Page 219 - American Stories, A History of the United States

To ensure that the citizen soldiers would receive professional leadership, Jefferson cre-
8.1 ated the Army Corps of Engineers and the military academy at West Point in 1802.
Political patronage was a burden for the new president. Republicans had worked
hard for Jefferson’s victory. As soon as he took office, they stormed the executive
8.2 mansion seeking federal jobs. While the president controlled several hundred jobs,
he refused to dismiss all the Federalists. To be sure, he acted quickly to remove the so-
called midnight appointees, partisan selections that Adams had made after Jefferson’s

8.3 election. But to transform federal hiring into an undisciplined spoils system, especially
at the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy, seemed to Jefferson to be shortsighted.
Moderate Federalists might be converted to the Republican Party. In any case, the gov-
ernment needed their expertise. At the end of his first term, half of the people holding
8.4
federal office were appointees of Washington and Adams.
Jefferson’s political moderation hastened the demise of the Federalist Party. This
loose organization had nearly destroyed itself during the election of 1800. After Adams’s
8.5
defeat, prominent Federalists such as Fisher Ames and John Jay withdrew from national
affairs. They refused to adopt the popular forms of campaigning that the Republicans
had developed so successfully during the late 1790s. The mere prospect of flattering the
common people was odious enough to drive Federalists into political retirement.
Many of them also sensed that national expansion worked against their interests.
The creation of new states and congressional reapportionment increased Republican
representatives in Washington. By 1805, the Federalists retained only a few seats in
New England and Delaware. “The power of the [Jefferson] Administration,” confessed
John Quincy Adams in 1802, “rests upon the support of a much stronger majority of
the people throughout the Union than the former administrations ever possessed since
the first establishment of the Constitution.”
After 1804, younger Federalists attempted to pump life into the dying party. They
experimented with popular election techniques. In some states, they tightened party
organization, held nominating conventions, and campaigned energetically for office.
These were essential reforms, but except for a brief Federalist revival in the Northeast
Quick Check between 1807 and 1814, the results were disappointing. Even the younger Federalists
Why did Jefferson find it so difficult thought it demeaning to appeal for votes. Diehards such as Timothy Pickering pro-
to reduce the size of the federal moted wild secessionist schemes in New England. The most promising moderates—
government?
John Quincy Adams, for example—joined the Republicans.

The Louisiana Purchase
When Jefferson took office, he was confident that Louisiana and Florida would eventually
become part of the United States. Spain owned these territories, and Jefferson assumed
he could persuade the rulers of that notoriously weak nation to sell their colonies. If that
peaceful strategy failed, the president was prepared to threaten forcible occupation.
In May 1801, however, prospects for the easy or inevitable acquisition of Louisiana
darkened. Jefferson learned that Spain had transferred title to the entire region to France, its
powerful northern neighbor. To make matters worse, the French leader Napoleon seemed
intent on reestablishing an empire in North America. Even as Jefferson sought more infor-
mation about the transfer, Napoleon was dispatching an army to suppress a rebellion in
France’s sugar-rich Caribbean colony, Haiti. From that island stronghold, French troops
could occupy New Orleans and close the Mississippi River to American trade.
A sense of crisis enveloped Washington. Congressmen urged Jefferson to prepare
for war against France. Tensions increased when the Spanish officials who still gov-
erned New Orleans announced the closing of that port to American commerce (Octo-
ber 1802). Jefferson assumed that the Spanish had acted on orders from France. Despite
this provocation, the president preferred negotiations to war. In January 1803, he asked
James Monroe, a loyal Republican from Virginia, to join the American minister, Robert
Livingston, in Paris and explore the possibility of purchasing New Orleans.
By the time Monroe joined Livingston in France, Napoleon had lost interest in an
American empire. The army he sent to Haiti succumbed to tropical diseases. By the end
of 1802, more than 30,000 veteran troops had died there. The diplomats from the United
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