Louisiana Purchase revisited...

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Philadelphia Enquirer, Posted on Sun, Feb. 23, 2003

  Mock trial will examine La. Purchase's significance

  By Cain Burdeau
  Associated Press

  NEW ORLEANS - The patriotic rah-rah is everywhere in this 200th
anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.  Tributes to Thomas Jefferson pour
out, reenactors paddle the Lewis and Clark trail, and writers burn through
pages about how the purchase catapulted the United States onto the world
stage.  But in the din of celebration, some descendants from the gumbo of
colonial Louisiana ask: Was the 1803 deal really that great?  Or even
legal?

  Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson - the heroes behind "the
greatest real estate deal in history" - have been summoned to appear April
25 at a federal courthouse in Lafayette, La., the capital of Cajun
America. Cajun lawyers will conduct a mock trial.  "It's more of a play to
make people think about issues that they haven't probably thought about,"
said David Marcantel, a lawyer crafting the trial's script.

  Two lines of legal argument are under consideration:

  One: Did the sale - $15 million for 828,000 square miles - violate the
Louisiana Civil Code that states a sale can be rescinded for being less
than half of the fair market value? If so, the argument goes, then
Louisiana ought to be returned to France.  Two: Should France pay for the
damage it caused to Louisiana's culture, language and heritage by
abandoning the French colonialists?

  "Two hundred years ago, people and the land were sold and there was no
consideration to protect the language, the culture, the people - it was a
tragedy," said John Hernandez 3d, a lawyer and the trial's organizer.
The mock trial is sure to hit a never-dormant nerve: French-English
animosity.  "I think most people in the states that were created out of
the Louisiana Purchase are celebrating it with symposiums, conferences,
fairs and museum shows. But there will always be French groups who will
want to have the counterparty and who want to say that the main parade is
not their glass of wine but someone else's cup of tea," said Douglas
Brinkley, a historian who worked with the late Stephen Ambrose on a recent
book about the Mississippi River's pivotal role in the Louisiana Purchase.

  "Thank God Jefferson saved millions of Americans from eating snails for
generations," Brinkley said.  But other historians said the Cajun lawyers'
look-back trial spins off a host of important questions.  Was American
expansion desirable? Should the United States be a republic or an empire?
What does the Constitution allow?  "Jefferson himself knew at the time
that he was doing something constitutionally problematic and socially
troublesome," said Daniel Usner, a Vanderbilt University professor who
specializes in colonial history. He is not affiliated with the mock trial.

  While the Constitution did not explicitly say whether the country's
boundaries could be enlarged, the bigger question was whether the purchase
would convert the republic into a continental empire, said Jack Rakove, a
history professor at Stanford University.  "I think in Jefferson's mind
the greatest cause of his time was the creation and protection and
guaranteeing the future of the United States," said John Boles, a history
professor at Rice University.  "Any sensible person will compromise the
lesser principle to maintain the higher principle."

  Usner said the purchase of Louisiana, which included areas such as New
Orleans and St. Louis with a French-speaking, Roman Catholic population,
foreshadowed American annexation of Texas, New Mexico and California, the
Philippines, and Cuba.  After the Americans took New Orleans and the
scattered French outposts, ending 200 years of French colonization,
efforts to "Americanize" began, said Carl Brasseaux, an Acadian historian
with the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  "Linguistic and ultimately
cultural diversity were lost," he said.

  The French language was attacked, and officially banned in the state of
Louisiana in 1921, Brasseaux said. A 1974 state constitution revived it.
"If you talk to older Cajuns now, the story will come up again and again
about how they were punished for speaking French on the school grounds.
This marked an entire generation," Marcantel said.  Brasseaux said a more
insidious legacy grew out of the Louisiana Purchase: Louisiana's French
have been characterized as decadent and lazy.

  Raphael Cassimere Jr., a black historian at the University of New
Orleans, said the purchase perpetuated slavery.  "With this vast new
territory of uninhabited territory - except for a few hundred thousand
Native Americans - it meant slavery was going to be expanded
indefinitely," Cassimere said. "It occasioned the separation of slave
families as families were broken up and transported to the West."  But
would it have been any different under the flags of France or Spain, which
held the territory previously? Rice professor Boles doesn't think so.

  "An event like this mock trial will raise questions about inevitability
and the desirability of U.S. expansion," Usner said. "Four cents an acre -
that was just the beginning of the costs."  The benefits outweighed the
costs - that's the mainstream opinion.  "Without the Louisiana Purchase,
the United States would end at the Mississippi River and the whole concept
of a republic reaching from shining sea to shining sea would have never
reached fruition,"  Brinkley said.





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