The Price Was Right

Gail Feigenbaum, curator.Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France: An Exhibition for the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2003. xviii + 286 pp. Photographs, selected bibliography, and index of artists. $45.00.

Thomas Fleming.The Louisiana Purchase. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. vi + 186 pp. $19.95.

Jon Kukla.A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. x + 430 pp. $30.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

The second time around, the French flag flew over New Orleans for only three weeks. Louis XV had, of course, been the first European monarch permanently to settle subjects on the banks of the Mississippi River (at New Orleans in 1718), but the French had ceded Louisiana to their Spanish allies at the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1762. As every attentive schoolchild knows, however, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte obtained a retrocession of Louisiana in 1801, promising never to alienate it. But by November 1803, when Pierre Clément Laussat officially took possession in name of France, Napoleon had already sold the territory to the United States.

The brief French re-possession of Louisiana and its momentous sequel—the more-than-doubling of the land area claimed by the United States—are the subjects of the three bicentennial volumes under review here. None of these authors seeks to overturn any of our most cherished notions about the Louisiana Purchase, and indeed most of the information in Wilderness So Immense, Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France may also be found in Encarta^®. But all three books have their virtues. Thomas Fleming's Louisiana Purchase can expect a long run as the best short summary of the context and course of the negotiations that resulted in the Louisiana Purchase. The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) has honored its 2003 bicentennial Louisiana Purchase exhibition (its largest ever) by publishing not only luscious photographs of the artifacts but also ten scholarly essays that analyze them and set them in the context of the French and American (inclu166ding Native American) art of the period. Jon Kukla offers a brief narrative of the Louisiana Purchase negotiations—and a considerably longer canvass of the Louisiana-related machinations of the preceding two decades.

Thomas Fleming is the author of literally dozens of books, mostly on the battles and heroes of the American Revolution. At only 184 diminutive pages, his Louisiana Purchase is lively but business-like. It is the latest installment in Wiley & Sons' "Turning Points" series, which is aimed at general readers and undergraduates. The series includes treatments of Columbus by William Least Heat-Moon, of Jackie Robinson by the NPR host Scott Simon, and of the Declaration of Independence by Alan Dershowitz. There are no source notes or bibliography, only a two-page discussion of "Further Reading." The book does not have any maps or illustrations—or even an index.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the contrast between the modest Louisiana Purchase and the flamboyant Wilderness So Immense, which fairly bursts with personality. Kukla has a sharp eye for vivid and telling details—and a keen scent for scandal. He is the master of the thumbnail biography. Reading Wilderness So Immense, I had the sense that if I were to review the documents Kukla used in preparing it, I would not be able to find a single quotation that was more demonstrative or colorful than the ones Kukla chose.

Although scholars who have previously studied the Louisiana Purchase are unlikely to learn much from either of these books, for a non-specialist like me both contained surprises. The largest of these had to do with the context in which the United States purchased France's claim to New Orleans and the region west of the Mississippi River: the two nations were on the brink of war. The moribund Spanish empire's occupation of New Orleans and the West had not caused...