Louisiana and Beyond: The Story of America Series [Ep. 18]

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, another installment in our series about us, “The Story of America” series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book “Land of Hope,” Bill McLay. The presidency of Thomas Jefferson marked a drastic change from that of his predecessors, George Washington and John Adams. Jefferson was a party man through and through, but some of his best decisions were made by putting the country first. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

There’s a saying, and it’s usually said rather cynically, that sometimes a politician has to rise above principle. It’s supposed to be a kind of humorous statement, but actually, there’s truth to it. Sometimes statesmanship, the art of governing well, which is an art and not a science. The art of statesmanship requires one to rise above principle, one to recognize that the time is not right, may never be right, for the implementation of the principles that one so dearly loves. You can stay in opposition and be a political voice, a voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice. But if you want to be effective, if you want to get things done, if you want to be a practically good president, you have to come to terms with the opposition. Thomas Jefferson was a very popular president.

He was.

Came into office in a very divided time and managed to produce national unity, and he had a vision for America’s future. It was a different vision than the vision that Alexander Hamilton had so influentially promoted, but he gave voice to it, and in the process he learned a very important lesson about politics, and that is that there’s a higher requirement incumbent on the great statesman, and that is the well-being of the polity itself. So Jefferson understood all of this, and he rose above principle. The conflicts with the judiciary that we’ve described in a previous episode were a very bitter pill to swallow, and he never stopped swallowing it all the rest of his life. But the other important violation of his principles led to his greatest accomplishment, and that was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. It was an accomplishment of great importance for two reasons. One of them is defensive. It removed a foreign presence from America’s western border and in command of the port city, New Orleans, that governed commerce from the mid-section — what would be the mid-section of the country, but it was the westernmost part of the country. It freed New Orleans from being a choke point that could, with the flick of a policy switch, cripple much of the American economy. So it freed things in that way. But it also — there’s a second way that it was a great accomplishment, and this is more expansive, not less defensive than expansive. It redefined America in a certain way, which had been a coastal nation with strong ties, both explicit and implicit, to your Europe, with a derivative culture from Europe. And it made it into a continental republic, a sprawling continental republic, not yet from sea to shining sea, but headed in that direction. It’s easy for us to see in retrospect, so from a coastal nation to a half of a continent nation, with rich farmland ripe for agricultural exploitation. In the years ahead, and this was part of Jefferson’s dream, his vision of America. It was one heck of a land deal, probably the greatest land deal in American history. It was the land basically between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to what today would be the state of Montana, all for a mere fifteen million dollars, which was worth, worth more than fifteen million it would be now, but still, for that kind of land acquisition, it was an amazing deal, and it was a dream come true for Jefferson, whose vision of America was an agricultural vision. He thought that those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God. If he had a chosen people, he wasn’t kidding. He thought agriculture was a particularly effective school of virtue. They didn’t live off of the finagling and calculation of a paper economy based on finance, the sort of thing that appealed to Hamilton. No, an agricultural nation would be a much more down-to-earth, in every sense of the word, nation. So the acquisition of all this land meant that you could have generations upon generations that would be able to find farmland.

And to.

Take up the mantle of self-sufficient farming and create a uniquely virtuous people in the face of the earth. But, problem was, Jefferson had to violate his political principles to get that deal done because it involved expanding the president’s executive power. And remember, he was very much the strict constructionist with the King of the Constitution: that government governs best, that governs least. Strong presidencies were not his cup of tea or his glass of wine. And Jefferson’s case, so he expanded the executive power way beyond anything that he’d ever imagined, in ways that he’d argued against vehemently in the past. And yet he had to do this. He had to operate this way in order to be able to take the deal that was offered while he was on the table. So again, he opposed things that he ended up doing after he’d taken the oath of office, but he didn’t do so out of lack of principle. He rose above principle. Political necessity was in play.

One week. Come back more of the story of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we continue here with Our American Stories and our series about us, “The Story of America” series. When we last left off, Bill McLay was telling us about how Thomas Jefferson put country over party when buying the Louisiana Territory from France. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Bill McLay.

After the Louisiana Purchase was completed, Jefferson was very, very excited about the whole thing. Dever, Jefferson, among his many interests and talents, was a great scientist. He had a great scientific curiosity. He was curious about what sort of animals are there in this territory, what sort of flora are there, you know, what sort of growing things, what sort of people? And so he commissioned very quickly an exploratory mission called the Corps of Discovery Expedition. We usually call it the Lewis and Clark Expedition, after Captain Meriwether Lewis, who was Jefferson’s private secretary, and Second Lieutenant William Clark. Lewis and Clark, these were Army officers who were seasoned in the sense that they’d had experience on the frontier, which made them perfect candidates for the job at hand. And the job was the big job: survey the area’s geography, study the plant and animal life, establish relations with native tribes, track the natural resources of the newly purchased land. A very big task. You could consider that the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest road trip in American history. They left Saint Louis, the city of Saint Louis on the Mississippi River, in May of 1804, just a year after, less a year after, the actual purchase occurs, so Jefferson didn’t waste any time. And it was a group. It was really a party, the road trip with a party, a group of fifty men traveling up the Missouri River, crossing the Continental Divide, and making their way along the Columbia River to the Pacific, to what’s close to Portland, Oregon. By November of 1805. So they were on the road for a long time: May of 1804, departure; arrival in Portland, November of 1805; and returning home September of 1806. So, over two years on the road. That’s quite a road trip. And something many of you may not know: There is a Gateway Arch, a beautiful object of, kind of, public sculpture almost, in the city of Saint Louis, which everyone thinks of as being related to Saint Louis as the Gateway to the West. Well, yes, but it was directly to commemorate and honor the pioneering, adventurous spirit of Lewis and Clark, the Corps of Discovery, and ultimately, Jefferson himself. But there were problems at home, things less exciting to the scientific-minded Jefferson, actually, the kinds of things that made politics such a frustrating business for him. Once again, America found itself caught in a battle between the two great European powers of the time, the British and the French. The British, former foes; the French, former allies, maybe to some extent still allies, but not entirely. Both were waging war on each other, and their weapon was economic warfare. America tried to stay neutral, but the British ignored these claims. They captured American seamen and sailors and forced them to serve in the Royal Navy. This practice went by rather and a dying name. It was called impressing, but nobody on our side was impressed by it. It was a hostile act against America and Americans, and kidnapping, plain and simple, at least from the American point of view. Jefferson, who, remember, had not wanted to be a great world power. He didn’t want to have a big navy. In fact, that Jefferson would have been happy to have a navy that was the equivalent in today’s terms of a fleet of PT boats, just to guard the coastal areas of the country, but otherwise stay aloof from the world. He did not want a war. He did not want to war with the great European powers, either one of them, let alone both, and that was not likely to happen. But he hoped that he could stem the tide seemingly moving towards warfare by getting the Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807, and that he thought the Embargo Act would do that because it would prohibit American ships from an entry into foreign ports, which meant that those ships could not engage in commerce either to or from foreign nations. And, you know, that would keep them out of harm’s way. To make a long story short, the Embargo was a failure, a complete and utter failure. It caused more economic pain and home than it did in England. That’s my definition of a policy failure in wartime. So Jefferson had little choice but to repeal the Embargo, which he did, leaving a very bitter taste in his mouth. Of course, no president likes to not only have his policies defeated, but to be humiliated over them. Still, he could have probably served another term. Jefferson had so debilitated the capacity of the Federalist Party to govern, kind of driven them crazy. So there was no barrier, constitutionally speaking, or limit to the number of terms Jefferson could serve. After two terms in office, he took the example of Washington, his fellow Virginian, and retired. This wasn’t just out of veneration for Washington. He had begun his eight years with a resounding victory at a very, very, very tense time in national life. I want to impress that upon you, how, how the Election of 1800 looked to many people like the end of the constitutional republic, barely getting started before dying in its cradle, and Jefferson calmed the waters so he’d begun with this resounding victory. But he ended very weary and discouraged. Obviously, the failure of the Embargo Act, one of the chief sources of that, but not the only one. He was worn down by a multitude of political battles that he couldn’t win and problems he couldn’t solve, and he was beginning to have health problems: rheumatism, headaches. So he was able to return to his beloved home, Monticello, in Charlottesville. He would refer to his time in office as “splendid misery,” and he came to wonder whether he was just not suited for public office. He’d had that same wondering when he was a much younger man as governor of Virginia, and has returned to saying, “A since, maybe I’m not cut out for this,” he said this to a friend. “Never did a prisoner released from his chains feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived and forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passion, I thank God for the opportunity of retiring from them.” So once he was back in Charlottesville, he went to work on what was perhaps his biggest, boldest, most enduring project next to the Declaration, of course. He established the University of Virginia. He played a central role not merely in the founding of the school, but the magnificent design of the school. It’s an architectural design that followed straight through to the landscape, and it’s really one of the great architectural accomplishments of American history, not only of his time, even today.

When we come back, more of the story of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency and what came after, here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories in our series about Us, “The Story of America” series. We also returned to the final portion of our story on Thomas Jefferson. Telling it is Hillsdale College professor and author of “Land of Hope,” Bill McLay. When we last left off, Jefferson had left office after losing his love, his appetite for politics. It had been a bitter eight years in office for him, and soon he’d reach out to an old friend. Let’s return to the story.

You couldn’t ask for. I mean, if Hollywood had invented this, we would have said it’s unbelievable, but it actually happened. Jefferson died on July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and the day that John Adams died as well. This is an enormously powerful symbol. People looked at this, and they were in awe. How can this be? These two founding fathers of the American experiment, who for much of their careers, as to their lives, were bitterly antagonistic and ran against one another for the highest office in the land. But in the latter part of their lives, began a correspondence that’s one of the classic works of American history. Everyone should read the Adams-Jefferson Correspondence. They had a period of being friendly, and then a period of bitterness, and then they restored their friendship and reflected on a very deep level about what were the requirements of leadership, of virtue, of all manner of things relating to the conditions for American democracy to prosper. Here’s an example letter written. It’s his final letter, actually, to Adams. So that’s poignant in itself. And here Jefferson’s words: “May it be to the world what I believe it will be to some parts sooner, to other parts later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.” And he’s talking about the American Revolution, the Declaration, the whole kit and caboodle of what the Spirit of ’76 was about. Let me repeat it again: “May it be to the world what I believe it will be to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. The form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of man has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately the grace of God.” Oh, that’s fantastic. These are grounds of hope for others, for ourselves. “Let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.” Before you go on, I do want to mention one thing. Jefferson had his opinions, and when he mentions “the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves” in that first sentence, he is talking about religion here, and he’s probably mainly talking about the Roman Catholic Church, although he sort of had this opinion more generally about organized Christian religion. And, you know, you just have to take that, that’s part of who Jefferson was. He was a man devoted to the Enlightenment, to the Age of Reason, to the notion that reason has a kind of competence to address itself to all things, because we live in a world governed by a nature—capital ‘N’ Nature—that has its laws, that has an intelligible order. In my say, “intelligible,” I mean we can understand it, we can get what nature is about. Modern contemporary physics today is a little more tangled than that; the Newtonian physics of Thomas Jefferson’s day. But at any rate, he had great confidence and reason, and I take that, more than his swipes at organized religion, to be the essential character of Jefferson. I also want to point out how wonderful this image is: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.” You can feel some of that American republicanism stirring your own heart. I think when you hear those words, the idea that some people are born to rule and some people are born to be ruled over, that’s not American. That’s antithetical to what we believe we are, to the belief that we have that anyo