Purchase Louisiana? No thanks!(Flashback)

During last year's bicentennial hullabaloo over the Louisiana Purchase, the losing side was flushed down the memory hole. Opponents of Thomas Jefferson's French real estate steal, which doubled the American realm for a mere $15 million, have faded to an invisibility rivaling that of contemporary Franco-American culture. (Spaghetti-Os excepted, of course.)

The Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase by a vote of 24-7, and the House voted to pay for it by 90-25. So who were these few skinflints and skeptics?

Many had read their Montesquieu, who wrote, "It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist." The country was already too large, they suspected, and further expansion would swell it past the point of viability. John Dawson, the law partner of James Monroe, argued that "no government, formed on the principles of freedom, can pervade all North America."

The Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames scoffed that Louisiana, "a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians," would "be too extensive" to govern. The U.S., he marveled, was "rushing like a comet into infinite space." And for what? Ames, a first-class hater of Jefferson and "Imperial Virginia," slyly asked, "Having bought an empire, who is to be emperor?"

Foes of the Purchase were concentrated in the Northeast, where the Mississippi River was considered a parvenu not fit to wash the Hudson's banks.

The Yankees struck the occasional prescient note, warning that Louisiana would plant "the seed of division" in the American soil. The enlarged country would be too big, its sections too various, to exist under any common government beyond the loosest confederation.

As Connecticut Representative Roger Griswold asserted, "It is not consistent with the spirit of a republican government that its territory should be exceedingly large, for as you extend your limits you increase the