Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster (review)

In this lively work about the “men of Jefferson,” principally six explorers of the early American West, Julie Fenster presents an intimate portrait of colorful characters we thought we already knew. More importantly, the author deftly connects our understanding of international events leading to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 with Thomas Jefferson’s prior role as secretary of state and his involvement in the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, two experiences that had merged his interest in westward expansion with purely scientific exploration. Fenster’s inclusion of Texas into this broader American narrative is refreshing: she raises some other powerful folks from the dead to dance the two-step around controversies while she paints a less romantic vision of the same explorers Jefferson encouraged during an era of tremendous optimism and fear.

While readers may otherwise not see in various chapters any connections among Jefferson’s interest in the mustangs of Texas, navigation rights down the Mississippi to New Orleans, surveying the thirty-first parallel in West Florida, and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition’s search for the headwaters of the Missouri, Fenster shows in the opening chapter how these events followed from Jefferson’s concern over the Nootka Affair in Western Canada during the early 1790s. Jefferson feared Spain and Britain might go to war against each other over the fur trade in this region, with Britain possibly seizing Spanish Louisiana as a result. Jefferson’s advice to Washington’s cabinet expressing opposition to Britain and support for American neutrality, even if a bluff, marked the first victory of sorts for the diplomatic approach upon which Jefferson came to rely as president, especially after Napoleon’s rise to power in France. Fenster describes Spain’s rapprochement with Britain over coexistence in Nootka as a “tremor of weakness” for having “blinked” (12), but it also made Spain more determined to defend its claims in North America such as the border of Texas with Louisiana.

Perhaps of all the explorers Fenster covers, her discussion of Thomas Freeman does justice to a man sold short for his important survey work on behalf of the nation to find the source of the Red River before his expedition was cut off by Spanish troops from Nacogdoches. Meanwhile, Fenster humanizes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as Zebulon Pike: these men relied on grit in the outdoors and assistance from strangers, including Sacajawea for the former and the Spanish from New Mexico for the latter. Fenster brings to life other important power brokers such as the Kadohadacho chief Dehahuit in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands and the Mandan Indians in present North Dakota who could make or break nations and explorers. The author interestingly remarks that “Natchitoches was the Nootka of 1806” (332) in regards to continental ambitions: Pike could not return on time in support of Freeman whereas Pike’s mentor, General James Wilkinson, delayed support while under suspicion as a double agent for Spain.

Fenster relies upon a strategic combination of printed primary and secondary sources, including important works by such scholars as Dan Flores, Colin Calloway, and F. Todd Smith to name a few. While her book is intended for a general audience, her analysis is sound and written in a fast-moving style.