Article III of the Louisiana Purchase mandated that the residents
of Louisiana "be incorporated in the union of the United States." That
brief statement left tremendous disagreement in its wake. At a time of
contested borders and competing definitions of citizenship, incorporation
carried numerous meanings. As this paper will show, the Louisiana Purchase
initiated a battle over nothing less than the definition of American nationhood
as the struggle to settle the status of Louisiana's residents traversed
the national landscape.
The Louisiana Purchase came in a context of occasional, often unpredictable changes in national boundaries. With each moment of expansion came the simultaneous addition of new people and a perplexing question: could the national community expand as well? If not, could the nation survive with a large population of permanently alienated residents? These queries proved so troubling because they came at exactly the time when Americans were arguing about the definitions of nationality and citizenship. Crafting answers compelled people to consider what it meant to be an American. Likewise, it forced them to decide just how much differentiation the United States could accommodate.
Nowhere were these questions more pertinent than in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the years following the Louisiana Purchase. Federal policymakers faced the unprecedented task of incorporating a large foreign population without the traditional means of an extended period of naturalization. They sought a method to convert white Louisianians from foreigners into American citizens while simultaneously reinforcing white supremacy. For all the policymaking problems that came with this task, the vagueness of Article III also provided the springboard from which Americans attempted to settle who was or was not an American.
White Louisianians responded in kind. They proved eager to join an American union, but on their own terms. They demanded membership in political, commercial, and administrative networks that would connect them to the rest of the United States. Diplomatic contingency and regional instability, which seemed to pose the greatest threats to Louisiana, also created the conditions in which white Louisianians could press their claims on the federal government. They successfully deployed elements of the contemporary debate about citizenship, elements which emphasized individual identity and political belief over cultural homogeneity. They also found common cause with American policymakers in establishing new racial boundaries which rejected the competing notions of citizenship articulated by slaves, Indians, and free people of color.
Scholars of the early republic have usually seen expansion in a geographic terms. When it comes to the people living on land claimed or acquired by the United States, the familiar story is one of cultural imperialism or racial genocide. While this narrative accounts for the end result of a nation that spanned the continent, the death or dislocation of Indians, and the entrenchment of white supremacy, it fails to account for the fundamental problems of citizenship and nationhood that came with expansion. The incorporation of Louisiana suggests a more complicated system of federalism than historians usually describe. So too does it indicate the need for greater sophistication in dealing with expansion. While Louisianians occasionally resented their treatment at the hands of their new fellow-countrymen east of the Mississippi, this was no simple story of cultural imperialism or the tension between center and periphery. Instead, Louisianians and Americans found ways to reconcile the presence of an anomalous population and created institutions designed to subvert the problems of a vast republic. The case of Louisiana reveals just how much was at stake in the incorporation of new territory, and just how much people in the Americas could disagree about the shape of a nation.