Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: New Orleans and national unity

Andrew Jackson medal

In his book The American Age: United State Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (1989), historian Walter LaFeber addresses the critical importance of New Orleans in the early decades of the American Republic. This was a factor that weighed heavily on the Union decision-makers during the Civil War.

In the years after the War of Independence was concluded in 1783, the United States confronted actual and potential threats from the European empires. The British were still there next door in Canada and were a fearsome sea power. Spain still held the enormous Louisiana Territory which would later pass to France and also Florida. A strip of territory in what's now southern Mississippi and southern Alabama was then disputed between Spain and the US. Spanish agents had made attempts to tempt Anglo-Saxon settlers in Kentucky to join the Spanish empire.

LaFeber writes:

The individual states, however, could not coordinate an effective policy to deal with the Indians and Spain. In the background loomed British power. London officials refused to evacuate the northwest forts at Niagara, Detroit and Oswego until the Americans settled their pre-1776 debt. British agents exploited the fur trade and encourage Native Americans to drive back the settlers.

... The danger reached a peak when, in 1784, the Spanish sealed the Mississippi trade at New Orleans. Americans in Kentucky country suddenly faced the choice of losing their trade or joining the Spanish Empire. (my emphasis)

The United States was then ruled under the Articles of Confederation. John Jay, the foreign minister (Secretary of Foreign Affairs) negotiated a treaty with Spain to address the differences, known as the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty. But the Articles required nine of the 13 states to ratify a treaty for it to take effect, and only seven would approve Jay-Gardoqui.

Westerners weren't happy that the treaty granted Spain control of the Mississippi for 30 years. LaFeber writes:

Westerners threatened to join the British in Canada and then, they warned the Congress, "Farewell, a long farewell to all your boasted greatness, [for we] will be able to conquer you."

In other words, Spain's control of New Orleans gave them the power to put an economic stranglehold on Kentuckians and other Westerners in the US territories. If the United States could not provide secure access to the vital Mississippi River waterway through the port of New Orleans, that created a powerful, even irresistible incentive for the westerners to align themselves instead with the empire that did control New Orleans (Spain) or one that could wrest control from Spain (Britain).

This was one of the major incidents that created pressure for a national convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, a convention that actually wound up writing an entire new Constitution.

The critical importance of New Orleans was a central concern of US foreign policy as early as 1784, the year after the Peace of Paris which recognized US independence from Britain.

LaFeber also emphasizes that control of New Orleans was "the primary American objective" in Thomas Jefferson's policies as President, which led to the Louisiana Purchase:

These characteristics of Jefferson's foreign policy - expansionism, freedom of action, centralization of power, and the willingness to use force in selected situations - appeared in his greatest triumph, the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. But the affair could have been a diplomatic catastrophe. Jefferson and [Secretary of State John] Madison found themselves facing a crisis in 1801 when they learned that the weakened Spanish had finally surrendered to Napoleon's demands and sold him the Louisiana Territory. His war with Great Britain had stopped (temporarily, it soon turned out), and the emperor turned to developing a New World empire. He especially wanted to find a food supply in Louisiana for the black slaves who produced highly profitable sugar crops in Haiti and Santo Domingo. In 1802, the crisis intensified when Spanish officials (who still controlled New Orleans) suddenly shut off the Mississippi to U.S. trade. Madison had long understood that whoever controlled that great river controlled the rapidly multiplying Americans settling in the West: "The Mississippi is to them everything," he wrote privately in late 1802. "It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States formed into one stream." (my emphasis)

Britain could have wound up in control of New Orleans after the War of 1812, had Andrew Jackson not stopped them in the Battle of New Orleans in January, 1815. I'm just saying.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2008