Like the White House, the Capital was only partially complete. While the Senate occupied the north wing with its Ionic columns and soaring ceiling, there was not yet a south wing or rotunda. The House met in a squat and temporary structure known as “the Oven”–because it boasted the graceful curves of a battered Dutch oven, and because in the summer it got hellishly hot.
Jefferson borrowed the next part of his plan from Gallatan. For only the second time in his presidency, he wrote a secret message to Congress. This choice hinted at his urgency, but Jefferson focused the text on a popular and bipartisan policy, a policy he wanted Congress to continue: Native trading posts. These posts, he wrote, provided America with a peaceful way to acquire land, “which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for.” They could even help with New Orleans by lining the Mississippi’s American side with “the means of its own safety.”
Near the end of the message Jefferson switched rivers. Private traders couldn’t compete with federal posts. Would the Missouri fit them better? A few soldiers could scout that river “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the U.S.”- the drab phrase Jefferson chose as the bill’s name. He made the entire expedition sound boring. Spain, he promised, “would not be disposed to view it with jealousy.”
The preceding excerpts are found on page 52 and 53 of the book I am currently reading. Written by Craig Fehrman and published by Avid Reader Press, it is titled This Vast Enterprise, ( A New History of Lewis & Clark). President Thomas Jefferson had a dream, a desire to expand our young country. Author Fehrman compiles this edition apparently through the written journals and diaries of many of the principals of the Lewis & Clark expedition. The expedition members, named the Corps of Discovery, set off May 1804 from Camp River Dubois near St. Louis via the Missouri River heading west and north leaving the Mississippi River in their journal of yesterdays.
Coincidentally, as the planning of their watery trek began in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, Jefferson completed a deal with Napoleon to buy over 800,000 square miles of the land from New Orleans west through the Rockies for 15 million dollars. Napoleon sold the French claimed lands to fund his seemingly endless wars in Europe for an estimated 3 cents an acre. It came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase and it effectively doubled the size of the U.S.: an area, later, to become the home of 15 new states.
The author, Craig Fehrman, is a journalist and historian. (From the dust jacket)-He spent five years writing and researching The Vast Enterprise.
As an undergraduate history student at the University of Massachusetts, I learned the importance of reading primary resources as an aid to understand an era of time in our Country’s past. Journals and diaries written by the main characters of a specific period of time are literary gold mines of the moments historical characters witnessed said event(s).
The Lewis and Clark Expedition had a plethora of journalists. Jefferson demanded written records for political purposes and the citizens lived for the next news release. Of course the technology of the day was pen and paper multiplied and copied by printing presses. The educational nutrition for those presses were the first hand notes, written summaries, and letters sent from the Expedition principals following moments the animals, the Indians, the fur traders, the watery passageways and the first maps were recorded. Meriwether Lewis’s main goal was to map and note this uncharted Northwest passageway on the watery highways here-to-for only rumored. Like today, commerce and trade were the lifeblood of our nascent country. Next month I will reflect on the politics of neighboring countries so close to blocking our dream of owning “sea to shining sea”. Not just the countries that claimed territorial land like Spain and England but also the many nations of Indians that probably felt they were about to be run off their ancestral lands too.
This month I am reflecting on the concept of diaries and journals. As I mentioned earlier Craig Fehrman had the ability to mine the gold of first hand accounts as so many members of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery wrote daily accounts of their excursion. On page 456 in notes on John Ordway writer Elliot West is quoted; The Corps’ journals are an extraordinary source. “There’s nothing like these journals for any comparable event in American history”. In addition to Lewis and Clark , Ordway, Gass, Floyd, Whitehouse and Frazer kept journals. ( Note: Frazier’s journals have been lost.)
On the shelves of my bookcases are the diary of Anne Frank and the diary of Edward Ross Ellis. A young Frank’s written words open the door of empathy to the horrors of daily living (and dying) during what has been titled the Holocaust. Ellis’s diaries lead us into the days of life before and during World War I, mostly in New York City. Meriwether Lewis’s journals bring to life the growing pains of our country as we tried to entice the natives with trade and commerce. To me, a distraction to the future taking of their lands during the coming century.
In A Diary Of The Century, Pete Hamill opines the following: The diarist has one essential goal: to freeze time. With entry, he or she says that on this day that will never again occur in the history of the world, I lived. He adds: The greatest diaries from those of Andre Gide to those of the superb Japanese writer Kafu Nagai, are ruled by this principal. They are records of lone human beings attempting to be still in the flux of time.
With my metaphorical lighthouse showing the angry seas reflecting the white caps of anger and frustration of our current flux of time, we are thrust upon the rocks of judgement as many political non-leaders use copies of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary/journals to reinforce their one eyed cyclopian need to find an enemy that propelled the nation and the world to lose millions of people during the Corona Virus Epidemic of 2019, 2020 and 2021. My point here is not to defend Dr. Fauci though I do not understand why he journaled on a Government computer. Did he want it to be found?
In any case that leads me to wonder why I journal, produce my thoughts in a written blog and keep diaries? My simple answer is to enable my children and my grandchildren to have the ability to know me better when I am done making new tomorrows, if they so choose. Is that egotistical and shallow? Perhaps, but it sure beats having all my long winded opinions inscribed on a headstone!
Thank you for reading,
Be at peace and joy.
Mark