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The Louisiana Purchase The Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Fleming John Wiley and Sons, 2003 La Cession de la Louisiane The Louisiana Purchase /La Cession de la Louisiane: A History in Maps, Images, and Documents on CD-rom Edited by Sylvia Frey Deep South Regional Humanities Center, Tulane University. Distributed by Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003

When Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard issued orders for the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he did so with a slight French accent. And why not? A Creole from the old Louisiana Territory, Beauregard's first language was French. Not long after Sumter, Beauregard helped orchestrate the Confederate victory at First Manassas in Virginia. His achievement at Manassas was abetted significantly by the Louisiana Tigers, destined to attain mythic status as Southern warriors. (It was a myth grounded in reality; their Hibernian-Gallic ferocity, their appetite and talent for fighting, made the Tigers, man for man, possibly the most feared and formidable of any Confederate soldiers.) Beauregard would serve credibly, if not always with unmixed distinction and success, in every major theater of the war. (He even recommended the pattern for the Confederate battle flag.) In 1864, he blunted a Federal thrust at Petersburg, and so prolonged, by several more murderous months, the agony involved in restoring the Union. According to the distinguished Civil War scholar T. Harry Williams, during the war years and for several decades following, Beauregard ranked among a very select group of gray-clad leaders who served as the symbolic embodiments of the Old South and the Lost Cause. 1

Williams was probably right. And it may be that Beauregard also serves as a useful symbol of La Cession de la Louisiane—its promise and its price. As soldier and engineer, Beauregard had employed his services ably on behalf of the United States before Sumter. After 1861, he-with thousands more from the former Territory-did all in his power to undo the nation and to reverse La Cession. Stated another way, while the Louisiana Purchase had doubled the nation's expanse in 1803, Beauregard endeavored to halve it again less than 60 years later.

Thomas Jefferson's admirers boasted in his own time, and across the years, that the Louisiana Purchase represented an unrivaled historic achievement. What other leader could celebrate doubling a nation's size with so little cost? Other empires were purchased with wars, deceit, destruction, and bloody recriminations. Jefferson's yeoman paradise had been gained for pennies an acre, a pittance, and peacefully. In retrospect, it does seem that a more nuanced appreciation of the Purchase is required. In Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase, Roger G. Kennedy goes much further, contending that the Purchase carried staggering costs from the very day Napoleon decided to sell the Territory, costs paid in blood, treasure, environmental ruin, and national trauma. For Kennedy, the Confederacy was only among the last of the "host of horrors" enmeshed with Mr. Jefferson's remarkable bargain. With vivid language and an impressive marshaling of primary sources, Kennedy challenges, often effectively, any notion that the Purchase was an unmixed triumph.

As with so many recent treatments of the Purchase, Kennedy concentrates on what would become the state of Louisiana. And for good reason; it was New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Valley that so captured the attention of almost all the interested parties of the time. Visionaries and explorers may have cast wistful and even eager eyes at the prairies and rivers and mountains beyond, but for Jefferson and the other key actors, the crux of the problem-and the beckoning opportunity-was the exotic region south of Natchez, especially New Orleans and its hinterland.

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