The Expanding Blaze by Israel Jonathan;

Author:Israel, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Louisiana and the Principles of ’76

“A Warm Friend to the Liberty and Lasting Welfare of the Human Race”

The acquisition of the vast Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 was certainly the greatest feat of Jefferson’s presidency and among the foremost of any presidency. But in terms of consolidating the American Union on the basis of the revolutionary principles of 1776 it was also in several respects problematic. Doubling the United States’ size at a stroke while creating a new vast border with the northern segment of Spanish America still called New Spain (until 1821; then Mexico), it also redoubled the social and political difficulties arising from the unresolved controversies surrounding the Revolution’s legacy and the “rights of mankind.” It re-created in new forms the ideological clash between the Federalist and Jeffersonian factions over the nature of “true republican values.” Growing apace geographically, the “empire of liberty” at this point failed to establish a clear profile of this new entity in terms of basic human freedoms.

In the age of the American Revolution, no one else promoted the “Rights of Man” as trenchantly and accessibly as Thomas Paine. “No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style,” noted Jefferson, writing to Washington in May 1791, “in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language. In this he may be compared to Dr. Franklin; and indeed his Common Sense was, for a while, believed to have been written by Dr. Franklin, and published under the borrowed name of Paine, who had come over with him from England.”1 Jefferson considered Paine among the most important of those who made the American Revolution—and then carried “the spirit of ’76” to France and then the rest of Europe.2 In America, as in Britain, Ireland, and France, Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–93) caused a public furor. The papers were full of it, dividing American opinion sharply between Burkeites and Paineites. Though for the moment the latter seemed the dominant stream generally, this was obviously not the case among America’s governing elite. Jefferson too, like Paine, berated Adams for abandoning his earlier “republicanism” and genuine American principles, succumbing to “apostasy to hereditary monarchy and nobility.”3 There were “high and important characters” in American government abjuring Paine’s “lessons in republicanism,” averred Jefferson writing to Paine (then in France), in June 1792, a “sect preaching up and pouting after an English constitution of king, lords and commons, and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets, and mitres. But our people, my good friend, are firm and unanimous in their principles of republicanism and there is no better proof of it than that they love what you write and read it with delight. The printers season every newspaper with extracts from your last as they did before from your first part of the Rights of Man,” he averred, embracing Paine’s now explicit appeal for worldwide general democratic revolution. Burke pronounced Paine’s text an “infamous libel” on the British system; Jefferson declared himself Paine’s “sincere votary” and “ardent well-wisher.

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