THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: A NATION DIVIDED

PART II — A NATION EXPANDS

The Louisiana Purchase and the Question of Slavery

At the end of the eighteenth century, the United States had left an enormous question unresolved.

Slavery remained legal in much of the country.

Some states were moving away from it.

Others continued to depend heavily upon it.

And the Constitution had created a government capable of holding those states together without settling the disagreement between them.

For a time, that uneasy arrangement survived.

Then America grew.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson's administration completed one of the largest territorial acquisitions in American history.

The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States.

It opened enormous possibilities for settlement, agriculture, commerce, transportation, and national expansion.

But it also made the unfinished question from the founding much larger.

If America expanded west, would slavery expand with it?

Why Louisiana Mattered

To understand the Louisiana Purchase, we first have to understand geography.

The Mississippi River was becoming enormously important to Americans living west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Farmers depended upon the river system to move agricultural products toward markets.

And at the mouth of the Mississippi sat one of the most strategically important cities in North America:

New Orleans.

Control of New Orleans meant influence over access between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

For a growing United States, that mattered enormously.

President Thomas Jefferson therefore wanted to secure American access to New Orleans.

His administration sent representatives to negotiate with France.

What happened next was much larger than originally planned.

An Extraordinary Offer

France controlled the vast Louisiana Territory.

But Napoleon Bonaparte's ambitions in North America were changing.

France had faced a devastating struggle in Saint-Domingue—later Haiti—and Napoleon was also preparing for renewed conflict with Britain.

France needed money.

American representatives Robert Livingston and James Monroe had been authorized to negotiate for New Orleans and surrounding interests.

Instead, France offered something extraordinary:

The Louisiana Territory itself.

The United States agreed.

On April 30, 1803, representatives of the two countries signed the agreements that became known as the Louisiana Purchase.

The price was approximately $15 million.

The territory covered roughly 828,000 square miles.

The United States had nearly doubled in size.

Jefferson Faced His Own Constitutional Question

The purchase presented Thomas Jefferson with an interesting problem.

Jefferson had often favored a relatively strict interpretation of federal power.

But the Constitution did not explicitly say:

The President may purchase enormous territories from foreign countries and add them to the United States.

Jefferson considered whether a constitutional amendment might be necessary.

But the opportunity could disappear.

Napoleon could change his mind.

International circumstances could change.

Jefferson ultimately proceeded with the treaty.

The Senate ratified it.

And the United States took possession of Louisiana.

It was an early example of a question that would appear repeatedly throughout American history:

How should constitutional principles be applied when circumstances the Founders did not specifically anticipate arise?

But the constitutional question surrounding the purchase was only the beginning.

The territory itself would create much larger questions.

It Wasn't Empty Land

Maps can make territorial expansion look deceptively simple.

One country controlled an area.

Then another country acquired it.

A boundary changed.

A map changed color.

But the Louisiana Territory was not empty.

Numerous Indigenous nations had lived across those lands for generations.

The diplomatic agreement between France and the United States did not mean those nations had agreed to surrender their homelands.

As American settlement expanded westward, the United States would increasingly encounter—and often displace—Native peoples already living there.

So the Louisiana Purchase created more than one historical story.

It was a story about national expansion.

It was a story about constitutional authority.

It was a story about Native American land and sovereignty.

And increasingly, it became a story about slavery.

Expansion Changed the Political Map

The Louisiana Purchase created an enormous amount of territory from which future states could eventually emerge.

And states mattered.

Every state received representation in Congress.

Every state received two senators.

That meant the admission of new states could alter the political balance of the country.

By the early nineteenth century, Americans increasingly recognized a delicate balance between states permitting slavery and states where slavery had been prohibited.

As long as their numbers remained roughly balanced, neither section automatically controlled the Senate simply through the admission of additional states.

But westward expansion threatened to change that.

Every new state brought the same question:

Free or slave?

What looked like a question about territory was becoming a question about political power.

Louisiana Becomes a State

The first state created substantially from the Louisiana Purchase entered the Union in 1812.

It was Louisiana.

Slavery already existed in the region and remained legal when Louisiana entered the Union.

But Louisiana was only one part of an enormous territory.

More settlers moved west.

More territories developed.

And eventually another territory requested admission as a state.

That territory was Missouri.

Its application would ignite a national crisis.

Missouri Changes the Argument

In 1818, the Missouri Territory sought admission to the Union.

Missouri would permit slavery.

That mattered because the number of free and slave states had become politically significant.

A new slave state threatened to change the balance in the Senate.

Then Representative James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed restrictions on slavery as part of Missouri's admission.

The proposal intensified an already difficult debate.

Could Congress place restrictions on slavery when admitting a new state?

Did settlers entering federal territories have the right to decide the issue themselves?

Could Congress prohibit slavery from territories belonging to the United States?

What powers did Congress possess over territories?

And behind those constitutional questions was an increasingly obvious political one:

Which section of the country would gain power as America expanded?

The debate became fierce.

Missouri was no longer simply a statehood question.

It had exposed a national division.

The Problem Was Getting Bigger

The country now faced something the Constitution had never permanently resolved.

If every western territory could eventually become a state, the expansion of the United States could also mean the expansion of slavery.

For Americans opposed to slavery's expansion, that possibility was deeply troubling.

For many slaveholding Americans, restrictions on expansion raised different concerns.

If Congress could prohibit slavery in federal territories, what did that imply about federal authority?

Would states permitting slavery eventually become a political minority?

Would the balance of power shift permanently toward free states?

These questions involved morality.

They involved economics.

They involved constitutional interpretation.

They involved sectional interests.

And they involved political power.

Increasingly, they became difficult to separate from one another.

Then Came Maine

At almost exactly the same moment, another territory was seeking statehood.

Maine.

Maine had previously been part of Massachusetts.

Unlike Missouri, Maine would enter the Union as a state where slavery was not permitted.

That created the possibility of a political bargain.

Instead of admitting Missouri alone, Congress could admit two states.

One free.

One slave.

The numerical balance in the Senate could be preserved.

But that solved only part of the problem.

The Louisiana Purchase was enormous.

What would happen throughout the rest of it?

Congress needed another answer.

The Missouri Compromise

In 1820, Congress produced what became known as the Missouri Compromise.

The arrangement contained several important elements.

Maine would enter the Union as a free state.

Missouri could enter without a congressional restriction prohibiting slavery.

And throughout the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory, slavery would generally be prohibited north of latitude:

36°30′

—with Missouri itself excepted.

Congress had drawn a geographic boundary across the future of slavery in the West.

On one side, slavery could potentially expand.

On the other, it would be prohibited under the compromise.

For the moment, the immediate crisis had been contained.

But it had not been solved.

A Line Across a Map

The 36°30′ line represented something much larger than geography.

Congress had effectively acknowledged that the expansion of slavery had become a national political problem requiring a national political arrangement.

The Louisiana Purchase had made that problem unavoidable.

The United States had acquired land.

Now it was attempting to determine what kind of country would occupy it.

Would western America contain slavery?

Where?

Who would decide?

Congress?

The states?

Territorial settlers?

And what would happen when Americans disagreed with the answer?

Those questions were not going away.

Compromise Became a Strategy

The Missouri Compromise established a pattern that would appear repeatedly during the decades before the Civil War.

A crisis would emerge.

The country would divide.

Political leaders would search for an agreement.

A compromise would temporarily hold the Union together.

Then expansion or another political development would reopen the question.

The strategy could postpone confrontation.

But postponement was not resolution.

The country was managing the disagreement rather than settling it.

The Human Question Behind the Political Question

Political maps can also hide something important.

When politicians debated whether a territory would be “free” or “slave,” they were debating the future legal status of human beings.

If slavery expanded westward, enslaved people could be taken into those territories.

Families could be bought and sold.

Plantations and other slaveholding enterprises could spread into new regions.

If slavery was prohibited, the institution's geographic expansion would be restricted.

So while Congress debated representation and political balance, another question remained underneath everything:

Would the institution of slavery itself be allowed to grow as the nation grew?

That question would become increasingly important.

Jefferson Saw Danger

Thomas Jefferson had helped make the Louisiana Purchase possible.

Nearly two decades later, the Missouri controversy deeply troubled him.

The conflict showed how dramatically the politics of slavery had changed.

The issue was no longer confined to whether individual states would maintain or abolish slavery.

Now it was tied directly to the future geography of the United States.

Territory meant states.

States meant senators and representatives.

Representation meant political power.

And political power could shape the future of slavery.

America's expansion had connected all of them.

The Compromise Held

For more than three decades, the Missouri Compromise remained an important part of the political settlement over slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory.

The country continued expanding.

New states entered the Union.

Political parties changed.

The economy changed.

The population grew.

Americans moved farther west.

But the underlying disagreement remained.

Then the United States acquired still more territory.

And once again, the country faced the same question:

Would slavery expand with America?

This time, the territory would come partly from another war.

And the compromises would become harder to make.

Expansion Was Becoming Division

The Louisiana Purchase is remembered as one of the great territorial expansions in American history.

And it was.

It gave the United States control over an enormous region.

It strengthened access to the Mississippi River.

It opened land for American settlement and development.

It helped transform a relatively young republic along the Atlantic seaboard into a continental nation.

But expansion carried consequences.

Native peoples faced growing pressure on their lands.

The constitutional powers of the federal government continued to be debated.

And every new territory forced Americans to confront the question the founding generation had never resolved.

What was the future of slavery in the United States?

The Missouri Compromise provided an answer.

But only temporarily.

A line had been drawn across the map.

It could not erase the disagreement underneath it.

The Road Toward Crisis

In 1820, civil war was still decades away.

It was not inevitable that Americans living at that moment would eventually fight one another.

There would be more elections.

More political movements.

More compromises.

More opportunities to resolve disputes politically.

But something important had changed.

Slavery was increasingly becoming connected to the geographic expansion of the country and the balance of political power within the Union.

The argument was moving west.

And America was going to keep moving west with it.

Soon the United States would acquire vast additional lands following the war with Mexico.

Congress would again debate slavery in the territories.

The Fugitive Slave Act would deepen sectional conflict.

The Missouri Compromise itself would eventually be overturned by Congress.

Violence would erupt in Kansas.

The Supreme Court would enter the controversy.

Political parties would fracture and reorganize.

And eventually the compromises that had repeatedly held the Union together would stop working.

The country had expanded.

So had the disagreement.

NEXT — PART III

A Country Dividing

When Compromise Began to Fail

For decades, Americans had attempted to manage the conflict over slavery through political compromise.

Missouri had produced one settlement.

But more territory would produce more questions.

The Mexican-American War would reshape the map again.

The Compromise of 1850 would attempt another settlement.

The Fugitive Slave Act would bring the consequences of slavery directly into communities far from the plantations of the South.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act would overturn the Missouri settlement.

Kansas would descend into violence.

The Supreme Court would issue its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

And the political system itself would begin to fracture.

The question was no longer simply whether America could continue expanding.

It was becoming:

Could a nation increasingly divided over slavery continue holding itself together?

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT CONTINUES.

Our Money Matters.

Our Choices Matter.

Our Voice Matters.

The People. The Voice. The Future.

Politics 1776