“Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause”: a book review

I just finished reading “Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase” by Roger G. Kennedy. Most of the histories I’ve read have either taught me about events I hadn’t formed any prior impressions about or else confirmed and colored out my superficial understanding of those events. This book was different for me. I grew up thinking of Jefferson’s Louisiana purchase as being simply a real estate transaction occasioned by Napoleon’s need for cash, a kind of Founding Father’s Art of the Deal. I thought of it as an unalloyed good for the country. Kennedy convinced me that the real driver was soil exhaustion by tobacco and cotton planters in the east and the relentless push for virgin farmland to be put under cultivation by slaves of plantation owners. I confess that I never gave a thought to the fact that to effect this expansion, the actual, you know, Native American residents of the land had to be driven off. That was accomplished either by (1) forcing tribes to take on financial debts of tribe members to be paid off by land transfers or (2) military evictions. The land so acquired by the US government was then sold to wealthy planters, thus enriching the treasury.

Ironically, Britain ended up gaining financially from independence. They no longer had to field and finance an army to fight Indians; the costs of colonialism were transferred to the new United States. Instead, Britain exploited the newly liberated colonies economically by purchasing all the cotton they could produce and then selling it back in the form of finished textiles. This was a major driver for the plantation economy and its associated soil depletion and chattel slavery.

The concurrent acquisition of the Spanish territory of Florida—also intended for plantations—is described. And with the abolition of the African slave trade in the US in 1808, another valuable crop produced and sold on the eastern plantations were successive generations of legal home-grown slaves to be sold to westward-bound plantation owners. Overall, the sheer scale of greed, malfeasance and outright crime would warm the cockles of Donald Trump’s heart.

Kennedy emphasizes Jefferson’s versatility of conviction on slavery (he once advocated its abolition but later its expansion) and on land cultivation (he once valorized small sustainable subsistence farms but later promoted large-scale plantation farming). I was aware of the hypocrisy of the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence on the matter of “liberty,” but Kennedy examines this in microscopic detail. Yet one more mockery of MAGA; no wonder they want to cancel this history.

Along the way, Kennedy also shows how the economics and culture of the Southern plantation economy led the South to a destructive rejection of industry and manufacturing, ceding much of the nation’s growing wealth and trade to the North.

“The North had become able to manufacture nearly all its own needs and also to produce surplus food and fiber for both foreign and domestic markets. The South, by contrast, was still importing most of its tools, clothing, and luxury goods. Its obsession with cotton, produced in haste and by slave labor, depreciated its land, and thus reduced its ultimate power base.”

Kennedy shows how this both led to the Civil War and to the South’s ultimate defeat at the hands of an economically more powerful North.

The writing style here is quirky compared to other histories I’ve read. The author makes frequent wry asides about motivations of the characters and historical events are narrated in a droll, sardonic way. I found reading this book a little slow in parts, probably because there were more details than I was capable of digesting. Still, my eyes were opened to this episode of Manifest Destiny; I’m wiser for having read it.