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A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. By Jon Kukla. (New York: Knopf, 2003. x, 430 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40812-6.)
Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii, 350 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-515347-2.)
Many months after his inauguration, Thomas Jefferson observed,
"However our present interests may restrain us within our limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not southern, continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface." (in Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 1970, p. 746)
As Jefferson knew, the first step on that westward course of empire was the Louisiana Territory. In these provocative studies of Jeffersonian statecraft, Jon Kulda and Roger G. Kennedy examine the origins and consequences of the Louisiana Purchase. Their perspectives vary, and their conclusions about Jefferson's motives and the impact of Louisiana on the future of the Republic are equally divergent.
In A Wilderness So Immense, Jon Kukla examines the international forces and diplomacy that eventuated in the acquisition of Louisiana Territory. Deftly weaving the threads of a textually rich narrative that stretch from Paris and Madrid to Haiti and Washington into a seamless whole, Kulda stresses the centrality of European balance-of-power politics to America's expansion west across the Mississippi River. Spain valued the territory less for its economic potential than...