, of Essex County. Self-righteous, suspicious, and conspiratorial by nature, Pickering was one of the most disagreeable personalities in all of American political history. A man who entertained himself by compiling dossiers on his political enemies.
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A man whose fervent prayer at the age of eighty-two was:

“The Great Land-Jobber” was one of the milder epithets that Pickering coined after the Louisiana Purchase to describe “the Moonshine philosopher of Monticello,” whom he regarded as “one of the worst men who ever directed the affairs of a free country.”
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On Christmas Eve 1803, Coyle’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill in Washington—home away from home for New England congressmen—became the headquarters of the separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase.
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“Although the end of all our Revolutionary labors and expectations is disappointment,” Pickering wrote to his old friend Judge Richard Peters,

A month later Pickering outlined the separatist plan in greater detail to Salem-born George Cabot, a former senator and future president of the separatist Hartford Convention of 1814. “Shall we sit still,” Pickering asked,

“When
and
how
is a separation to be effected?” Pickering asked rhetorically.

From Coyle’s boardinghouse, Pickering and his lieutenants, including Uriah Tracy and Roger Griswold, of Connecticut, were discreetly rallying their forces. “The Connecticut gentlemen have seriously meditated upon it,” Pickering reported, and “we suppose the British Provinces in Canada and Nova Scotia… may become members of the Northern league. A liberal treaty of amity and commerce will form a bond of union between Great Britain and the Northern confederacy highly useful to both.” Griswold, who became the separatist leader in the House, calculated that the states “to be embraced by the Northern confederacy” could readily pay off their share of the national debt, “leaving out the millions given for Louisiana.”
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New Hampshire congressman Samuel Hunt recruited his Senate colleague William Plumer into the separatist movement with the assurance that Hunt’s uncle, Massachusetts governor Caleb Strong, was already on board. “The ratification of this treaty and the possession of that immense territory will hasten the dissolution of our present government,” Plumer had told his colleagues in October 1803.