When fate let America purchase a new dream

Two hundred years on, the Louisiana Purchase has the deceptive look of destiny. The acquisition of the great swath of land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and westward from the Mississippi to the Rockies occurred so neatly that it can appear preordained, inevitable, the first working out of a divine intent to transform the young, fragile republic into the greatest power on Earth. At the time, however, it was generally thought of as the dumbest kind of luck. “It has the air of enchantment,” exclaimed a delighted Gen. Horatio Gates, and from the other side of the political divide, Alexander Hamilton agreed. “The acquisition,” he said sourly, “was solely owing to a fortuitous concurrence of unforeseen and unexpected circumstances.”

Jon Kukla’s view, presented in “A Wilderness So Immense,”a sprawling and utterly absorbing account, involves neither God nor a crapshoot but the application of chaos theory to history. What interests him is how individual characters and appetites interweave to create great events: The way a butterfly’s wing creates a tornado is analogous to how the United States more than doubled the size of its territory.

The strategic value of Louisiana had long been recognized in Europe. France claimed it first as the central section of an imperial arc that began in Quebec and ended in the Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo. But once Quebec was lost in 1759, France traded the territory to Spain, which wanted a buffer state to insulate the silver mines of Central America against attacks from Britain’s Atlantic colonies. Napoleon decided in 1802 to rebuild the French empire and negotiated the colony’s return from its Spanish rulers. Yet it was not these apparently clear-cut decisions that determined Louisiana’s fate but the myriad workings of the dreams and hopes of individuals.

Adventure and religious impulse were what enticed the first Europeans, explorer Louis Jolliet and missionary Jacques Marquette, to voyage down the Mississippi in 1673, but once French rule was established, other adventurous spirits had to accept that Louisiana was a royal possession with strict rules governing immigration (only Catholics allowed) and economic life (its lumber, indigo and rice could be shipped only to France or the Caribbean colonies). Once the Spaniards took over, they proved even more autocratic, and so many French settlers left that, as one commentator observed: “Property lost three-fourths of its value. Homes were not repaired. The farmer planted no more than he could consume.” When two New Orleans traders, Jean Dupuy and Pedro Bailly, who shipped lumber and dealt in real estate, made the mistake of calling for more political and economic freedom, the governor deported them to Cuba. It was no coincidence that a century after the first exploration, barely 40,000 settlers were scattered across the land.

Just east of the Mississippi, a different pattern can be seen in the unchecked migration of settlers across the Appalachians to Kentucky and Tennessee. “Every industrious citizen of the United States has the power to become a freeholder,” wrote an English traveler, John Melish, about the unique advantage of being an American. “The land being purely his own, there is no setting limits to his prosperity. No proud tyrant can lord it over him.”

Consequently, between 1784 and 1800, the population of Kentucky grew from 30,000 to 200,000. In just one week in 1795, John Wesley Hunt, a storeowner, sent five wagons across the mountains from Pennsylvania carrying wine, linen, china, shoe polish, ginger and snuff for sale to Kentucky settlers. These goods could be bought for cash or for flour, tobacco, whiskey, beeswax or any other commodity that Hunt could then float down the Mississippi and sell through New Orleans to the wider world.

The Americans, wrote one alarmed Spanish governor of Louisiana, were “a new and vigorous people, hostile to all subjection, advancing and multiplying with a prodigious rapidity.” Numbers were going to decide Louisiana’s fate. But Kukla’s perspective demonstrates just how undestined that fate really was. The prosperity of the Western settlers depended upon the Mississippi River, and whoever held New Orleans effectively controlled its use. If the U.S. could not guarantee unrestricted access, many were prepared to change loyalties. It was just such an inducement that persuaded Gen. James Wilkinson, a hero of the American Revolution, not only to swear allegiance to Spain but also to assert that “the leading characters of Kentucky would be willing to open a negociation [sic] for our admission to [Spain’s] protection as subjects.” Wilkinson might have been optimistic, but no less a figure than George Washington judged that “[t]he Western settlers stand as it were upon a pivot, the touch of a feather would turn them any way.” When the Spanish promised to relax rules of land ownership, significant American colonies quickly grew up around Natchez and Vicksburg, lured by the good black earth on the banks of the Mississippi and by river access. And once the French thought of recovering their old colony, they used similar promises to persuade another hero, Gen. Rogers Clark, to enlist Americans on their side.

With formidable command of his sources, especially the reports of Spanish governors, Kukla shows how the floating loyalties of Kentucky and Tennessee settlers blew up a political storm that seemed as likely to split the Union in half as to double it. Southerners like Thomas Jefferson were determined to hold the Westerners to the Union and saw free navigation on the Mississippi as a fundamental American interest, but many Northerners shared the opinion of Massachusetts congressman Rufus King that “Every citizen of the Atlantic states who emigrates to the westward of the Allegany is a total Loss to our confederacy.” In their eyes, the closure of the river to American trade, even the secession of Kentucky and Tennessee to Spain, would be an undisguised blessing.

Yet perhaps the most decisive beat of butterfly wings happened far away on the island of Santo Domingo -- modern Haiti -- where French revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality inspired thousands of individual slaves. To suppress their uprising under Toussaint L’Ouverture, Napoleon diverted troops that he had earmarked for service in Louisiana and the re-establishment of French power in North America. In 1802, Toussaint’s army and yellow fever destroyed them. With the loss of his soldiers, Napoleon’s American ambitions evaporated, and Louisiana became redundant. But in Europe, he still needed funds for his war with Britain. On the afternoon of April 11, 1803, Robert Livingston, the American minister in Paris, met Talleyrand, the French foreign secretary, expecting to discuss the purchase of land around the mouth of the Mississippi to guarantee unrestricted use of the river for Western settlers. To Livingston’s surprise, Talleyrand suddenly asked “whether we wished to have the whole of Louisiana.”

So exactly did the needs of the two sides match that, barely three weeks later, a price of $15 million had been agreed upon and a treaty was being drawn up to transfer 565 million acres to the United States. From this raw material would grow the 13 Midwestern states, but perhaps more important was the effect the purchase had upon Americans’ vision of their country. Increasingly, they saw its natural border as the Pacific, and once the first pioneers began to follow Lewis and Clark, commentators began alluding to this expansion as destiny. But that isn’t how history happens: As Kukla’s book suggests, there is nothing predestined about the U.S.’ shape.

Kukla writes well, and his sharply defined portraits are a delight. There are flaws -- the fate of Native Americans is overlooked, the chronology is occasionally confusing and several irritating errors have escaped the editor (the British naval victory at Trafalgar occurred in 1805 not 1803, ulcers are cured by cleaning not lancing and so on) -- but these do not detract from the appeal of the book. “A Wilderness So Immense” is hugely entertaining and wonderfully informative, and it reminds us that history starts in our imaginations, today as it did 200 years ago.