By Seth Rosen The creation of a
continental nation was a pursuit that spanned
centuries, spawned wars, displaced native
populations, and dissolved the union. It culminated
in an empire within a nation.
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The
accomplishment was in many ways inevitable. The
Founding Fathers had won the Revolution with a
mandate to expand. At the close of the 18th century,
with the country's population doubling every
two or three decades, the West was considered
essential to creating new markets and generating
needed resources. Thomas Jefferson, long fascinated
by the West, saw self-sufficient yeomen as the
backbone of the republic. And James Madison, in
Federalist No. 10, talked of strength in unity.
"Extend the sphere," he wrote, "and
you take in a greater variety of parties and
interests; you make it less probable that a majority
of the whole will have a common motive to invade the
rights of other citizens."
Many
Federalists, however, were wary of the effects of a
massive land grab on a raw nation still struggling
with its independence. Dispersing the population,
they feared, would undermine cherished social
institutions, upsetting the founders' visions
of a land of close-knit, New England-like
communities.
The answer to such concerns was a
document that, next to the Constitution, is
considered the most brilliant in American
history--"the great genius of American
government," says John Mack Faragher, a history
professor at Yale University. The Northwest
Ordinance (1787) created what would become Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The
beauty of the document was that it established these
regions not as exploited colonies but as equal
partners of the eastern states. It created an
orderly process for statehood, protected religious
freedom, and encouraged education. Significantly,
each of the states entered the union slave-free--a
fact that many years later would tip the balance in
the Civil War.
The country's territorial
ambitions did not stop at the banks of the
Mississippi River. Jefferson had long dreamed of
extending the nation's reach to the Pacific
Ocean, and he secretly asked Congress to fund an
expedition to seek new trade routes. In their
legendary two-year voyage, beginning in 1803,
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled 8,000
miles, following the Missouri River upstream as it
ascended the Rockies and crossed the Snake and
Columbia rivers on the way to the Pacific. Although
the party ran out of such luxuries as whiskey and
tobacco, they had an ample supply of pen and ink,
with which they created one of America's
richest literary legacies.
In 1803, Jefferson
moved closer to realizing his vision of an
"empire of liberty" with one of the
sweetest real-estate deals in history: the Louisiana
Purchase. That November, in Paris, he had Robert
Livingston and James Monroe negotiate the purchase
of strategically placed New Orleans. "On the
globe," said Jefferson, "[there is] one
single spot, the possessor of which is our natural
and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which
the produce of three eighths of our territory must
pass to market." The Americans were prepared to
pony up $10 million for the city alone; instead, the
French offered the whole territory of Louisiana for
$15 million--about $18 a square mile.
