This Week in History
April 29, 1803-May 5, 1803
In this column, we look back to certain events in United States history, from the standpoint of arousing the memory of the American people to the historical principles which we followed at our best. Our focus on the Franklin Roosevelt years speaks to the fact that this was the last period of perceived crisis in our nation's history, in which the principles of the American System were applied, and we shall return to that period again over the coming weeks. Last week's column on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, represented a special exception, particularly appropriate because of the recent crimes by the Sharon government in Israel.
This week we go back further in the history of the United States, to commemorate an event which indeed shaped the prospects of our nation. That is the Louisiana Purchase, the huge land deal between France and the United States, which was signed on April 30, 1803. The purchase of this vast expanse, more than 800,000 square miles, put the young nation well on its way to becoming the continental republic which the republican founding fathers dreamed of its becoming.
As EIR has previously documented, founders such as John Winthrop, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams, and their collaborators, were committed from the nation's beginning, to the creation of a republic "from sea to shining sea."* This was a matter of moral commitment, and security, for those who had come to these shores. In 1629, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Winthrop issued a call for developing the North American continent for the benefit of mankind:
"The whole earth is the Lord's garden & he hath given it to the sons of men, with a general condition, Gen: 1.28. Increase and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it, which was again renewed to Noah. The end is double, moral and natural, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth and God might have his due glory from the creature. Why then should we stand here striving for places of habitation ... and in the meantime suffer a whole Continent, as fruitful and convenient for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement."
Once the American colonies had been forced into a revolutionary war against Great Britain in order to be able to pursue this goal, the imperative for continent-wide expansion became increasingly a military matter. The new nation was surrounded from the south, west, and north by hostile, and warring, powers: Spain to the south and west; France to the north and west; and Great Britain to the north, and by sea. By simply leaving circumstances status quo, the young United States could be virtually certain of moves by these imperial powers against its own territorial integrity, and survival.
John Quincy Adams, the statesman of the early 19th century who did the most to craft our foreign policy on the basis of the republican concept of the Community of Principle, had a very good idea of what would happen if the United States were not expanded continentally. He put it this way in a letter to his mother in 1811, in which he laid out the stakes if the Federalist Party of New England, then pushing secession, were not defeated:
"Instead of a nation coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors."
It was the threat represented by wars among the Europe powers that actually permitted President Thomas Jefferson to purchase the Louisiana Territories. France's Napoleon Bonaparte had taken over the huge territories from Spain in 1800, and Spain, which still controlled New Orleans, cut off the United States from shipping rights in the port. At the same time, Napoleon planned major military operations on the continent, but had to take into consideration his prospects against the British on the European continent.
Jefferson moved accordingly to offer to purchase the Territories, using emissaries James Monroe and Robert Livingston. The deal doubled the official territory of the United States, at a cost of about $11 million. There was a catch, however; could the United States hold on to the land? Napoleon, it seems, was betting it couldn't.
But Jefferson's first battle was a fight for support in the Congress. Here he encountered implacable opposition from the Federalist Party, which was at that point virtually controlled by the Tory faction. But, joining the President were the principled nationalists Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Rufus King, and John Quincy Adams himself, then a Federalist Senator in the process of breaking with the traitors running his party. The funding for the purchase, and arrangements for governing the huge territories, were eventually passed. When followed up by John Quincy Adams' actions as Secretary of State under President Monroe, the United States was well on its way to becoming the continental republic which John Winthrop had envisioned.
Nancy Spannaus
*For more material on the content and history of the United States' fight to become a continental republic, see EIR, Jan. 28, 2000, Vol. 27, No. 4.
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