Americana Revisited

“In Kali-yuga, however, in the so-called secular state, the executive branch of government is in the charge of so-called kings and presidents, who are all fools and rascals, ignorant of the intricacies of nature's causes and ignorant of the principles of sacrifice.”
Srimad-Bhagavatam, 4.16.5, purport

“While Bonaparte had no right to transfer Louisiana and Jefferson had no authority to buy it, that seemed not to matter . . . As for Spain's protests that Louisiana had been illegally sold by Napoleon, the Americans ignored them. Spain did not have the power to enforce its claim, and power, not legalisms, was all that concerned the Americans . . . As for the unconstitutionality of it all, our strict constructionist president coolly observed that he could not let 'metaphysical subtleties' impede the Republic's westward expansion.”
Pat Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire

This section considers the Louisiana Purchase. After the French were defeated in the New World in 1763, they were forced to cede massive territory to Spain in what is now the United States. Indeed, Madrid controlled most of the continental U. S. at the end of the Eighteenth Century. However, in 1800, the King of Spain decided, in the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, to transfer a vast tract of land known as the Louisiana Territory to the new Emperor of France (after the French Republic had failed). In 1802, this transfer was formalized as a treaty, and Napoleon I vowed to his chief ministers and other government representatives that he would, under no circumstances, ever sell or alienate this newly-acquired land.

The U. S. government of President Thomas Jefferson was alarmed when it became aware of these developments, in no small part because the “right of deposit” in New Orleans was also withdrawn from the U. S. by Spain on Oct. 18, 1802, although quite possibly under Napoleon's order. Although Paris had not yet occupied the Mississippi River's shipping choke-point of New Orleans (or any other land north of it), Bonaparte's plan was to make the Territory the granary of a New World Order centered in the French West Indies.

That plan, however, received a fatal setback in the form of massacre and yellow fever to French forces in and around Santo Domingo, so Napoleon began to have second thoughts. Jefferson had already sent an envoy, Robert Livingston, to France with an offer to purchase West Florida, which extended from Florida all the way to Baton Rouge--and included New Orleans. The offer had been spurned in November, 1801, but the heavy-duty rebellion by local insurgents in the West Indies, combined with disease, changed French thinking.

With James Monroe, a future U. S. president, now teaming up with Livingston, a pleasant surprise greeted them in Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, through his Secretary of State Talleyrand and Finance Minister Marbois, was now open to accepting offers. Actually, Napoleon, breaking his previous vow, wanted to sell all of the Louisiana Territory to the United States. On April 30, 1803, the deal was struck, and it was formalized two days later by so-called treaty. Word of this transaction reached Washington only in mid-July, as communication was very slow back in the early Nineteenth Century.

The whole transfer was shot through with unconstitutional irregularities. Jefferson could not authorize a treaty without it first being approved by Congress (it was approved ex post facto on Oct. 20, 1803). Jefferson had no right to authorize the U. S. Treasury to pay any amount of funds to a foreign government, what to speak of an exorbitant amount of somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen million dollars. All such payments had to be appropriated by Congress, and such is still the case, constitutionally.

On the other side of the coin (pun intended), France had never taken possession of the Territory, and possession is nine-tenths of the law as far as property is concerned. Spain still controlled the Louisiana Territory, and Madrid was never even consulted about the transaction. Just as importantly, the actual boundaries were not at all settled as to what constituted the Louisiana Territory. In the beginning, America thought it had also purchased most what is now Texas, but it had to cede all of that back to Spain sixteen years later. It had to cede other territory back not only to Spain but to Great Britain at the 49^th parallel (what is now the southern border of Canada). The whole deal was shot through with illegalities, and the final boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase were not determined until 1819.

On a side note, Napoleon was militarily pressured to make the deal in the form of both a covert and an overt threat by America that it would ally with Britain against the Emperor if he tried to take possession of New Orleans. Napoleon went to war against England two weeks after the “treaty” went down, so it was clear that he needed to unload that Territory and get the most he could from it (which was three cents per acre). In archives, it was revealed that the British had planned to send massive troops via their maritime superiority to New Orleans in order to take control of it by force in the event that war erupted with France. They did not do so because, when war was declared in Europe, New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory were by then the de facto property of the United States.

Your author makes no negative judgment about any of these proceedings. The United States doubled in size in 1803, and your author has either lived in, or visited, all of the fifteen states compromising, in part or in total, the former Louisiana Territory. Indeed, he happily resides in one of them at this time. It was a great deal for America, but, according to the words of President Jefferson himself, he had “stretched the Constitution until it cracked.” This is another historical example of how secular politics, the secular state, and secular law function, both de jure and de facto, and we shall discuss that in the final section of Part Two.

The formation and annexation of the State of Texas is but another example of how expediency of a nation of men and not laws (although advertised as just the opposite) marched toward what it considered to be its Manifest Destiny.