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Louisiana purchase london bank { May 2 2003 }

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2800-2003May1.html

A Young Nation's Growth Spurt
200 Years Ago, France Did America a Favor to Savor -- the Louisiana Purchase

By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 2, 2003; Page C01



NEW ORLEANS

It's easy to make fun of the French in the current global climate, but there's this to consider: The last time the French were a really serious, battle-winning military power, they got so distracted by the costs of war that they virtually gave away land that doubled the size of the United States.

Not every nation would be willing to revisit (much less commemorate) a muttonheaded move like that, but France is helping do so with a dazzling exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art to mark the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.

So let's back off the surrender jokes. The French are being good sports about this.

The Louisiana Purchase, of course, was the world's biggest land deal, whereby 200 years ago today Thomas Jefferson's special envoy, James Monroe, got Napoleon Bonaparte to sell to the United States what would become all or part of 13 to 17 states (depending on whom you ask) for something like 4 cents an acre. Price and acreage, however, don't begin to tell the story.

Imagine the United States without Kansas City, Mount Rushmore or Yellowstone National Park. Imagine American life without the Nebraska Cornhuskers, Oklahoma Sooners or Denver Broncos.

Without the Louisiana Purchase we would never have had Louis Armstrong, Garrison Keillor, Bill Clinton or Mark Twain.

Jazz? Colorado skiing? Tom Daschle? Imagine life without them!

But the real significance of our 200-year-old bargain dawns here in the heart of it all when the waiter at Christian's restaurant brings you a side order of french-fried eggplant so light it almost floats off the plate. Lots of restaurants in the world fry eggplant, but probably only in Louisiana would the waiter bring you the option of Parmesan cheese as a garnish -- or powdered sugar, "in case you want to eat it like a beignet."

Jefferson knew what he was doing when he sent Monroe to France. He didn't know, however, how much Monroe could or would do.

Jefferson had instructed him to buy New Orleans. Napoleon threw in everything between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains for almost nothing, for a lagniappe, as they say down here.

Fifteen million dollars to Napoleon and now we have powdered sugar on our eggplant -- and Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Bozeman, Mont.; and Arkadelphia, Ark., as complimentary hors d'oeuvres.

Is this a great country, or what?

Crispy smoked quail salad with bourbon molasses vinaigrette

-- Bayuna Restaurant,

New Orleans

As much as it has meant to our nation, the Louisiana Purchase is a remarkably little studied and commemorated event. No celebrations are planned this year in Des Moines, Denver or Dubuque, which wouldn't be American without it. They're not even pondering the Purchase in Amarillo.

But here in New Orleans they're pulling out all the stops, which is to say the city's celebrated chefs are cooking up gustatorial tie-ins with the NOMA exhibition on "Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France." This means that to research things properly, one is required to undertake a sort of Lewis & Clark Expedition through the flavors that $15 million bought us.

This is not for the timid. Somewhere between the marchand de vin sauce and the sweetbreads at Rene Bistrot on Common Street and the "Don't Mess With My Tasso" omelet with andouille cheese grits at Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge, farther west in the Purchase, one can come perilously close to staring gout in the face.

There are, however, compensations. At 18 participating New Orleans restaurants, diners can stagger out with free commemorative china bearing Napoleonic and Jeffersonian signatures -- further evidence that the 200-year-old Purchase just keeps on giving.

The NOMA exhibit, whose 260-plus artifacts from 100 different collections include everything from Napoleon's toothbrush to Jefferson's easy chair, tells the tangled story of the Purchase as best it can. Where it really excels, however, is in setting the cultural context of the times, particularly with the magnificent art of the Napoleonic era, which is frequently as wacky in its portrayal of reality as it is exquisite in its craftsmanship.

Huge allegorical paintings represent both France and America as overwhelmingly female, blue-eyed, blonde and bare-breasted. Even the "noble savages" of the American woods are often blond, blue-eyed and bare-breasted.

Is it any wonder France's grasp of its American territory was, shall we say, uncertain?

"The truth is nobody on either side of the ocean knew the extent of what was really being bought and sold," said Jason R. Wiese, co-editor of "Mapping Louisiana," to be published next month by the Historic New Orleans Collection, a private museum in the French Quarter with its own impressive exhibit on the Purchase.

"There were maps, but they were highly speculative west of the Mississippi, where few other than Native Americans had ever ventured," Wiese said. "For example, one 1719 map designates the 'Province de Quivera' " in the general area of the present-day city of Texarkana.

"This referred to the Quivera Indians, who supposedly lived there. They were an entirely mythical tribe, but maps kept referring to them well into the 19th century."

Fried green tomato topped with shrimp remoulade

-- Upperline Restaurant,

New Orleans

That uncertainty, like the Purchase itself, started with Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de LaSalle, who canoed down the Mississippi from French Canada in 1682 and claimed all the lands drained by the river for the French King, Louis XIV. He brought a notary with him just to make it official.

The French, however, although ardent traders and explorers in Canada, proved to be lackluster colonists in the territory they named "Louisiana," for their king. They founded New Orleans in 1718 to control trade on the Mississippi, but starvation, disease, Indian attacks and slave revolts so impeded establishment of a plantation economy that Louis XV in 1762 ceded New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory to his Bourbon cousin, Carlos III, the king of Spain. Some historians say Louis did so to avoid losing the colony to Britain as part of the treaty that ended the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and cost France its Canadian colonies.

Whatever the reason, New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory belonged to Spain for the next 38 years.

When the Spanish in 1785 sought to tighten control over American freight moving down the Mississippi for export, the United States rattled sabers in protest. A temporary treaty solved that problem for a time, but with the rise of Napoleon U.S. leaders decided that New Orleans was too important to remain in foreign hands.

"France means to regain Louisiana," Secretary of State Timothy Pickering wrote to his ambassador in London in 1797, "and to renew the ancient plan of her monarchs of circumscribing and encircling what now constitute the United States."

Indeed, heady with the glory of his adventures in Europe and Egypt, Napoleon began planning to expand his domain to the New World. In 1800, he pressured Spain into a secret treaty giving the Louisiana Territory back to France. Then he readied a military expedition to lay claim to New Orleans and the upriver territory.

Louisiana crawfish cake with creole beurre blanc sauce

-- Galatoire's, New Orleans

The force that Napoleon dispatched to the New World in December 1801 was enormous -- more than 30,000 men. Ostensibly, it was sent to put down the long and bloody slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), a colony that had once yielded more riches than all the others in the world combined. Then the French forces were to move on to reclaim Louisiana before aroused Americans could intervene.

However, Saint Domingue's wily rebel genius Toussaint L'Ouverture, the "Black Napoleon," decimated the French with guerrilla attacks, augmented by a virulent yellow fever season. Toussaint was ultimately captured and sent to die in France, but by the end of 1802 his lieutenants had all but driven the French from Hispaniola. Napoleon's dream of a revived colonial empire was finished.

Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson -- sworn in as U.S. president in 1801 -- turned his attention promptly to the New Orleans problem.

"There is on the globe one single spot," he wrote to his ambassador in Paris, "the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market. . . . France, placing herself in that door, assumes to us the attitude of defiance."

Jefferson sent a succession of emissaries to Paris, some to warn Napoleon that trigger-happy Americans were spoiling to gain New Orleans by conquest, others to remind the emperor that he needed money for his European armies more than he needed that territorial white elephant in the New World. Why not sell it?

On April 12, 1803, James Monroe arrived in Paris, authorized by Congress and the president to spend $2 million for New Orleans. But the day before, Napoleon had startled U.S. Ambassador Robert Livingston by announcing his willingness to sell not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory.

The French originally asked for $22.5 million. Monroe and Livingston thought the price too high: They had been authorized neither to spend that much nor to buy that much. But they realized that the opportunity for the young nation was both unparalleled and probably fleeting: The mercurial Napoleon might easily change his mind.

In late April, negotiators agreed to a purchase price of about $15 million for what would prove to be more than 800,000 square miles. On May 2, the first of several treaties documenting terms of the Purchase was signed in Paris.

"This accession of territory," Napoleon announced, "strengthens forever the power of the United States; and I have just given to England a maritime rival that will sooner or later humble her pride."

He had also given America an outpost of haute cuisine in a wilderness of English cooking.

Pecan-crusted gulf fish with crawfish and mushroom meuniere

-- Napoleon House Cafe,

New Orleans

Like an underfinanced family today buying its first house, the young United States had to find financing for the Purchase. They found it -- 20 years' worth of notes -- with Baring & Co. bankers in London, which (together with Hope & Co. of Amsterdam) agreed to pay Napoleon, even though England declared war on France less than three weeks after the treaty was signed. The final cost of the Louisiana Purchase, including 6 percent interest on the loans, was $23,527,872.57.

Jefferson was overjoyed that the Purchase had virtually doubled the size of the United States, but he was troubled by suspicion that he had exceeded his constitutional authority in making it. He was drafting a constitutional amendment conveying such authority when Livingston sent word from Paris that Napoleon was considering withdrawing from the treaty.

Rather than risk the delays involved in winning ratification of an amendment, the third president lobbied the Senate to approve the treaty and won a 24 to 7 vote in October. The Louisiana Territory was formally transferred from France to the United States on Dec. 20, 1803.

French-speaking New Orleanians wept. Some of their descendants have been weeping ever since. The rest, happily, have been cooking.

Sauteed five-ounce filet stuffed with fried oysters, topped with creole Sauce Robert

-- Arnaud's, New Orleans

To a number of historians, including Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans, the Louisiana Purchase remains the third most important event in the life of the United States, after adoption of the Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution.

Control of the Mississippi as a trade route was more immediately important to the new nation in 1803 than all that new land, Brinkley says. Like Charles A. Cerami, author of the just-published "Jefferson's Great Gamble," he believes there was a sense of inevitability about the eventual U.S. ownership of much of western North America.

"Had Spain, France or even Britain controlled that territory, it would have been a colony, and it's doubtful any European colony could have been held for long in the path of a vital and expanding young nation," Cerami says.

But a less readily noticed significance of the Louisiana Purchase, Brinkley and Cerami say, is how it tested our ability to absorb and assimilate other cultures. As Jon Kukla points out in his new book "A Wilderness So Immense," with the Purchase "the United States began a long encounter with diversity that has forced us, and that should inspire us, to think and to live far differently than the Founding Fathers expected."

For unlike the overwhelmingly Protestant East Coast, whose principal social division was between whites and black slaves, New Orleans and the Louisiana territory was a polyglot gumbo of Spanish and French Catholics, free blacks, pirates, picaros, backwoodsmen, West Indians, Native Americans and adventurers. It was a mixture that alarmed upright New Englanders, many of whom said, in effect, "There goes the neighborhood."

Twelve thousand Americans flooded into Louisiana in the first decade after the Purchase. But in the last half of 1809 alone, Kukla points out, more than 10,000 French-speaking refugees from the Haitian revolution also arrived, leaving New Orleans with a cultural stamp it wears to this day. When architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe arrived in New Orleans in 1819 he found "a more . . . various gabble of tongues . . . than was ever heard at Babel" and a society of such astonishing diversity as to be "wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America."

Yet New Orleans was soon to absorb even larger numbers of Irish, German and Sicilian immigrants. Benjamin Franklin had once worried about the trickle of German-speaking farmers altering the culture of Pennsylvania. What would the cultural jambalaya of the Louisiana Purchase portend for the United States? Would it enrich us or tear us apart?

Sure enough, much of the North-South strife over slavery bore on territory in the Purchase -- would states there be slave or free? America's bloodiest war was fought to resolve that question.

There were other wars, farther north: wars with the Indians, wars between farmers and cattlemen. But the land there also became the breadbasket of America, with amber waves of grain all the way to the Rockies. Not to mention the wellspring of such icons of Americana as Wyatt Earp, Will Rogers, Harry Truman and James Dean. Plus Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

But for those of us who've made it this far -- especially here in the city that started it all -- the richest legacy of the Purchase has been the powdered sugar it has sprinkled on the eggplant of American life.

Merci beaucoup, France. We needed this.

Bananas Foster bread pudding

-- Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse,

New Orleans



© 2003 The Washington Post Company




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