Jefferson, The Louisiana Purchase and the real flaw at the heart of our democracy
By Matt McCaw
During the 2000 presidential election, one that stretched on through weeks of recounts and legal challenges, TV news outlets used blue and red to illustrate apportionment of electoral votes to the two candidates, a choice that has since entered the popular consciousness. In the years since, this crude graphic has been pressed onto everything from food taste to body type and has made its way into the collective map of our landscape. ‘Islands of blue’ and ‘seas of red’ appear again and again in descriptions of a nation that once was, and probably still is, infinitely more complex. The most intractable and monolithic feature of this landscape is an inland sea of red that appears across the middle of the nation. It pops up first in every election, placing every Democratic candidate far behind the starting line before much larger electoral prizes on the coasts even the score. What few of us notice when we look at this expanse of states and electoral districts, though, is the sheer optimism of the lattice-work of borders and townships that were long-ago branded onto this empty geographic feature. This broken promise rests at the heart of America’s political dysfunction, and any attempt to remake our public life will eventually have to face it.
As every schoolchild learns, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States when Thomas Jefferson acquired the territory from France in a fire sale that was only possible in the desperation of the Napoleonic Wars. Ceding the territory to the United States eliminated a huge front that the United Kingdom could attack while strengthening Great Britain’s new rival and freeing up France to focus on its war in Europe. Most of the scholarship related to the Louisiana Purchase focuses on Jefferson’s unilateral decision to make the acquisition without the consent of congress, an ‘ends justifies means’ question relating to executive power and its relationship with the other branches of government. What’s missing is usually a discussion of Jefferson’s vision for this new territory and how that vision played out in reality.
Jeffersonian Democracy refers to the second president’s vision for the young nation’s government. Jefferson distrusted wealth, industry and urbanization and saw a simple rural life as the future of the young republic. It was the job of the government to construct a land of villages and townships in which a virtuous citizenry of agrarianists would govern themselves through simple democratic institutions. Something like this had extended across the Northwest Territory as the rich farmlands of the Midwest were populated, and Jefferson saw no reason why a similar wave of settlers wouldn’t fill the new territories. Missing from the president’s appraisal was an understanding of the unique character of this dry, windswept landscape, and his shortcoming continues to bedevil us as a network of Jeffersonian institutions continues to falter for lack of a true citizenry.
Jefferson bequeathed to the nation a boundless optimism born of the enlightenment and a corresponding blindness to reality, a legacy that defines our nation to this day. The Louisiana Purchase was the perfect landscape for Jefferson’s unresolved philosophical conflicts to find their expression in America’s soil. North America’s first colonial empire, France, had already gambled its fortune on transplanting European culture into the vast expanse at the center of the continent and failed in a speculative bubble that was instrumental in hobbling pre-Revolutionary France’s economy. Working with Duke d’Orleans, John Law, a Scottish adventure and early economic theorist, engineered a property scheme that set the lands of France’s North American territory as collateral against a vast issuance of paper currency. The scheme scored some initial success before collapsing as colonists and investors quickly realized that the lands to the north and west of their famous port could not be compared to those of New England or the Ohio Valley. We can’t be sure, but the legacy of the Mississippi Bubble likely influenced Napoleon’s decision to dispose of its vast tract of North American land. Law’s failure certainly cast a long shadow over France’s economy, but not as long as Jefferson’s.
Following the purchase, the young republic’s new lands were settled in a slow, difficult process that contrasted sharply with the settling of the Northwest Territory. The acquisition first revealed itself as a poison pill when the creation of new states upset the balance between North and South and eventually led to the Civil War. Following this national cataclysm, a process took place that lagged significantly behind the explosion of the west coast, a flood of capital and people that put the lie to Jefferson’s idyllic vision of a timeless agrarian nation stretching beyond the Mississippi. An unusually wet series of decades on either half of the turn of the twentieth century created a brief mirage of agricultural productivity, a period that unraveled with The Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Since the accompanying hemorrhaging of population, the story has been the same. What hasn’t changed, though, is the constitutional structure put in place. Today 22%% of the nation’s senators come from the territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, an area that holds less than 8% of the nation’s people and less than 7% of the nation’s GDP. Representation in the Electoral College and the House of Representative is also disproportional, but to a lesser extant than in the Senate. This is fitting, as the Senate was the body designed to maintain the federalist nature of the country, where the states would assemble and govern as equal polities, and it is just such a body that puts the lie to Jefferson’s original vision for the vast middle of the nation.
Following a series of presidential elections in which the popular vote and electoral college results diverged, a campaign to end this curious institution has gathered momentum, and it’s not unlikely that a simple popular vote will replace the creaky old institution at some point in the coming decades. The move is one that we might come to regret. Our federal government has successfully presided over a diverse nation for 250 years by creating a federal system that operates through the participation of a group of polities defined as states. James Madison, the great architect of the Constitution, said of the nation’s electorate: “The People — not the people as composing one great body, but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties.” There’s a temptation in today’s age to consign the borders that divided the early colonies to history and treat our interconnected nation as a single polity. In this reading of history, violent dissolution is a thing of the past, and the parts of our government that sacrifice popular will to regional compromise are relics of another age. However, the last few years ought to have shown us that our system can still falter and our citizens can still withdraw into regional tribes. Senatorial representation and electoral college votes will always be seen by each of our states as God-given rights of democracy, and any attempt to remove them would likely lead to our undoing. There is certainly a flaw in our system, but it is not our federalist model. Rather, it lies in the creation of a handful of entities that function as participants in our system but can hardly be called polities. The population of California is likely to reach 50 million by the year 2040 while the population of Wyoming will likely be 614,000. With a handful of our states facing population pressures and government challenges more common to nations, it’s worth asking how long the citizens of our largest states will cede power to a handful of rural senators. The flaw in the system isn’t that we compromise between the rights of states. The flaw is that we continue to call some of those bodies states at all.