(emphasis added) page 14>How did it come to pass that this quintessentially Atlantic man [Jefferson] should have at least part of his imagination turned around to face the Rockies and Pacific waters?
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At last, it was Jefferson's reading list that provided the final and most important spark to action. Spending the summer season of 1802 at Monticello, Jefferson ordered a copy of Alexander Mackenzie's recently published Voyages from Montreal. At the same time, the President asked his New York bookseller for a copy of Aaron Arrow Smith's new map of North America. There was little noteworthy about these requests. Jefferson had long collected books related to American travel and discovery. Perhaps he thought that Mackenzie would be just one more volume in Monticello's growing library. Most of Mackenzie 's book was an unimaginative account of his 1789 and 1792-1793 expeditions. It was the explorer's commentary at the end of the book that captured Jefferson's attention. Repeating ideas gained largely from fur trade strategists like Peter Pond and Alexander Henry the Elder, Mackenzie sketched out an impressive plan for British domination of the West. One sentence alone was enough to stun the President. "By opening this intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and forming regular establishments through interior, and at both extremes, as well as along the coasts and islands, the entire command of the fur trade of North
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America might be obtained." And Mackenzie went further. His was not simply a fur trade vision. He suggested that the lands along the Columbia River were ideal for colonization. Here was a challenge that Jefferson could not ignore. By the fall of 1802, the President was busy laying the groundwork for what became the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Reflecting on these events it might seem perfectly reasonable to accept Talleyrand's interpretation. Jefferson's Western policy was just reflexive thinking. The American empire seemed nothing more than an accidental crossing of chance and response. But exploration history needs to be understood as part of a larger, richer intellectual history. Scratch the surface of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and one finds a whole network of powerful, even compelling ideas. We need to understand these ideas if Jefferson's Western vision is to make any sense. What turned Jefferson to face West was not a romantic fascination with the Rockies, not an all-consuming fear of imperial rivals, not even a scientific interest in native peoples and cultures. His imperial schemes were grounded in an intellectual universe only now becoming clear. To probe that universe is to explore the heart of the Western Jefferson.
A thoughtful look at Jefferson's correspondence and presidential actions reveals a clear, often elegantly reasoned theory linking Western exploration and imperial expansion. That theory grew slowly. But by 1802 it occupied a central place in Jefferson's life and thought. More than many other American statesmen of the age, Jefferson was wholly committed to Republicanism. That political philosophy valued what he said he most cherished: personal independence, minimal government, industry, frugality, and virtue. Republics, so the argument went, were the best repositories for such values. But many students of republics, including the influential Montesquieu, insisted that republics were by their very nature small in size and homogenous in population. Writing about Rome—a state much on the minds of American Republicans—Montesquieu declared that "'the expansion of the republic was what envenomed the situation and converted popular tumults into civil wars." In an age forever drawing parallels to the past and lessons from it, the prospect of expansion and decline was grim indeed.
And there was a further complication. The eighteenth-century thinkers believed that all human societies went through four distinct stages. Just as plants and animals had life cycles, so did peoples and nations. Human societies began with hunting, moved to pastoralism. advanced to farming, and then declined in urban ways.
Jefferson wholly accepted this theory or social evolution. Writing to William Ludlow, he imagined a traveler journeying east from the Rockies. That "philosophic observer" would see in sequence all the stages of societal development. From hunters and shepherds to farmers and merchants. Here was the past and future of all human folk. Such a future deeply troubled the Republican Jefferson. If societies moved inexorably from stage to stage surely the American republic would eventually become a highly developed, commercialized nation. Since Jefferson ardently believed that "cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens," the future seemed bleak. The challenge or Jefferson and his intellectual collaborator James Madison was to create the theory or an expanding republic. The Jeffersonians had to fashion a rationale for expansion that would at once avoid what Montesquieu said had destroyed Rome and what prophets of a commercial-mercantilist future like Alexander Hamilton insisted was not only inevitable, but also beneficial.
Could an expanding Republic remain true to its promise? The Jeffersonians thought so. James Madison's political philosophy was always more rigorously argued and logically presented than Jefferson's. In numbers 10 and 14 of the Federalist Madison effectively challenged the traditional wisdom of small republics. He asserted that size was an advantage, allowing otherwise dangerous factional disputes to be diluted. While classical democracies indeed demanded that each citizen participate in every decision, republics delegated much of the governing to elected representatives. "A republic," Madison declared, "may be extended over a large region." In a burst of uncharacteristic rhetoric, Madison predicted the rise of "one great, respectable, and nourishing empire."
Jefferson was in complete agreement. In an often-quoted letter to Archibald Stuart in 1786, Jefferson maintained that "our present federal limits are not too large for good government. " But the Virginian's vision went well beyond the boundaries set for the United States at the end of the Revolution. "Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled." While Jefferson sometimes wrote about separate Eastern and Western republics, such political separation was not at the heart of either his thought or presidential actions. Jefferson steadily worked to advance the continental expansion of a single American nation. He doubted that sectional forces would be strong enough to divide the Union. So confident was Jefferson that in 1803, just after the announcement of the Louisiana Purchase, he predicted that the American nation would move uninterrupted state by state to the Pacific.
For Jeffersonians, an expanding Republic was not only acceptable, but also essential. If time and social evolution took their course, the American Republic would finally be much like the English nation. Commerce, in the guise of large cities and powerful companies, would dominate all spheres of life. Jefferson and his fellow Republicans insisted that the only way to stave off such a dismal future was to provide almost limitless supplies of arable land. So long as the nation was bound to its farmers, the Republic would be secure. New land, whether obtained by purchase or right of discovery, might be the great source for national renewal. "By enlarging the empire of liberty," wrote Jefferson, we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of renovation, should its principles, at any time
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degenerate, in those portion of our country which gave them birth." Little wonder that Jefferson reacted so swiftly to Mackenzie's initiative. Here was the planting of British colonial and commercial power in the very region Jefferson hoped might provide renewal for the American Republic. …
Jefferson's Indian policy, wrapped in the language of assimilation and philanthropy, has as its ultimate goal the transfer of lands from native hands to white ones. Dispossession and dependency were at the heart of what the empire of liberty meant for those peoples on the other side of the cultural divide.