1803

Slave cabin at Monticello.
(Author's photo.)

 

IN EARLY 1803, President Jefferson sent James Monroe to France, to advance efforts to complete the Louisiana Purchase. Monroe let the French know that if his mission failed, then the United States was prepared to receive the “overtures which England did not cease to make.” One French official warned that Monroe had “carte blanche and that he goes to London if badly received in Paris.” 

Even Napoleon said later that his willingness to sell Louisiana had to do with his desire to cement the friendship of the Americans, and keep them from allying with Great Britain. (24/206, 224) 

The “respect,” Monroe once said, “which one power has for another is in the exact proportion of the means which they respectively have of injuring each other with the least detriment to themselves.” (24/235) 

Monroe was impressed, during a trip to Spain, by the contrast with the rest of Europe. The plight of those living in poverty, he said, was proof of the evils of a “government which is perfectly despotic, in which the people count for nothing.” (24/237)

The author at Monticello, during a bicycle ride across the USA, 2007.

 

* 

April 30: The Louisiana Purchase is agreed to, doubling the size of the United States, at a cost of pennies per acres. 

Van Loon has this to say about the Louisiana Purchase – that Napoleon could read a map, and knew that “the city of New Orleans had great strategic value as the finger that could be held on the great Mississippi funnel” stopping American trade in agricultural products. Jefferson understood, once “let this terrible Napoleon person (who could defeat anybody and anything) get hold of this valuable spot and the entire West would be bottled up for good.” (124/276) 

By a stroke of great good luck, Napoleon’s minister of finance was the son of a former governor of Pennsylvania and had lived for a considerable time in America. This worthy, by the name of Marbois, was just then engaged upon the difficult task of trying to collect a sufficient amount of money for the next war. (124/277-278)

 

Marbois asked for one hundred million francs, or $25 million. Our ambassador haggled, and a price of sixty million francs or $15 million was agreed to.

 

Congressman Timothy Pickering, of Massachusetts “went so far as to talk of secession suggested the founding of a new confederacy of New England states, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence of the democrats from the South.” Pickering offered up Vice President Aaron Burr as best man to serve as chief executive of the new nation. (124/279) 

“Very soon the new nation was to learn that our common earth is only a fifth-rate little planet and of such small dimensions that what affects one nation must necessarily affect all others.” (124/282)

 

* 

Students should know: 

1. Why was the decision in Marbury v. Madison so important?

2. What is “judicial review?”

 

Jefferson called impeachment a “scarecrow.” McLaughlin refers to Justice Marshall as “the greatest judge in our history…” Mr. Bryce on the same jurist: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to call him, as an eminent American jurist had done, a second maker of the Constitution…” (56/266)

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I used this lesson on the American Dream at different points during my coverage of U.S. history. Sometimes it served as part of a unit on pioneers, sometimes as part of a unit on the territorial growth of the United States

 

The American Dream

 

What is the American Dream? 

ANSWER ALONG THESE LINES: If you work hard, you can be rich and successful. You can own a good home, with a “white picket fence,” and be well off in terms of material things. You can have a happy family, and live in a good neighborhood. Life will get better and better. America is the “land of opportunity.”

Once the American Dream involved owning your own land - a farm.

What forces might be killing the American Dream today? 

This will depend on student answers.

 

The “Dream” developed because there was always a frontier in America. 

Frontier: the edge of settlement, “where civilization ends,” as one person wrote. Today: the edge of what is known; some students may recall the opening line from Star Trek. There are frontiers in science, in cancer treatment, etc. – ask students for examples. 

The frontier offers a fresh start: 

If you failed in one place, you could always head West, you could get a fresh start. Daniel Boone, for example, moved repeatedly. 

(We used to talk about “Log Cabin” presidents.) 

You could be born poor and rise to the highest office in the land – kids may know that Lincoln was one. Garfield, Grant, Truman and others all had humble roots. 

Pioneer: a person who goes where no one has gone before.

 

Land (1787): At first, the U.S. government would sell land only in parcels of 640 acres, a square mile. Cost:$1 per acre, but all money down. Rich land speculators tended to buy up huge chunks, then divide their tracts and sell at a profit. 

Land (1800): In an effort to help the ordinary American, a new law reduced the number of acres you had to buy to 320, and required only $160 down. 

Land (1820): A pioneer could now buy 80 acres, but the price was raised to $1.25 per acre, and all money had to be paid down – or $100. 

Land (1862): The Homestead Act offers settlers 160 acres, for free, with the only requirement being that the owner must live there for five years, and build a cabin, and improve the land. 

Ted Morgan once explained, the United States “would be a country where anybody could own land, a pie with a million slices, a country where the buying and selling of acreage was as simple as a day’s shopping.”

 

Most Americans, then, were optimistic. 

Optimism: the belief that the future will be better, that you will get the job you applied for, that your favorite team will win the Super Bowl. I used the example: You could be optimistic, if you asked the girl of your dreams to the dance – and believed she would say, “yes.” (It was fun to pick one of the boys in class, and use him, as the optimist in this example.) 

Pessimism: the belief that the future will be worse, that if you get cancer, it won’t be easy to treat, you expect to be fired, you don’t ask the person of your dreams out on a date, because you expect to get shot down. 

Millions of immigrants have come for the dream. Irish immigrants in 1848, for example, came from a land where the average landholder had three acres. 

“The Big Bear of Arkansas” story: I liked to give a capsule description from this story. The “Big Bear,” is riding a riverboat south, and brags to other passengers about a farm he has just purchased, where the soil is so rich, if you plant corn, you have to jump back, because it explodes out of the ground. One careless cow was blown up in a similar way. He talks about having the best hunting dog, and all the bear meat he can eat. At one point, he has a buyer for his land – but the man comes for a look, while the Big Bear is away. He says he won’t buy, because the land is full of tree stumps and Indian mounds. The Big Bear explains later, those “are tater hills.” Finally, he claims, if you planted ten-penny nails in the morning, you would have railroad spikes by evening. (I liked to have ten-penny nails and a spike for demonstration.)

 

Ray Kroc (as an example of the American Dream): Kroc was a salesman of restaurant equipment. In 1954, he noticed that one restaurant was wearing out milkshake mixers, and went out to find why. The McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice, explained their simple concept. They had a limited menu – including milkshakes, hamburgers and fried, but they could fill orders quickly, and families could enjoy a meal out, without getting dressed up, or paying a huge price. Kroc convinced the brothers to form a partnership and they began selling franchises, all operated along the same lines. In 1961, he bought the brothers out, and went on to become one of the richest men in America in years ahead. 

You can use all kinds of examples. 

Charles Van Doren achieved the dream – and then destroyed it. Bright, handsome, articulate, a popular professor at Columbia, he became famous in the early days of television, using his knowledge to win one of the earliest quiz show games, “Twenty One.” 

According to The Commonweal (February 22, 1957, p. 523): 

In song and story, America has ever been the land of unlimited opportunity, where any man could strike it rich, and the pot of gold lay just over the horizon. Our Presidents come from log cabins and our corporation heads once worked as shipping clerks. The American dream of success – material success – is expressed in Franklin’s autobiography and the gospel of work, but also and more accurately, perhaps, in the Horatio Alger tales. Ragged Dick had sterling qualities to be sure, but so did every American boy. The one thing needful, in the Alger version of the myth, was to be in the right place at the right time – to save the millionaire’s daughter from the runaway horse, for example, and thus, through luck and pluck, be made president of the company. This is the pattern of the quiz show success. Fame and fortune lie in the laps of the gods, and the best preparation for the moment of greatness is simply to be alert and ready for the call.

 

Mr. Van Doren’s success is particularly pertinent in this regard, because he has been rewarded not so much for knowledge as for luck and pluck as a gambler. The quiz game which has so far won him $138,000 [equal to $3,101,000 in 2023] (“Twenty One”) is based on the card game vingt-et-un or, as it is more popularly called, blackjack. This is a game requiring shrewdness, courage and the ability to bluff. It is a game Mr. Van Doren learned, presumably, in the army rather than the groves of academe. 

 

Others that I used included Sara Blakely (Spanx); Mark Zuckerberg; LeBron James; Sergey Brin (born in the USSR) and Larry Page (a college dropout) who together founded Google, and became billionaires, and any others who were in the news at the time. 

Students have usually heard the term, “American Dream,” and can give examples themselves. It always worked to ask them to describe their personal version of the Dream – and we had excellent work when I asked them to draw their American Dreams. 

Joe Burrow, who sat on the bench for three years in college, would be a good example now. In 2023, he became the highest paid player in the NFL.

 

Native-American American Dream: Not to get bulldozed by the white and black settlers. Not to be killed. To live in their old ways.

 

Early Ohio (I taught in Ohio, so included this): African American adults were not allowed to vote; their children could not attend public schools. Adults, however, can pay taxes, like anyone else. In the poem, Harlem, by Langston Hughes, he once asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Did it, perhaps, “dry up, like a raisin in the sun.”