David Ramsay and Louisiana: Time and Space in the Adolescent Rhetoric of America1

Abstract

Young men have strong passions.... They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not often been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood though with excess of wine. --Aristotle, The Rhetoric Writing in the New England Journal in 1889, Robert Morss Lovett (2002) asserted, If we ask what the purchase [of Louisiana] meant to Jefferson's fellow-citizens and contemporaries, we have to answer, Very little. They had come into possession of a territory extending from the Mississippi to the Mexican border and the Rocky Mountains, but yet they comprehended but vaguely their new acquisition. (282) While this may have been true of many Americans, it was certainly not the case with Dr. David Ramsay, the celebrated physician, historian, and South Carolina politician. In fact, on May 12, 1804, Ramsay delivered a stirring speech at St. Michael's Church in Charleston, entitled An Oration on the Cession of to the United States. [2] The speech offered an occasion not only to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of Charleston to the British on May 12, 1780, but also to celebrate the first anniversary of the acquisition of the Territory by the United States. [3] France's sale of Louisiana, concluded on April 30, 1803, amounting to about 828,000 square miles, almost doubled the size of the United States with the stroke of a quill. Ramsay was nothing if not enthusiastic in his endorsement of the deal. Louisiana is ours! he exclaimed. It was nothing less than a heaven sent boon, which, if properly improved, would make the United States as great and happy a nation on which the sun has ever shone (par. 3). The enthusiasm of Ramsay and others over the Purchase stands in marked contrast to ongoing doubts, prevalent in the early federal period, regarding the geographical extent of the Republic. As Sanford Levinson (2002) puts it, Size matters, especially given certain basic conflicts inherent in American political thought of the (p. 109). The conflict was over the possibility of republican government in a geographically large country. The conventional wisdom of European politics, grounded in the writings of Baron de Montesquieu, was that the size of America was a tremendous liability (Onuf, 2000, p. 17). At the time of ratification of the constitution, James Madison was obliged to engage the huge size of the country a formidable obstacle to ratification. Madison addressed the problem in Federalist 14, arguing, among other things, that traditional negative views of large republics were overblown with imaginary difficulties, that in the past, great distances had not hindered the successful functioning of the 13 states, that the United States compared favorably with several large European countries, and that some problems presently connected with the size of the country could be deferred to the future. Curiously, Federalist 14 ends with a very emotional plea, uncharacteristic of Madison, to Americans to embrace the novelty of large republic. By 1804, Americans like Ramsay were enthusiastically endorsing a land acquisition that doubled the dimensions that had so troubled Madison. The sharp contrast between Ramsay's exalting over the Purchase and Madison's emotional plea regarding even the possibility of a large republic indicates a marked change in public discourse that happened over a short period of time. The rhetoric of founding was transformed into a rhetoric of growth and development. A close reading of Ramsay's speech helps illuminate how this shift came about. For Madison, space was a problem. There was too much of it, or so it was commonly believed, to establish a viable republic. In a notable exercise of American pragmatic ingenuity, Ramsay recasts the issue by turning space into a solution. …