JEFFERSON, MEANWHILE, HAD no trouble at all in being reelected for a second term. This time Charles Cotesworth Pinckney tried for the presidency rather than the vice presidency on the Federalist ticket, but he was easily defeated, drawing only 14 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 162. Jefferson got the electoral votes of fifteen states, and Pinckney only the votes of Connecticut and Delaware. (Despite this, incidentally, Pinckney ran again as a Federalist in 1808 against James Madison and this time got 47 votes to Madison’s 122. Pinckney then decided that politics wasn’t for him and took a job as the first president of the Charleston, South Carolina, Bible Society.)

All that confusion during Jefferson’s first election finally resulted, in 1804, in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which required that the president and the vice president be voted for separately, so that there’d never again be any question of which man should get which office if they happened to end up with an equal number of votes. But the really valuable thing that occurred during Jefferson’s time, as I’ve said, was the arrival of the two-party system. And the two-party system is plenty valuable because, as I’m sure is obvious, it means that there’ll always be an opposition group to yell and complain that the party in power is doing wrong; and if the people agree that the party in power really is doing wrong, that party gets thrown out. Opposition is good for a political party and for the country in general because there’s never been a time in the history of any free country when one group could run the country successfully forever, so whenever that group gets to behaving foolishly or improperly, it’s essential to have somebody around to point it out and tell the people what they’re doing. And that group then usually gets overthrown and there’s a new start. That’s why you’ll find, in modern times, that there’s an opposition party in every free government and in every republic.

And our two-party system, our system of a Democratic Party and a Republican Party of almost equal strength, is, I believe, better than the systems in other countries. The British, for example, have two major political parties, too, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, but the difference is that the Conservative Party is made up mostly of the people who control the finances of the country and the Labour Party is made up mostly of the working class. We don’t have that. Our two main parties are made up of sections of every part of the population of the United States. It’s true, of course, that it’s the general policy of the Republican Party for the financiers to control the country, so they might be compared in a way to Britain’s Conservative Party, and it’s also true that the Democratic Party has a greater percentage of the people who have to work for a living, so we Democrats might be compared in a way to the Labour Party. But the big difference is that the Republicans have plenty of people who are interested in labor and the welfare of the country as a whole, and the Democrats have plenty of rich people, so there are different segments of the population and different types of people in the three branches that separate the powers in this country: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches. And that’s a very good thing because, when a president is elected every four years, there’s never any total turnover that will upset the government of the United States.

If you want to trace the development of the two major political parties in this country, and the origins and development of their differences, you have to remember that it was the notion of the Federalists to exploit, or at least to dominate, the ordinary man, and the refusal of the Democratic-Republicans to go along with this, so that their party was made up largely of the would-be exploited. That means, at least in my view, that the Federalists were like some of the modern Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans were like most of the modern Democrats.

As the years went along, the names changed here and there, with the Federalists fading out and their party next being called the National Republicans and then the Whigs, and the Democratic-Republicans settling for just being called Democrats, but their viewpoints remained more or less the same, with the Democrats being the party of the common man and the Republicans being the party of the more aristocratic class. The two-party system collapsed for a while in 1824, when John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, ran against Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay with no political designations for any of the three men, but the results were truly chaotic. Jackson got the most votes, ninety-nine electoral votes and 152,901 popular votes; Adams was next with eighty-four electoral votes and 114,023 popular votes; W. H. Crawford of Georgia was third, at least in electoral votes, with forty-one electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes; and Clay received thirty-seven electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes - but it was decided that no man had a clear enough majority, and it was up to the House of Representatives to do the final voting. Clay then had to drop out because he had the fewest electoral votes, and he decided to throw his support to Adams. The House of Representatives then gave Adams thirteen states, Jackson seven, and Crawford four, so Adams became our sixth president even though Jackson had done better than him in both the electoral and popular voting! Can you beat that?

You can be sure that, when Jackson ran against Adams again in 1828, the two political parties ran their men as the only two major candidates, and this time Jackson beat Adams even more decisively, 178 electoral votes and 647,292 popular votes to Adams’ eighty-three electoral votes and 507,730 popular votes. And when he ran again in 1832, this time against Henry Clay, Jackson invented the convention system, bringing the members of his party together in a large meeting in Baltimore to pick their candidates. He also had another, equally important motive: He’d begun to realize that little caucuses, little special interest groups, in Congress and in the various legislatures were again controlling too many things, and he wanted to make sure that people of every persuasion within his party were present and being vocal and visible in expressing what they wanted in the party’s policies and who they wanted as candidates.

The Whigs were still around as late as 1852, when Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, ran against John C. Frémont, the Whig candidate. Then in 1856, the Whigs and some of the other and weaker parties got together and called themselves the Republican Party. The original name of Jefferson’s party came, of course, from the fact that they were a democratic organization in a republic, but now that Jackson’s people were just calling themselves Democrats, the opposition took the other half. I think they had the idea of fooling the people a little bit. Anyway, as you know, Frémont didn’t make it, but a very great president, Lincoln, was elected as a Republican. And after a while, I’m afraid, the Republicans went back to being Federalists in disguise all over again, too frequently forgetting the needs and desires of the man in the street.

That fellow Richard Nixon said recently that Jefferson wouldn’t agree with the Democrats of the present day. Well, that’s just nonsense. I’m just as sure as I sit here that if Jefferson were alive, he’d be right in line alongside the Democratic Party as it is today because it’s fundamentally the basis on which free government is organized. As I’ve pointed out, the Democratic Party goes all the way to the time of Jefferson shortly after the Revolution, and it’s based on the fact that the Constitution means what it says - that the power of the government is in the people. I’m certain, therefore, that Jefferson would be a good Democrat if he were alive today.

I haven’t talked a lot about Jefferson’s personal background, aside from the fact that he was descended from a king and a few other things like that. So let me do a little of that now because a man’s background and upbringing often determine whether he becomes a good president or a bad one.

I’ll have a bit of fun to start with and tell you that Jefferson was born on April 2 and April 13, 1743; that he was born in Goochland County, Virginia, and Albemarle County, Virginia; and that his full name was Thomas Jefferson and wasn’t. What are the explanations for all that? Well, when he was born, the old style or Julian calendar was still in use, that funny old calendar that started the year on March 25 and did a lot of other things that look strange to us today, so his date of birth was April 2 at the time. But the Gregorian calendar, the one we use today, was adopted by Britain and the colonies in 1752, and that shifted things around and April 2 became April 13, so the “official” date of Jefferson’s birth is now April 13, 1743. As for the other things, well, Jefferson was born in Goochland County, but the name was fancied up and changed to Albemarle County later on, and Jefferson never called himself anything other than Thomas Jefferson, but he was really Thomas Jefferson III, because he was named for his paternal grandfather, and his paternal grandfather was Thomas Jefferson II.

It’s pretty clear that the aristocratic side of the family was the maternal side. Jefferson told friends that he really knew nothing about his father’s family beyond the fact that the Jefferson family probably originally spelled the name Jaeffreson and probably lived originally at Mount Snowden, Wales, and probably came here early in the seventeenth century. Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, however, was the one who could trace her family all the way back to King David I, who ruled Scotland from 1124 to 1153, and the Randolphs were one of the richest and most respected families in Virginia. But by the time Tom came along, the families were pretty equal in reputation and holdings; his paternal grandfather became a major landowner and judge before his death in 1731, and Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, increased the family’s wealth substantially, owned about 7,000 acres of good Virginia land, and was also a surveyor, sheriff, an officer in the local militia, and a judge himself.

Thomas Jefferson grew up to be a tall fellow, nearly six feet three inches in height, with red hair and a face full of freckles. (A book I once read described him as looking like a taller Tom Sawyer, and I’d say that’s a pretty good description.) He was extremely shy, which made him a very poor speaker when he went into public life though he was okay when he was speaking to small groups and probably felt more at ease. And he didn’t seem to give a damn about his clothes other than to insist that everything he wore fit loosely and comfortably, and more than once he shocked visiting foreign dignitaries by showing up for meetings in worn old clothes and house slippers.27 He enjoyed good health all his life, except for headaches when he was nervous and tense, arthritis toward the end of his life, and after he was forty-three, a bad right hand because he tried jumping over a fence to impress a lady friend and fell and broke his wrist.

He was one of eight children; two sisters preceded him, and then there were four more sisters and a brother. One of his sisters, Anna, and his brother, Randolph, were twins. Another of his sisters, Elizabeth, was retarded. Both his parents died relatively young - his father at forty-nine of an illness that was never figured out and named, and his mother of a stroke at fifty-six. Jefferson himself, fortunately for the country, lived to the good old age of eighty-three.

Despite his shyness, he was quite a ladies’ man. His first romance was with a sixteen-year-old girl named Rebecca Burwell when he was nineteen, and he attempted shortly afterwards to propose to her, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t talk straight, and she ended up marrying a fellow named Jacquelin Ambler. The Amblers subsequently had two daughters, one of whom later married John Marshall, who became Chief Justice of the United States and the man who went easy on Aaron Burr.

Jefferson’s next love was a married woman, Betsey Moore Walker, and that caused Jefferson a lot of trouble when he was president. In 1805, her husband, John Walker, wrote a long article in which he said that he’d trusted Jefferson and made him executor in his will and asked Jefferson to look after Betsey while he was away, and instead Jefferson had tried repeatedly to seduce his young wife. In fact, Walker said, Jefferson continued to try to seduce Betsey for eleven long years, even after Jefferson had gotten married himself, and had even jumped out of the darkness at Betsey a couple of times and tried to force her to give in to him.

Walker got so agitated after he wrote his piece that he ended up challenging Jefferson to a duel, but Jefferson admitted only that he had fallen in love with Betsey while he was single but denied all the other things, and he managed to convince Walker to meet him for a quiet talk at James Madison’s house and cooled him down.

On January 1, 1772, as I mentioned previously, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, and their marriage was an extremely happy one but not very lucky. Martha became pregnant seven times, but only two children survived. These were two daughters, one also named Martha but nicknamed Patsy, and the other named Mary but called Polly. And on September 6, 1782, after ten and a half years of marriage, Jefferson’s wife died. She was only thirty-four and had given birth to another daughter just four months before her death, but the child, another daughter, lived for only two years.

Jefferson promised his wife on her deathbed that he would never remarry, and he never did. But he continued to be attractive to, and attracted by, women for the rest of his life. One of his two more famous romances after Martha’s death was with Maria Hadfield Conway, a well-known painter of the period and wife of another painter, whom Jefferson met in 1786, when he was minister to France. It was while he was taking a walk with Maria, at which point he was forty-three and she was twenty-seven, that he tried to get over that fence and ended up breaking his wrist, which was set poorly and gave him a deformed hand for the rest of his life. The romance subsided after Maria and her husband left Paris. It flared up again when Maria returned to France for a few months in 1787 and was confined only to passionate letters after that.

Jefferson’s other romance has received even more attention from historians, who, I guess, were shocked because it was with one of the slaves on his plantation, Sally Hemings. In those days, it was commonplace for plantation owners to take female slaves to bed with them whether they wanted to go or not, but it’s clear that Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings was a genuine love affair and not like that at all. Sally Hemings was the daughter of another slave, Elizabeth Hemings, but her father was John Wayles, who was also the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, which made Sally the half-sister of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The history books record that Sally was an outstandingly beautiful woman and that Jefferson had several children with her, though some historians dispute the latter statement. The thing that’s certain, in any case, is that, for some of the time Jefferson was in France, Sally was there, too, and took care of Jefferson’s daughter Polly, and that the love affair with Sally lasted for thirty-eight years.

Jefferson’s early education was with ministers; he boarded and studied first with Reverend William Douglas in Northam, Virginia, staying there except for visits home from the age of nine until he was fourteen, and then he studied until he was sixteen with Reverend James Maury in Fredericksville, Virginia. Jefferson didn’t care much for Douglas and had already begun to develop his doubts about established religions and his general feelings that the best kind of religion was a belief in God and in doing good for other people, but he liked Maury, who also tutored two other men who later became presidents, James Madison and James Monroe. In 1760, Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary and went there for two years, then went on to study law for five years, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1767. It was at William and Mary, incidentally, that Jefferson met Dr. William Small, a professor of literature whom Jefferson liked and admired and helped instill in him his love of books and reading and his lifelong interest in and curiosity about almost everything. Jefferson had always enjoyed books, but he became such a dedicated reader that, when the family home burnt down in 1770 and the fire destroyed all of his books, he set out almost fanatically to buy more books and ended up with a library of over 6,500 volumes.

He was now twenty-four, and his father had been dead for ten years at this point, so, as the oldest son, Jefferson expected to spend the rest of his life practicing law in Virginia but mostly to devote his time to managing the family plantation and the Jefferson properties. As a matter of fact, not long after he married Martha, he reached a decision even to give up his law practice and spend his time as a farmer and with the books he loved so much. He had already begun to build the mansion that became his home for the rest of his life, Monticello, and it seemed to him that he already had all he needed and wanted in life. But he’d become a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, a kind of standard assignment for young and prominent Virginians, and the other young men who became his friends there were outspoken about their feelings regarding British injustice.

One of his colleagues in the House of Burgesses was Patrick Henry, a fiery and self-educated young lawyer whose two famous lines, “Give me liberty or give me death” and “If this be treason, make the most of it,” did a lot to advance the idea of the American Revolution. Jefferson agreed with these views and in 1774 wrote his own brilliant statement of his opinions on the relationship between his homeland and the motherland, Summary View of the Rights of British America. He was also very active in the Committee of Correspondence in Virginia, that underground network of men, mostly very young men, who believed increasingly in freedom for America and kept their views alive by writing to each other constantly on the subject.

It was inevitable, of course, that Jefferson became a member of the Continental Congress, and in a way, almost equally inevitable that Jefferson would be the man picked to write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. As you’re aware, those other men picked for the committee to prepare the Declaration were no dumbbells - you’ll recall that they were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman - but it was decided almost without discussion that Jefferson would write the initial draft of the Declaration all by himself because, despite that tendency to freeze up and give poor speeches before larger audiences, it was already more than clear from his correspondence and other writings that he was far and away the best writer of his times. Three of the other four men on the committee were older and more experienced than Jefferson: Adams, born in 1735, was forty-one; Sherman, born in 1721, was fifty-five; Franklin, born in 1706, was already seventy. Only Livingston, born in 1746, was younger than Jefferson, but they all felt that Jefferson was best equipped to put their views down on paper. He went to work on June 11, 1776, and without ever going to other people’s writings to assist him, had completed his draft of the Declaration seventeen days later.

The other men didn’t accept the draft exactly as written, of course. They all went over it and made changes as needed, and if you take a look at the original draft, you’ll find it pretty well scratched up with recommendations for its improvement. And they were improvements. Just to give a single example, take that wonderful sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Well, that wasn’t Jefferson’s; nobody’s absolutely sure today whose change it was, but it’s generally believed to be Ben Franklin’s. Jefferson’s original sentence was, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and then another man’s opinion prevailed and changed it to the simpler and totally perfect sentence we all know today.

I’m sure that just about every American capable of reading this book or any other book has read the Declaration of Independence, but I’m equally sure that hardly anyone can quote even its superb opening word for word. I think it’s worthwhile, therefore, to remind people of the opening words of our greatest American masterpiece by stating those words here:

We hold these truths to be self-evident.—That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain 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 to 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government . . .

It goes without saying that the words and the thoughts weren’t entirely new and original. In the preceding century, a number of influential British writers and philosophers, men like Algernon Sidney and John Locke and James Harrington, had expressed similar views on mankind’s natural right to freedom and happiness, and in Jefferson’s own century a number of other writers in other countries had done the same thing, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, Christian von Wolff in Germany, and Emerich de Vattel in Switzerland. De Vattel and Locke in particular had a great effect on American minds, De Vattel because his book, Law of Nations, was translated into English and published in America in 1760, a crucial time in which Americans were beginning to think hard about their treatment by their king, and Locke because his writings said much the same things that the early Americans began to believe more and more. As Nevins and Commager say in their excellent history of the United States, “Locke maintained that the supreme function of the state is to protect life, liberty, and property, to which every man is entitled. Political authority, he said, is held in trust for the benefit of the people alone. When the natural rights of mankind are violated, the people have the right and duty of abolishing or changing the government.”

Nevins and Commager go on to analyze the Declaration. “What we have here, of course,” they write, “is the philosophy of democracy, a philosophy which had never before been given so succinct or so eloquent a statement. There are certain things . . . that no reasonable man can doubt - self-evident truths. There is the truth that all men are created equal - that all men are equal in the sight of God and equal before the law. There were, to be sure, even as Jefferson wrote, many inequalities in America: the inequality of rich and poor, of men and women, of black and white. But the failure of a society to live up to an ideal does not invalidate the ideal, and the doctrine of equality, once announced, worked as a leaven in American thought . . .

“Another great truth proclaimed in the Declaration is that men are ‘endowed’ with ‘inalienable’ rights - among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are not rights granted to men by some benevolent government and held at the pleasure of that government. These are rights with which all men are born and which they cannot lose. This principle, too, worked as a ferment in the minds of Americans and others, changing their attitude toward authority; for, as the Declaration pointed out, it was precisely to secure these rights that governments were organized in the first place. What we have here is the ‘compact’ theory of government - the theory that men once lived in a ‘state of nature,’ that in such state they were continually in danger, and that in order to protect themselves they came together and set up governments, granting to these governments just enough power to protect their lives, their liberty, and their property. In short, men made governments to do good, not evil; made it to protect them, not injure them. And the moment government failed of the purposes for which it was established, it no longer deserved the support or allegiance of men.”

Jefferson and the other members of the committee submitted the Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress on July 2, and, following a few small further changes, it was, of course, adopted two days later. It was probably the most revolutionary document ever written, and it has affected many other nations in addition to establishing forever the policy and the philosophy of the United States. It was one of the reasons for the French Revolution and a reason since then for revolutions all around the world. The French Revolution’s own Bill of Freedom has many similarities to the Declaration of Independence, and some people believe that Jefferson had a hand in helping the French write that one as well.

During the Revolutionary War, Jefferson became governor of Virginia, following Patrick Henry into that job; and then, after we’d won the war, he was Washington’s minister to France from 1785 to 1789, and then, of course, Washington’s secretary of state from 1790 to 1793 and Adams’ vice president from 1797 to 1801. When Jefferson set out to oppose Adams once again for the presidency, I don’t think he did a whole lot of traveling and campaigning. As I understand it, he did everything almost entirely by letters, just writing to all the people he knew. He developed relationships with the leading men in every colony via the Committees of Correspondence, and he knew everybody of consequence in Virginia as well, so I don’t think it was necessary for him to do much campaigning aside from writing a lot of letters. He carried on a tremendous correspondence all his life. I found one letter of his not long ago in which he said he was a slave to his writing table. There are two full volumes of the letters that passed between him and John Adams alone, and that was only part of the correspondence that he carried on. He kept up with all his correspondence, and it was all in longhand, so I don’t see how in the world he ever did it, but he did.

Of course, he hadn’t done much campaigning to become governor of Virginia, either. In Virginia, in those days, the succession was carried on by cliques just like it is now under Harry Byrd.28 Jefferson was in Boston and New York and Philadelphia all the time while the Continental Congresses were in session, but I don’t think he did a great deal of traveling up and down the country while he was campaigning to become president. In any case, as I’ve said, he was picked over Burr and Adams that first time, and in that second contest against Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, he landslid all over Pinckney with those 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s fourteen.

Jefferson did a lot of important things as president, but I guess the three that should be mentioned in particular, before I move on to Andrew Jackson, are his dispatching of the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the Northwest Territory, his purchase of Louisiana, and his bill putting a stop to the importing of slaves into this country.

That third one is undoubtedly the most important, or at least it would have been if the damn fools who opposed it or ignored it had just had the sense to obey it. As it turned out, opposition to the whole idea of an end to slavery in this country continued right up until the Civil War and even after Jefferson signed the bill in March of 1807 that prohibited people from bringing slaves into the country commencing January 1, 1808, slaves continued to be smuggled in for many years after that. But, at least, Jefferson managed to get the idea of an end to slavery made more official, and it was an idea that he’d felt and expressed most of his life. Years before this bill was proposed, he wrote and managed to get passed a bill that prohibited slavery in five states getting ready to come into the Union - Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; and he almost managed to get a bill passed that prohibited slavery in all future states. But that bill was defeated by a single vote, and he wrote bitterly afterwards that “a single individual [could] have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment! But it is to be hoped that it will not always be silent, and that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.” It took almost another century, and the Civil War for that to happen, and there’s still plenty of injustice to black people in this country. But as he said, it’s to be hoped that right will prevail in the end.

The other two things were the direct result of Jefferson’s lifelong opinion that land, the ownership of land, is the key to what you might call the good health or strength of both individuals and nations. He was always eager to acquire more territory for the United States so that small landowners could become bigger landowners, and so that people who owned no land at all could get some, and he jumped at the chance when Napoleon agreed to sell Louisiana to the United States.

Jefferson’s investigation into whether or not some of that territory might be for sale, however, started because he was afraid that France, which was becoming the strongest nation in the world under Napoleon, might develop too strong a presence near our own country. France had originally owned Louisiana, but now, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Spain owned it; and in 1795, our minister to England, who was one of those Pinckney boys of South Carolina, Thomas Pinckney, sent an envoy to Spain and established diplomatic relations between Spain and the United States. Among other things, the treaty signed that year allowed both Spanish and American citizens uninhibited use of the Mississippi River, and also allowed Americans to deposit grain and other farm products from the Ohio and Mississippi valleys at the port of New Orleans before selling them around the country. But, in 1801, Jefferson learned that Napoleon had done some tough talking to Spain, a much weaker country at that point in history, and had gotten Spain to sign a secret agreement ceding Louisiana back to France. The next year, Spain canceled America’s right to deposit products in New Orleans, and, in alarm, Jefferson instructed Robert R. Livingston, who was then our minister to France, to see if he could negotiate a purchase of part of that vital territory. He also sent his friend James Monroe over there as “minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary,” about as fancy a title as anybody could think up, to help with the negotiations, and he got Congress to give the two men a budget of up to $2 million to make their purchase.

Jefferson was hoping to buy only New Orleans and a part of what is now the western section of Florida. But to his absolute amazement and delight, Napoleon offered to sell the entire Louisiana territory, an area of more than a million square miles, equal in size to the entire United States at that time, if we could come up with somewhat more than that $2 million. Napoleon, Jefferson realized instantly, was in trouble and cash-poor and eager to refill the French treasury. France and England were not at war at that time, having signed the Treaty of Amiens. Napoleon knew it was a shaky peace and that the two countries would soon be fighting again, and, in fact, they were fighting again a year later. Napoleon was also feeling depressed at the fact that a revolution had been started over in Haiti, which France owned, by a black leader named Toussaint-Louverture, and that French forces there were in terrible trouble. (The French eventually managed to put down the revolution, but a combination of Toussaint-Louverture’s men and yellow fever killed 24,000 French soldiers.) And though Napoleon had always had the ambition to establish part of his empire in the Western Hemisphere, he realized all too well, after the great French losses at the battles of Aboukir and Acre, that his naval people weren’t as good as the forces he had on land, and that he really had no way of controlling the oceans. So he allowed his foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, to ask the Americans what they might be willing to pay for the entire French territory, hinting that 80 million francs, which was then the equivalent of $15 million, might do the trick.

Jefferson also realized two other things. One was that Napoleon’s price for that entire huge area of land came to a mere three cents an acre, which made it one hell of a bargain for land anywhere in the world, but especially for all that rich farmland and all the other first-rate real estate. The other was that he might be tinkering with the Constitution if he said yes because the Constitution contained no provision whatever for the purchase of foreign lands. There had already, in fact, been protests from many Americans, mostly Federalists, when Congress allowed Livingston and Monroe to show up on Napoleon’s doorstep with $2 million in their back pockets. Jefferson knew, therefore, that the proper thing to do was to go and ask Congress to allocate the additional money and okay the purchase, but he also knew that Napoleon, an erratic and temperamental fellow, might change his mind if he had to sit around and wait too long. On April 29, 1803, Jefferson told his envoys to tell France that they had a deal at 80 million francs, and then he went to work to get the money and Congress’ approval.