Roger G. Kennedy. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
In the appendix to this thought-provoking study, Roger Kennedy mentions that his original plan for the book would have mandated a much longer work; as it is this study seems longer than it is. Or perhaps I should say "denser"; the book is not a chore to read. Kennedy is an entertaining stylist, and the story he is telling is compelling and rewards attention. But he is trying to tell a seemingly familiar tale (the Louisiana Purchase and its roles in the spread of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century) through a novel interpretive approach. Namely, the leading role Jefferson played in opening the new land to slavery by precluding the possibility of multi-racial yeoman farming.
This is also an environmental history, as Kennedy returns again and again to the damage that plantation slavery agriculture inflicted on the landscape of the American South. This is somewhat ironic given Jefferson's well-documented interest in the theory that working the land developed virtue--thus, his oft-quoted belief that the nation would be best served by spreading as a nation of independent small farmers.
The chapters are broken up into many very short, very specific thematic sections; this allows the text to gain thematic depth and richness, but while Kennedy is an able wordsmith sometimes the narrative it a little hard for the general reader to discern; Kennedy assumes a level of basic knowledge that not every reader might possess.
It would be very difficult to summarize this book briefly; there is simply a lot here to mull over. The ways in which Jefferson and Madison tacitly utilized filibustering and other quasi-national adventuring to extend American sovereignty into former Spanish possessions are just one example of how Kennedy manages to alter the perspective of how the Louisiana Purchase came about. This is a book any student of the era would benefit from studying.
Highly recommended.
