Jefferson’s Louisiana (Slave) Purchase in Paris — it’s not what you learned in high school
Former slaves in Haiti forced France to sell Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson’s top secret representative in Paris — vastly expanding America’s own slave empire (and founding the world’s largest chemical company).
That’s sure not the way I learned American History back in high school.
But here’s how it all went down. Just follow the money:
Spurred by the loss of France’s insanely profitable slave colony in Haiti, and frightened to the core by the military triumph of General Toussaint’s army of former French slaves, Jefferson’s top-secret Louisiana Purchase in Paris instantly doubled the acreage of U.S. territories open to slavery — setting the stage for a future American Cotton Kingdom just as filthy rich (and just as brutal) as France’s former Sugar Empire in the Caribbean.
On a purely personal level, that same secret deal increased the future value of Jefferson’s own slaves astronomically, including his former slave-concubine Sally Hemings — not to mention millions of other American slaves still held in bondage across the Southern Slave States (plus the value of their enslaved children; and their enslaved children’s children’s children).
As Jefferson well knew, opening vast new territories to American slavery would require breeding vast new legions of human slaves to clear the forests and work the fields.
So why not simply ship freshly-captured slaves in from Africa at a discount, just as the French and Americans had always done before?
Game over: by 1807, under heavy pressure from the northern states, President Jefferson signed into law new federal legislation prohibiting further importation of foreign slaves to the United States. But what began as an Anti-Slavery Abolitionist triumph soon backfired badly: Due to economic laws of supply and demand, American-born slaves now became part of a federally-mandated national monopoly — permanently shielded from all foreign competition.
For financially-bankrupt slave plantation owners, such as Jefferson himself, the windfall profits the Louisiana Purchase produced were nothing short of spectacular: Prior to Jefferson’s secret Parisian Purchase, deeply-indebted American slave-holders had increasingly found themselves farming depleted soils ruined by tobacco crops. After his secret Parisian Purchase, American slave-holders could clear new fields of tobacco and cotton on fresh soils located in the forested frontiers far beyond the Appalachians — at least as soon as the Native American tribes who lived and farmed there for centuries were forced out.
Gunpowder, Secret Agents, and Slavery
None of this could have happened without the direct intervention of America’s wealthiest new French-American family, the du Ponts. Decades earlier, members of the aristocratic du Pont family had worked side by side with Ben Franklin (in partnership with the great French chemist Lavoisier) to build a lucrative scientific gunpowder industry just outside Paris. Indeed one secret of Napoleon’s stunning success as an artillery commander in the early days of the Revolution was the stunning superiority of French gun powder manufacture. Prior to Ben Franklin’s intervention, the quality of French gunpowder had been pathetic.
Then in the bloody wake of the Revolution, as Napoleon’s armies swept across Europe, Lavoisier lost his head to the Guillotine — and the aristocratic du Pont family fled the Terror to find shelter in the newly-independent United States.
There the du Ponts found easy favor with America’s former Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson.
But not without some luck.
As legend has it, young Éleuthère du Pont was out hunting with friends in New York when his party suddenly ran out of gunpowder. Stopping to resupply at a local village store, du Pont was appalled by the poor quality of American powder. English gunpowder, he learned, was still considered far superior — and hence often imported at great cost. Since buying gunpowder from America’s sworn enemy seemed like a recipe for disaster, Thomas Jefferson encouraged the young French gunpowder heir to set up shop right here in the new United States.
Thrilled at the opportunity, E. I. du Pont immediately set sail, vowing to bring back the latest top-secret, state-of-the-art technology for gunpowder production from his family’s former manufacturing facilities in France. Eager to undercut the English, the French quietly agreed to let du Pont smuggle back almost anything he wanted. The result was the foundation of the now-famous DuPont Chemical Corporation — which until its recent merger with Dow Chemical ranked among the largest privately held, family-owned and operated corporations on earth.
Yet young du Pont’s gun powder espionage soon ended with a bang — because in addition to bringing back gun-powder production equipment, President Jefferson had secretly asked the young French aristocrat to query Napoleon about selling the port of New Orleans to the United States.
Presumably, Jefferson’s initial intent was solely to assure safe passage for American goods down France’s Mississippi River.
But why not simply sell all of Louisiana to America, du Pont asked the Emperor? That way France could recoup the cost of its catastrophic military defeat in Haiti — and cut its loses in North America forever.
Technically, Napoleon had no legal right to sell Louisiana in the first place — and du Pont had no legal authority to bargain with him on behalf of the United States. In effect, Napoleon sold former Spanish territories he did not yet fully own to a nation which had no legal right to buy them.
None of this seemed to bother young du Pont — or Thomas Jefferson.
So it came to pass that the largest real estate transaction in history was soon completed in Paris — but without the knowledge or consent of the American Congress or of the American Ambassador (and no guarantee of payment).
What was guaranteed was the re-imposition of human slavery across all the formerly French territories of North America — not to mention sufficient American cash flowing into Napoleon’s coffers to continue his military depredations elsewhere.
Hence the largely personal political impact of Jefferson’s sordid sexual liaison with his slave girl Sally Hemings in Paris was now eclipsed by the global impact of his Louisiana Slave Purchase in Paris almost two decades later.
To their credit, the French nation eventually reversed Napoleon’s traitorous re-establishment of slavery — once again abolishing slavery in all French territories in 1848. Meanwhile, to our own nation’s eternal shame, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was not fully ratified until nearly two decades later, at the bloody conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865.
Meanwhile the DuPont corporation grew immensely wealthy supplying gunpowder to the Union troops fighting to end slavery. Today the DowDupont conglomerate remains the world’s largest chemical corporation — and the American Du Ponts remain among the world’s wealthiest families.
As for President Thomas Jefferson’s mixed-race descendants, their family history contains many comforting codas.
Some lived as free men and women within the confines of Washington D.C. Others migrated to the new states Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase created.
His son Eston’s descendants passed as members of white society. Two of Jefferson’s grandsons even joined the Union Armies under President Lincoln’s administration, with one (John Wayles Jefferson) rising to the rank of Colonel.
Others maintained their open allegiance to the Black community — including a great-grandson named Frederick Madison Roberts (1879–1952), a graduate of Colorado College (which stands on lands once officially a part of French Lousiana).
In Los Angeles, Frederick went on to become the first person of African American descent ever elected to the California State Assembly. There he served with great distinction, known as the “Dean of the Assembly,” from 1918–1934. His grandfather, Madison Hemings, had been Hemings and Jefferson’s oldest surviving son — named “Madison” in honor of Jefferson’s closest political ally, James Madison, the fourth President of the United States (and a proud slave-owner himself).
Today after more than two centuries of white denial, at least some (though not all) official Jefferson family reunions at Monticello now include mixed race descendants — exactly as they did, at least covertly, from the very moment Jefferson first returned from Paris to in 1789, accompanied by a pregnant mixed-race slave girl named Sally Hemings.
