Why Thomas Jefferson Faced Opposition to the Louisiana Purchase

In brokering the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the United States and set the fledgling country on a course to become a continental power—all for just three cents an acre. “Let the land rejoice,” General Horatio Gates praised Jefferson, “for you have bought Louisiana for a song.”

More than two centuries later, the decision to acquire the resource-rich territory from France may seem like a no-brainer. But at the time, many Americans objected to the Louisiana Purchase over issues that included cost, constitutionality and conflicting visions for the country’s future. Even Jefferson himself harbored concerns about consummating one of history’s greatest real estate deals.

The most vocal criticism of the Louisiana Purchase emanated from the Federalist Party, which opposed Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. “You know with what bloody teeth and fangs the Federalists will attack any sentiment or principle known to come from me,” Jefferson wrote to Kentucky Senator John Breckinridge. The massive land deal was no exception.

Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republicans hoped the vast terrain would fulfill their vision for an agrarian-based economy. By contrast, Federalists worried the new territory would lure workers away from their party’s urban power base—and the seafaring and manufacturing businesses they believed vital to the country’s future.

Afraid the acquisition would dilute their political power and weaken the region’s economy, New England Federalists launched the fiercest objections. “The Federalists saw the Louisiana Purchase as detrimental to New England’s future,” says Jon Kukla, author of A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. “They feared that by opening up an enormous area of arable farmland, potential sailors and factory workers would be attracted to go west and become farmers.”

Some Federalists also balked at France’s $15 million asking price for the 828,000 square miles. Although a veritable bargain, it still exceeded what the young nation could afford to pay on its own. And it required financing by European banks, which paid French Emperor Napoleon in cash and ceded ownership of the land to the United States in return for the repayment of bonds over 15 years at 6 percent interest.

The financing pushed the total cost of the Louisiana Purchase to $27 million, which increased the national debt by 20 percent. “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much,” groused former Federalist congressman Fisher Ames in the Boston Columbian Centinel.

Critics of the Louisiana Purchase deemed the parcel too immense to effectively manage and defend, threatening the very survival of the United States as a republic. Staunch Federalist Alexander Hamilton wrote that the sheer size of the acreage was “extremely problematical” and could be impossible to govern and integrate into the country. He worried the expansion might “hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the government.”

Kukla says the massive land expansion concerned Americans who subscribed to the Enlightenment belief that, in order to retain their political virtues and effectiveness, republics must be relatively small in area, uniform in population and economically homogenous. Looking to Ancient Rome as an example, Kukla says, they saw how the Roman Republic’s rapid territorial growth led to a centralization and expansion of executive powers that precipitated “its sudden replacement by an empire.” Such a model appeared “dangerous to all the rights and liberties for which the American Revolution was fought.”

It didn’t help that the U.S. government seemed to be going down that very path, denying self-rule to inhabitants of the newly acquired tract—mainly Native Americans and French and Spanish residents of New Orleans deemed unworthy of the ballot. “Our new fellow citizens are as yet as incapable of self-government as children,” wrote Jefferson, who appointed a governor to administer the territory along with a nonelected legislature. To some Americans, that lack of popular sovereignty made the United States more akin to the colonial empire they had cast aside in the American Revolution than the republic born out of that war.

Abolitionists foresaw another threat to the republic. They worried that the extension of farming into vast swaths of new land would expand the institution of slavery. By 1820, the issue spawned the Missouri Compromise that decreed the 36º 30’ parallel to be the dividing line between free and slave states. Debates over whether to permit slavery in states carved out of the Louisiana Purchase would be flashpoints in the leadup to the Civil War.

When controversy erupted over whether the Louisiana Purchase was constitutional, members of both parties contorted themselves into positions seemingly contrary to their core principles. While Federalists generally favored a liberal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and a powerful executive, they argued that the president lacked the explicit constitutional authority to acquire new territory.

A champion of a limited federal government who favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution, Jefferson initially agreed. “The general government has no powers but such as the Constitution gives it,” he wrote to John Dickinson in 1803, “and it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory, and still less of incorporating it into the Union. An amendment of the Constitution seems necessary for this.”

Jefferson’s cabinet argued that such an amendment was unnecessary and that the president’s power to purchase land was implied in the Constitution’s treaty-making provisions. After spending weeks wrestling with his conscience and drafting an amendment, Jefferson abandoned his constitutional qualms when news arrived that Napoleon might be having second thoughts on the transaction. “Even if all the politics aligned perfectly, the notion of being able to craft an amendment, get it through Congress and send it to the states for ratification would have far exceeded the available timeframe,” Kukla says.

To Jefferson, the deal was too good to slip away over a constitutional argument. “The less that is said about any constitutional difficulty, the better,” Jefferson wrote to Attorney General Levi Lincoln. “It will be desirable for Congress to do what is necessary, in silence.”

With limited debate, the U.S. Senate on October 20, 1803, ratified the acquisition by a 24-7 vote, with only one Federalist senator crossing the aisle. Jefferson signed the agreement on October 31, with the United States taking formal possession of the territory before the end of the year.