Thomas Jefferson, Columbia University

• Sculptor: William Ordway Partridge
• Date: 1914.
• Location: Columbia University, in front of the Graduate School of Journalism. Enter the campus on Broadway at 116th St., right at the end of the first building, then right again.

April 30, 1803: United States acquires the Louisiana Territory

Jefferson didn’t buy the Louisiana Territory merely because it was for sale. He felt strongly that if New Orleans remained in foreign control, it would be a danger to the United States, which was barely 15 years old:

There is on the globe one single spot 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, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half of our inhabitants. … [T]he impetuosity of [France’s] temper, the energy and restlessness of her character placed in a point of eternal friction with us and our character, which, though quiet, and loving peace and the pursuit of wealth, is high-minded, despising wealth in competition with insult or injury, enterprising and energetic as any nation on earth; these circumstances render it impossible that France and the United States can continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Robert Livingston, 4/18/1802

We’re so used to thinking of the Louisiana Purchase as a huge amount of land that it’s strange to remember the details of it had to be written out, like any other transaction between governments. Here’s the gorgeous binding of the National Archives copy of the agreement to pay 60 million francs to France.

 Everyone who’s had an American history course recalls (at least if reminded) that the purchase of the Louisiana Territory nearly doubled the size of the United States, adding some 800,000 square miles of land from the Mississippi to the Rockies and the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border for the bargain price of $15 million. For a map showing the purchase, see here. 

Less well known is the fact that President Jefferson offered the governorship of the Territory to the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the last surviving generals from the Revolutionary War and a good friend from Jefferson’s time in Paris as minister to France. “I would prefer your presence to an army of 10,000 men to assure the tranquility of the country,” wrote Jefferson to Lafayette. “The old French inhabitants would immediately attach themselves to you and to the United States. You would annul the efforts of the foreign agitators who are arriving in droves.”

Lafayette had seen his hopes for American-style liberty in France crushed by the horrors of the French Revolution in the 1790s, and only in 1797 had been released from years in a foul Austrian prison. In 1803 he was living circumspectly in France under the rule of Napoleon, who had sold the Territory to the United States to gain money for his military incursions in Europe.

Lafayette replied to Jefferson:

You, my dear friend, have seen my hopes for French and American liberty; you shared those hopes. The cause of humanity has been victorious and been reaffirmed in America; nothing can stop it anymore, or displace it or tarnish its progress. Here, it is deemed irrevocably lost, but for me to pronounce this sentence and to do so through expatriation goes against my hopeful character. I cannot see how, unless some force place me in physical constraints, I could abandon even the smallest hope … I tell myself that I, the promoter of the revolution, I must not recognize the impossibility of seeing reestablished, during out lifetime, a just and generous liberty, American liberty.

The Jefferson and Lafayette quotes are taken from Harlow Giles Unger’s Lafayette, a thoroughly researched and very readable biography. Unger unapologetically regards Lafayette as a hero.

New York has two statues of Lafayette, both by Bertholdi, who designed the Statue of Liberty. One is at Union Square and East 16th St. The other, in which Lafayette is shown meeting George Washington, is near Morningside Park (114th St. and Manhattan Avenue, at Morningside Ave.).

For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.

Jefferson and Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World vied with Hearst’s New York Journal to be the most sensational paper in New York (see Maine Monument). Pulitzer (1847-1911) left funds for a statue of Jefferson to be erected in City Hall Park, as a companion piece to Nathan Hale. But MacMonnies didn’t want his work to be one of a pair, so Jefferson was eventually erected in front of Columbia’s School of Journalism, which was also funded by a Pulitzer bequest.

Jefferson asserted that “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” but he also remarked that “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

Favorite Jefferson Quotes

• We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed. — Letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, 4/2/1790
• We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it. — Letter to William Carmichael and William Short, 6/3/1793
• Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question. — First Inaugural Address, 3/4/1801
• We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it. — Letter to William Roscoe, 12/27/1820 
• In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
• When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.
• Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
• Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
• A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
• It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
• To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
• No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it.
• I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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