Ruminatrix
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Thursday, May 01, 2003
Let's Make a Deal
This week marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. The LP deal (background to the negotiations here) covered all land from the Mississippi to the Rockies except for the Red River Basin (acquired 1818) and the Texas Territory (annexed 1845). The price: 828,000 square miles for a mere $15 million.
The French were weakened first by defeat of their Navy at the hands of the Royal Navy, then by the uprising of Toussaint L'Ouverture against the sugar planters in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Vast fortunes were lost in this revolution, among the planters and the traders of the French Atlantic ports of Nantes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux -- as a child I saw quaint watercolours of the Haiti plantations in La Rochelle's "Museum of the New World."
This bloody war was to grind on until 1804 at a frightful cost on both sides, with tens of thousands dying either in punitive massacres or of yellow fever. Only 7,000 French troops of an army of 60,000 led by Napoleon's brother-in-law General Leclerc survived to surrender in 1804 (Leclerc died of the fever). Among the casualties were 4,000 members of the 5,000-strong volunteer Polish Legion, who must have wondered why the hell they had been to repress the values of Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite in this faraway island.
So France had to sell sooner or later and preferred to get something rather than lose sovereignty altogether, as happened to Spain in 1898. Was the LP more significant than the much cheaper Seward's Folly of 1867 ($7m to Russia for the 598,000 square miles of Alaska)? Sure. For better or worse -- and for the Indian tribes things were about to get irreversibly worse -- without LP the great expansion westward under Andrew Jackson would be unimaginable. We won't see that sort of population influx into Alaska any time soon.
But France also sold because Napoleon, still titular "First Consul" of a quasi-Republic, was planning to invade Britain and to attack other European powers. Although France was at peace in 1803, the future Emperor sold the Louisiana Territory to finance these wars. Despite the defeat at Trafalgar, at first Napoleon was spectacularly successful, defeating Austria (1805) Prussia (1806) and Russia (1807) in turn. Then came the long slow haemorrage of Spain and the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812.
Military campaigns cost money, wars are very expensive to fight. And the debts which fund them can lead to the fall of empires.
And a happy May Day to one and all...