belongs to the living generation,” he once wrote. “They may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.”
Jefferson’s feeling toward the land was one of the strongest influences in the development of his political philosophy. “The small landholders,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God . . . whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
To a man with these sentiments, the landowning tradition of the feudal aristocrats was an abomination. Jefferson believed that the system of land tenure and distribution adopted would ultimately determine the character of the new society. He saw in America’s surplus of resources an opportunity to develop a “natural aristocracy” of talent and virtue. He favored small freehold landownerships which would cause class distinctions to disappear. Growing as Jefferson would have had it grow, this country would have been a rural nation thinly populated by small farmers.
These were his theories, but Thomas Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was a practical reformer, who could go to the heart of, a political issue and win others to his opinions. In 1774, when most grievances against the royal reign were directed obliquely at Parliament, Jefferson struck hammer blows at tire King and his land policies. He publicly advocated free fifty-acre farms and boldly asserted that lands “within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society and subject to their allotment.” He further counseled his countrymen to “lay this matter before His Majesty and to declare that he has no right to grant lands of himself.” The land question was the key to a society of equal opportunity, Jefferson was convinced, and the year he wrote the Declaration of Independence he struck a telling blow at the old order by pushing laws through the Virginia Assembly which abolished feudal entails and rights of primogeniture.
The first result of the Revolution—although this is a chapter of history that most Americans have forgotten—was a program of land reform. The Patriots expropriated and subdivided the Tory estates, and many huge holdings were sold cheaply, given free to small farmers, or parceled out to deserving war veterans. The uncertain claims of many squatters ripened overnight into fee titles that gave the owners the first installment of the new democracy—the right to vote.
The victory at Yorktown, however, did not decide who owned the unoccupied land beyond the Appalachians, and for a time this vexing problem threatened the unity of the Confederation. Settlement had continued during the war years, and seven of the colonies now asserted overlapping claims to the trans-Appalachian country. The crux of the matter was whether these seven colonies should take title to the unoccupied hinterland, or whether it should be a national estate.
Maryland vigorously asserted the case for a national solution by arguing that these lands, “wrested from the common enemy by the blood and treasure of the thirteen States, should be considered as common property. . . .” In the end the Maryland idea won out, and one by one, the colonies ceded over their rights to the lands of the West. Although Virginia’s claims were the largest and most legitimate, Governor Thomas Jefferson, in 1781, relinquished them with this observation: “The lands . . . will remain to be occupied by Americans and whether these lands be counted in the members of this or that of the United States will be thought a matter of little moment.”
This was our first great land decision, and it was formalized later through Jefferson’s work as chairman of the committee of the Confederation Congress, which shaped the historic Northwest Ordinance and the Land Ordinance of 1785. Thereafter, the unoccupied land would be owned by all of the people. The public domain had been created, and a basic ordinance had been enacted that would lead to the establishment of new states. Much later, the public domain would make possible a superb heritage of national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges.
The Northwest Territory, then, was secured for all the citizens of the United States—the vast rich valley, the country of the Shawnees and Cherokees, filled with deer and beaver and rich soil. There was an abundance to this land beyond the mountains that beguiled all Americans. During the early years of the eighteenth century, there grew up a vision of an agrarian paradise that would one day stretch to the western sea. In men’s minds the land that lay westward would be the Garden of the World.
Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, summed up the universal euphoria with the classic comment: “The happiness of my country arises from the great plenty of land.” There was so much of everything—so much land, so much water, so much timber, so many birds and beasts that neither Gallatin nor Jefferson envisioned the day when any natural resources would be depleted. And so, in spite of Jefferson’s belief in careful husbandry, his own era saw the beginnings of the Myth of Superabundance that would plunge us headlong into a century of land plunder and land abuse.
In the first years of the Republic, however, our land policies were not designed to get farm tracts into the hands of settlers. The new country had war debts to pay, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton turned to the public domain as a source of revenue. During the early years of the new republic immense areas were sold to land speculators and farm tracts were sold to some individuals.
As a national leader, Jefferson abandoned the idea of free family farms, and supported the Hamilton approach of selling all land for cash. In spite of Hamiltonian policies, the yeoman spirit still walked the hills of the back country, and pressures generated by land-starved men changed the system. The very richness of the land was a force for land reform. The poor squatters demanded, and usually got, pre-emption rights and lower prices, and their counterparts two generations later formed the Free Soil Movement, passed the Homestead Act, and helped fulfill Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian empire.
It was Jefferson’s basic understanding of the people-land equation, and his confidence in American prowess, that made him a master geopolitician. He understood each maneuver in the imperial power game being played on the chessboard of the American continent by the British, French, and Spanish. In 1802, when yellow fever and Touissant L’Overture’s counterattack in the swamps of Santo Domingo crushed Napoleon’s plans to restore France’s American empire, Jefferson dispatched James Monroe posthaste to Paris to offer a price for “Louisiana.” The crucial moment had come, and Jefferson acted swiftly to acquire the heartland of the continent for the American people.
The Louisiana Purchase extended the boundaries of the new nation beyond the rumor of wide rivers, almost beyond imagination. The deal consummated so quickly by Monroe and Talleyrand transferred an area as large as Western Europe for a price of less than three cents an acre. Napoleon himself gave this salute to Jefferson’s statesmanship: “This accession of territory consolidates the power of the United States forever, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.”
Timid, literal-minded men cast doubt on the President’s legal power to complete the transaction. But Jefferson knew that the Constitution had to grow with the country and his bold assumption of executive power has, over the years, been a ringing reply to those who would limit the role of presidential stewardship. Overnight the American nation was doubled in size, and Manifest Destiny, long before the phrase was invented, had its finest hour.
Jefferson’s first move was to send Lewis and Clark to chart this terra incognita, but the wisdom of the purchase was vindicated before the explorers made their report. Americans were already on the move. They were not, at first, Jefferson’s farmers. For even before events had forced Napoleon to contemplate a sale, a few adventurous men in buckskin had been moving westward through the dark forests of Louisiana.
Boys brought up in the colonies at the edge of the Big Wild were not, after the Revolution, going to stay at home. The tasks of land husbandry would be too tame or too troublesome for many of them, just as the institutions and values brought over from Europe were too binding and too cramped. The new
