"They are very much interested in obtaining an unlimited slavery": rethinking the expansion of slavery in the Louisiana purchase territories, 1803-1805

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 353-380

  Hammond, John Craig ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67449103795     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3595044     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. "The remonstrance and petition of the representatives elected by the freemen of their respective districts in the District of Louisiana." Amencan State Papers, Class X, Miscellaneous, 1:401. The territorial bills created two territories in the Louisiana Purchase. Orleans Territory, or Lower Louisiana, encompassed the present-day state of Louisiana minus the Florida parishes. Upper Louisiana encompassed the remainder of the territory and was referred to as the District of Louisiana
2. Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978), 74-100
3. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 253-63
4. William W. Freehling, "The Founding Fathers and Conditional Antislavery," in Freehling, The Rein-tegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 12-33
5. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), 13 8-43
6. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (2nd ed., Armonk, NY, 2001)
7. Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,1765-1820(New York,l97l),378-400
8. Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI, 1990), 25-55
9. Duncan MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (London and New York, 1974), 47-61
10. Freehling, "Founding Fathers and Conditional Antislavery," 12; Robinson, Slavery and the Structure of American Politics, 399
11. This conclusion informs literature focusing on slavery and expansion in the early republic, as well as slavery and politics in general. For slavery and expansion, see Stephen Deyle, "The Irony of Liberty: Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade," Journal of Early Republic, 12(Spring 1992), 37-62
12. Adam Rothman, "The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South, 1790-1820," (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 2000), 47-53
13. For slavery and politics, see, for example, Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 43
14. and Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jejfersonian America (New York, 1970), 43
15. For the term "power politics of territorial hegemony," see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North America History," American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999), 814-41
16. For the importance of the lower Mississippi Valley in securing the trans-Appalachian West, see Peter J. Kastor, "'Motives of Peculiar Urgency': Local Diplomacy in Louisiana, 1803-1821," William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (Oct. 2001), 819-48
17. and James E. Lewis Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 24-32
18. For the crisis of Union produced by French possession of Louisiana, see Peter S. Onuf, "The Expanding Union," in David T. Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford, 1995), 50-80
19. For the diplomatic concerns involved with the Louisiana Purchase, see Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire for Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1990)
20. Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., lst sess., 1186
21. "Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana," American, St. Papers, Class X, Misc., 1:399
22. Philadelphia (PA) Aurora and General Advertiser, Oct. 21,1803
23. John Edgar to John Fowler, Sept. 25, 1803, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 13:5-7
24. William E. Foley, The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood (Columbia, MO, 1989)
25. John Mack Faragher, "'More Motley than Mackinaw': From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783-1833," in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 304-26
26. Thomas T. Davis to Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 5, 1803, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 13:7-8
27. Meriwether Lewis to Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 28, 1803, in Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783-1854 (Urbana, 1962), 153
28. For two excellent accounts of the plantation revolution in the lower Mississippi Valley, which began in earnest only in the 1790s, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1998), 325-57
29. and Paul F. Lachance, "The Politics of Fear: French Louisianans and the Slave Trade, 1786-1809," Plantation Society, 1 (1979), 162-97
30. Daniel Clark to James Madison, Sept. 8, 1803, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 9:33, 35, 44
31. "Columbus," Philadelphia Aurora and General Advertiser, Aug. 8, 1808
32. "From the N. Y. Daily Advertiser," Philadelphia Aurora, Aug. 1, 1803
33. Journal of Andrew Ellicott (1803; rpt., Chicago, 1962), 134
34. Thomas Rodney to Caesar Augustus Rodney, Dec. 5,23,1803, in "Thomas Rodney," Simon Gratz, ed., Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 43 (1919), 210, 221
35. Petition of Alexander Baudin to Governor Claiborne and the President and Congress of the United States, Feb. 14,1804, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 9:187-88
36. The federal government published the "Description" as An Account of Louisiana, Being an Abstract of Documents in the Offices of the Department of State and of the Treasury (Philadelphia, 1803), and printers circulated it widely by publishing it as a pamphlet and in various newspapers
37. For its publication in western newspapers, see, for example, Cincinnati (OH) Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette and Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, OH) issues for Dec. 1803
38. C. C. Robin, Voyage to Louisiana, 1803-1805, trans. Stuart O. Landry (1806; rpt. ed., New Orleans, 1966), 53-54. Travelers from the eastern states expressed astonishment at the fantastic profits to be made from sugar
39. For Jefferson and diffusion, see Freehling, Road to Disunion, 121-43
40. and Peters S. Onuf, "'To Declare Them a Free and Independent People': Race, Slavery, and National Identity in Jefferson's Thought," Journal of the Early Republic, 18 (Spring 1998), 1-46
41. James E. Scanlon, "A Sudden Conceit: Jefferson and the Louisiana Government Bill of 1804," Louisiana History, 9 (1968), 152-55, contains this letter from Jefferson to Breckinridge, dated Nov. 25, 1803
42. Everett S. Brown, ed., "The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for the Government of Louisiana, 1804," American Historical Review, 22 (1917), 340-64 (quotation at 345)
43. "Breckinridge Bill," 348, 347. The Aurora celebrated how "The white-American farmers will have an opportunity to prove, that sugar can be produced on many plantations without slaves." Philadelphia Aurora, Nov. 23, 1803, Aug. 8, 1803. The Philadelphia Aurora and Thomas Paine also suggested settling the Louisianas with free blacks from the Atlantic states
44. Paine to Jefferson, Jan. 25,1805, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1945), 2:1457-64
45. "Breckinridge Bill," 352; Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 242
46. For the importance of Caribbean planters in fostering the transition to a full-scale plantation economy in lower Louisiana, see Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 325-57
47. LaChance, "Politics of Fear." Congress allowed the South Carolina loophole to expire in 1805, and Charleston became the chief supplier of African slaves for Louisiana. For South Carolina's reopening of the international slave trade in response to the Louisiana Purchase, see Jed Handelsman Shugerman's insightful "The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina's Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803," Journal of the Early Republic, 22 (Summer 2002), 263-90
48. Gallatin to Jefferson, Aug. 20, 1804, Papers of Albert Gallatin (microfilm ed.: Philadelphia, 1970)
49. Israel Smith, Samuel Smith, and James Hillhouse, "Breckinridge Bill," 346,344,349-350
50. For a damning indictment of white Louisianans' unfitness for republican government and inclusion in the American Union, see Thomas Paine, "To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana," in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, 2:963-68
51. See also, Lewis, American Union, 25-31
52. For French interest in creating a colony encompassing the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, see Perrin du Lac, Travels through the Two Louisianas, 96-97
53. Thomas Rodney to Caesar A. Rodney, Dec. 5, 1803
54. For the problems of union and disunion associated with incorporating the "marginal settlements and foreigners" of the Louisiana Purchase into contested nationalist identities, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 274-87
55. Kastor, "'Motives of Peculiar Urgency.'"
56. See Henry Marie Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811 (Pittsburgh, 1812; rep., Chicago, 1962), 145
57. See Plumer, Memorandum, 474
58. See Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808-1826," Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (Fall 2001), 445-65
59. "Petition of the Vincennes Convention," in Dunn, ed.v "Slavery Petitions and Papers," 462
60. For slavery in Ohio, see Onuf, Statehood and Union, 113-16
61. For the supposed importance of "leading men" in cultivating the attachments of ordinary settlers, see, for example, Clark to Madison, Oct. 28, 1803, in "Despatches," 346-50
62. Kevin M. Gannon, "Escaping 'Mr. Jefferson's Plan of Destruction': New England Federalists and the Idea of a Northern Confederacy, 1803-1804," Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (Fall 2001), 413-43
63. Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 136-37
64. Todd H. Bamett, "Virginians Moving West: The Early Evolution of Slavery in the Bluegrass," The Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 73 (1999), 221-48
65. For planters stripping free and enslaved blacks of rights prior to American possession, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992), 376
66. For white Louisianans fears that the United States appeared poised to upset the region's delicate and changing racial balance, see LaChance, "Politics of Fear"; Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana, (Baton Rouge, 1994), 3-8
67. Sarah Russell, "Ethnicity, Commerce, and Community on Lower Louisiana's Plantation Frontier, 1803-1828," Louisiana History, 40 (1999), 389-405
68. Thomas N. Ingersoll, "Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812," William and Mary Quarterly, 48 (1991), 173-200
69. and Andrew F. McMichael, "Reluctant Revolutionaries: The West Florida Borderlands, 1785-1810" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2000)
70. For a recent assessment of America's role as a power unfriendly towards slavery, see Matthew Mason, "The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (July 2002), 665-95
71. (originally published in the New Orleans Louisiana Gazette, Nov. 2, 1804)
72. Claibome to Jefferson, Nov. 25,1804, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 9:340
73. For the agents and their activities in Washington, see Everett S. Brown, "The Orleans Territory Memorialists to Congress, 1804," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 1 (1917), 99-104
74. and Plumer's Memorandum, 222-24
75. Governor Claiborne to Madison, Oct.3, 1804
76. Claibome to Madison, Nov. 22,1804
77. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 108-30
78. Claiborne to Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 9:338
79. Claiborne to Madison, Mar. 10,1804, in Rowland, ed., Letter Books, 2:26
80. For reference to "the Farmers" and slavery; see Claiborne to Jefferson, June 3, 1804, ibid., 187
81. Claiborne to Madison, Oct. 10, 1804, ibid., 9:305
82. Watkins to Claiborne, Feb. 2,1804, in Rowland, ed., Letter Books, 2:10
83. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 260
84. For similar arguments, which attribute expansion to Jefferson's inactions, see Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott Case, 89-97
85. Robinson, Slavery and the Structure of American Politics, 397-400
86. and Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 151
87. For an especially critical indictment of Jeffersonian inaction on Louisiana slavery, see Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York, 2003), 208-13
88. Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 260-61
89. For the importance of land and slaves in Upper Louisiana, see Foley, Genesis of Missouri, 114-15,138-40,150-01
90. For a similar letter, which probably failed to reach Congress in time to impact their decision, see William Henry Harrison to Jonathan, Oct. 29, 1804
91. and Kennedy, Jefferson's Lost Cause, 208-10
92. For contemporary writers who reached this conclusion, see John Melish, Travels through the United States of America, in the years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810, & 1811 ⋯ (Philadelphia, 1818), 388
93. A Philadelphian [Robert Walsh], Free Remarks on the Spirit of the Federal Constitution: Tlie Practice of the Federal Government, and the Obligations of the Union, Respecting the Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories and New States, (Philadelphia, 1819), 40-47