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CHAPTER 7 Hammering Out a Federal Republic, 1787–1820 229

Gallatin reduced the debt from $83 million in 1801 to $45 million in 1812. With Jef-
ferson and Gallatin at the helm, the nation’s fiscal affairs were no longer run in the
interests of northeastern creditors and merchants.

Jefferson and the West

Jefferson had long championed settlement of the West. He celebrated the yeoman
farmer in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785); wrote one of the Confederation’s west-
ern land ordinances; and supported Pinckney’s Treaty (1795), the agreement between
the United States and Spain that reopened the Mississippi River to American trade
and allowed settlers to export crops via the Spanish-held port of New Orleans.
As president, Jefferson pursued policies that made it easier for farm families to
acquire land. In 1796, a Federalist-dominated Congress had set the price of land in
the national domain at $2 per acre; by the 1830s, Jefferson-inspired Republican Con-
gresses had enacted more than three hundred laws that cut the cost to $1.25, eased
credit terms, and allowed illegal squatters to buy their farms. Eventually, in the Home-
stead Act of 1862, Congress gave farmsteads to settlers for free.

The Louisiana Purchase International events challenged Jefferson’s vision of west- EXAM TIP
ward expansion. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France and sought
to reestablish France’s American Empire. In 1801, he coerced Spain into signing a A key idea to trace starting with the
secret treaty that returned Louisiana to France and restricted American access to New Louisiana Purchase is the conflict
between national and sectional
Orleans, violating Pinckney’s Treaty. Napoleon also launched an invasion to restore interests as a result of western
French rule in Saint-Domingue. It was once the richest sugar colony in the Americas, expansion.
but its civil war had ruined the economy and cost France a fortune. Napoleon wanted
to crush the rebellion and restore its planter class.
Napoleon’s actions in Haiti and Louisiana prompted Jefferson to question his
pro-French foreign policy. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, we
must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation,” the president warned, dispatch-
ing James Monroe to Britain to negotiate an alliance. To keep the Mississippi River
open to western farmers, Jefferson told Robert Livingston, the American minister in
Paris, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans.
Jefferson’s diplomacy yielded a magnificent prize: the entire territory of Lou-
isiana. By 1802, the French invasion of Saint-Domingue was faltering in the face
of disease and determined black resistance, a new war threatened in Europe, and
Napoleon feared an American invasion of Louisiana. Acting with characteristic
decisiveness, the French ruler offered to sell the entire territory of Louisiana for $15
million (about $500 million today). “We have lived long,” Livingston remarked to
Monroe as they concluded the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, “but this is the noblest Louisiana Purchase
work of our lives.” The 1803 purchase of French territory west of
The Louisiana Purchase forced Jefferson to reconsider his strict interpretation of the Mississippi River that stretched from the
Gulf of Mexico to Canada and nearly doubled
the Constitution. He had long believed that the national government possessed only the size of the United States. The purchase
the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution, but there was no provision required President Thomas Jefferson to
for adding new territory. So Jefferson pragmatically accepted a loose interpretation of exercise powers not explicitly granted to him
by the Constitution.
the Constitution and used its treaty-making powers to complete the deal with France.
The new western lands, Jefferson wrote, would be “a means of tempting all our Indi-
ans on the East side of the Mississippi to remove to the West.”

Secessionist Schemes The acquisition of Louisiana brought new political prob-
lems. Some New England Federalists, fearing that western expansion would hurt their
region and party, talked openly of leaving the Union and forming a confederacy of
northeastern states. The secessionists won the support of Aaron Burr, the ambitious
vice president. After Alexander Hamilton accused Burr of planning to destroy the
Union, the two fought an illegal pistol duel that led to Hamilton’s death.
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