EMINENT DOMAIN: The Louisiana Purchase and the Making of America

New York, NY, U.S.A.: Charterhouse, 1972. First Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Between the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston seventy-four years later, there was no more fateful event in American history than the purchase of the Louisiana territory from France in 1803. It was the episode upon which the whole unfurling of the continent hinged - and, not incidentally, the most spectacular real-estate transaction of all time: 900,000,000 square miles, the very heart of the North American continent, for $12 million. If it had been a private matter, it is inconceivable that any bargain would have been struck. No reasonably intelligent man would go nostril-deep in debt to buy a property he had never seen, and which was entirely undescribed, and doubtless inhabited by warlike savages. He would be even less likely to buy such a property from a man with a reputation for devious, violent, and criminal behavior - and even less likely if he well knew that the aquisition might plunge him into war with a larger, better armed, and unfriendly next-door neighbor. But it was not a private matter. The seller, Napoleon Bonaparte, cared nothing for the United States, yet he was willing to use the little republic any way he could to claw at his arch-enemy, the British. That his title to the Louisiana territory was questionable at best meant nothing to the French ruler, then surely the most powerful man on earth. The man he sought to sell to - Thomas Jefferson - was one of the least powerful rulers on earth. His political career was in jeopardy, and so was the precarious unity, if not the very existence, of his infant nation. His country was virtually without an army or navy, without much money in its treasury, without a friend in the world but with hostile, covetous neighbors on three sides. Still, Jefferson meant to have the great inland empire across the Mississippi, even if it meant jettisoning principles upon which his political credo, and that of his party, had been built. For who controlled the Louisiana territory, history was to prove, possessed a storehouse of enormous riches: the timberlands of Minnesota alone would prove to be worth many times the asking price. And so the deal was made - and overnight the United States doubled in size (though nobody knew it then) and suddenly held within its domain the potential for greatness among nations. Whatever claims of "manifest destiny" Americans have since made, there was nothing preordained about the Louisiana Purchase, as John Keats makes clear in his fascinating account of the complex events on both sides of the Atlantic that ultimately conspired in America's favor. EMINENT DOMAIN is an engrossing narrative of those events, rendered on a panoramic scale. Fine,first edition, first printing, in green cloth, in fine, mylar-protected dust jacket.[not remainder-marked or price-clipped] NFS2