A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest

In his introduction to the eleven excellent essays in this fine anthology, Patrick Williams notes that historians of the Louisiana Purchase traditionally have focused on the benefits it brought the young nation. At the same time it "created turmoil along the territory's fringes and brought wrenching changes to many Americans both east and west of the [Mississippi] River" (p. xi). This anthology, he promises, "hopes to do a better job at examining these latter aspects of the Purchase . . . many of its essays attend to the more complexly multilateral negotiations among peoples, nations, and empires that preceded and followed the actual transfer of territory" (p. xi). With particular emphasis on the southern reaches of the Purchase, particularly modern Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Red River watershed, it does just that, documenting the impact of Jefferson's great diplomatic bargain on Native Americans, African Americans, French, and Spanish residents of the Purchase, as well as the white settlers who flooded into the area seeking a better life west of the Mississippi.

Several essays stand out as being of particular interest to historians of American territorial expansionism, Texas, and the Southwest borderlands. The first essay in the anthology, Eliott West's "Lewis and Clark: Kidnappers" sets the tone for those to follow, by arguing that all the hoopla over the Lewis and Clark expedition in recent years has allowed Americans to forget that the Louisiana Purchase was of far greater importance; and furthermore, that the real thrust of Jeffersonian expansion was not "west and north but west and south . . . toward Texas and New Mexico" (p. 5). Dan Flores's "Jefferson's Grand Expedition and the Mystery of the Red River" continues this theme, demonstrating how interest in finding a possible trade route to Santa Fe led to "the southwestern counterpart to Lewis and Clark" (p. 22), the 1806 Freeman-Custis expedition up the Red River. Charles Robinson's "The Louisiana Purchase and the Black Experience" correctly observes that "The Louisiana Purchase, though a grand and joyous event for many, brought little positive change for blacks in the region" (p. 119). It extended the domain of slavery, ended the Spanish practice of coartación, a legal mechanism that enabled some slaves to purchase their freedom, and resulted in a sharp decline in the legal and social status of free blacks in Louisiana and New Orleans. Historians of Texas are encouraged to reference anthropologist George Sabo's "Dancing in the Past: Colonial Legacies in Modern Caddo Indian Ceremony," which discusses the Turkey Dance, a modern Caddo practice, and one of their oldest surviving traditions, which LaSalle's lieutenant Henri Joutel may have observed in an earlier form in his visit to the Hasinai in 1687. A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest is recommended for anyone interested in the history of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and the Southwest borderlands.