Louisiana Purchase, Part 1: The Early History of the Louisiana Territory
Jean-Adolphe Bocquin. “Taking Possession of Louisiana and the Mississippi River, in the Name of Louis XIVth, by Cavelier de La Salle [From Rouen] on April 9, 1682.” Library of Congress.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was one of the truly watershed events in American history. The acquisition of this vast land placed the United States firmly on a path towards both the domination of North America and the status of an emerging world power. The young nation which started as a strip of colonies hugging the eastern seaboard never looked back after cementing this deal with Napoleonic France. But this new territory was an untamed and unknown wilderness and virtually unsettled by Europeans despite French sovereignty over the region for over a century.
French interest in North America began in 1608 when Samuel de Champlain established a small village he named Quebec on a high bluff above the St. Lawrence River. From this base, French missionaries and trappers moved continually west in search of fresh souls and fresh furs. In 1673, the explorer Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, took their canoes from Lake Michigan to the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, and then down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas River, an incredible voyage of over 2,900 miles. But the season was getting late, and rather than risk losing the results of their journey, Joliet and Marquette turned back before reaching the Gulf of Mexico.
Nine years later, Robert Cavelier de la Salle, a French explorer and fur trader, completed the mission when on April 7, 1682, he reached the mouth of the Mississippi River and claimed the immense interior of North America for King Louis XIV, and named it in his honor. In 1718, New Orleans was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on a narrow isthmus between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, a huge lake that stretches east to the Gulf of Mexico. Without question, the new settlement was located at the most strategic spot in the entire Mississippi basin, that vast drainage area comprising the core of the continent between the Appalachians and the Rockies. It was here, roughly ninety miles above the Gulf, that all the water borne traffic up the Mississippi and east from Lake Pontchartrain converged.
Importantly for the French, the establishment of New Orleans created a massive strategic arc across North America stretching from the northern citadel of Quebec near the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the southern deltas and the Gulf of Mexico. From within this domain, the French controlled the hugely profitable fur trade, reaping immense profits for the court of King Louis. But their hold did not go unchallenged as the British also sought to become master of the interior and its vast trove of furry wealth. As a result of a series of wars throughout the eighteenth century, the British dispossessed the French of its colonies in North America. As the final war for the control of North America, the French and Indian War, drew to a close, France secretly transferred the entire Louisiana territory and the riverport of New Orleans to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau rather than have Louisiana fall into British hands.
Jacques-Louis David. “The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812.” National Gallery of Art.
With the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the war, Spain retained Louisiana but surrendered Florida to Great Britain. Two decades later, when the American Revolution ended with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the United States gained the lands north of the Ohio River to British Canada and west to the Mississippi thanks to the exploits of George Rogers Clark. Additionally, Spain recovered Florida which created a Spanish North American Empire that stretched from St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast across the northern crescent of the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Isthmus of Panama. Strategically for the newly formed United States, it meant that Spain blocked any future growth of the fledgling nation and, inadvertently, established our former ally as perhaps our greatest foe, certainly from an expansionist point of view.
At this point, the French were undergoing their own revolution, albeit more chaotic and blood thirsty than the American Revolution and had little interest in North America. But when the dust settled in 1800 with Napoleon Bonaparte’s ascension to power, that all changed. Napoleon, one of the truly great military men in world history, had visions of reestablishing a North American empire and turned his eyes to Louisiana. On October 1, 1800, Napoleon forced Spain’s King Carlos IV to sign the Treaty of Ildefonso which retroceded Louisiana to France. Napoleon also wanted Florida, but here Carlos stood his ground and refused this cession. To help conclude the deal, Napoleon pledged to the King that France would never sell Louisiana, a promise that would prove to have a short shelf life.
Napoleon did not necessarily desire to colonize and populate the region, but rather he wanted to keep it safe from falling into British or American hands as Spain’s empire was clearly on the decline and thereby check the growth of the United States. As Talleyrand, the French Prime Minister, stated, “There are no other means of putting an end to the ambition of the Americans then that of shutting them up within the limits which nature seems to have traced for them.” With control of Louisiana, “The French Republic would be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America.”
Napoleon also wanted to use Louisiana to grow crops and livestock with which to supply the lucrative former French sugar colony of Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti), where he planned to reestablish French control. Unfortunately for Napoleon and the French, the 500,000 former slaves living in Saint Domingue who had revolted in the 1790s, had no intention of surrendering their newfound freedom. As a result, Napoleon sent a large expeditionary force under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to subdue the Haitian rebels. But between the formidable soldiers led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the even more formidable diseases such as yellow fever, the invasion was a disaster.
All told, the French lost over 30,000 soldiers, men that Napoleon needed in Europe to fight his endless wars on the continent. Although the Haitian rebels lost upwards of 80,000 men, they were willing to die to preserve their freedom, as most men will, and had no intention of ever surrendering. Napoleon recognized this fact and determined that possession of the island was not worth the price, especially since a costly war with Great Britian was on the horizon. With that realization came an end to Napoleon’s dreams of a rekindled North American empire and he began to consider what to do with Louisiana.
Next week, we will discuss the growing American need for Louisiana and the Mississippi River. Until then, may your motto be “Ducit Amor Patriae,” love of country leads me.
The British American experience since 1607 when the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown had largely been confined to the eastern seaboard north of Spanish Florida. As the British began to expand beyond this Atlantic bubble in the mid-1700s, they came into conflict with their longtime nemesis, the French, primarily over which nation would dominate the lucrative fur trade in the Ohio Country.