Thomas Jefferson vs. Napoleon Bonaparte

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Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 8 of 13

Jefferson vs. Napoleon
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, February 21, 1985

Transcript:

This is the 8th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Hermetic America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Jefferson versus Napoleon. The date is February 21st 1985.

For some of you who have not been following this for some time, I have to apologize for speaking out a little forcefully. But you have to understand that I've been at this for a quarter of a century now. And most of the people I started with at the University of Wisconsin are dead or gone. And so I feel very strongly about some of these issues. and I do my best to give you a yogic eye view. But I preserve the right personally to keep the issues significant to me.

We have many tasks in this country and in the next decade some of the most difficult ones are going to mature. And one of them is to make sure that the United States remains a free land. So these lectures while they are describing the American portion of the history of Western man, the spiritual history of Western men, that we've been working on for the last five years here. We began with Homer and we took the aggressive march of Western civilization right up to the 20th century up to Yung and Wittgenstein(?). And we saw that the European branch of Western civilization ends with the Second World War. It's own lunge, its own energy, its own echo kept alive into the 1950s. But for all intents and purposes the Second World War ended the structure of the European branch of Western civilization. And new transformations have been in progress in our lifetime. And they are huge. And this country is playing the major role in that transformation. Not in terms of planning, because the transformation is within. But in terms of conscious energizing.

And so tonight we come to a clash of two titans. The two individuals who represented in their time the clear battle lines of civilization. Napoleon and Jefferson are in fact still the catch words of the two sides of this fight. And a fight it is. But a fight in the sense of a strategic all-encompassing historical manifestation. So we should make clear at the outset what the two principles are. Napoleon stands for Empire. He stands for the kind of man who in his ver and his intelligence, his manner, his psychology, his tradition, yes and even his occult powers stands for Empire. Empire with the understanding that it is a machine sociale. A social machine. And the Empire that Napoleon brought to fruition had been brewing for a long time in the European mind. It was only through his perseverance and his courage, and Napoleon said these are the two virtues of a soldier. You must have courage. And you must have perseverance that when he crowned himself Emperor on the 18th of rumure(?) November 9th 1799. He initiated the consolidation of a web of intrigue that had elusively escaped being captured by any European individual. Even though attempts had been made.

And we did a whole lecture series on the 16th and 17th century and saw that the web of intrigue first mooted itself to the Italians. The Italian bankers then mooted itself to the Spanish Cortez and the conquistadores. And then mooted itself to the Elizabethans in England. And then finally passed into the realm of philosophical manipulation. And Napoleon was the first European human being to sense Empire in exactly the same way that Julius Caesar sensed Empire. The web was centered on Paris. And Paris was centered on the web of intrigue that Napoleon set up. And he himself as an individual was positioned at the center.

The will of the Emperor was the will of the French Empire. It had two polarized aspects that had to be kept constantly in balance and aggressively in the forefront. The first aspect was one of logical structure. The logical structure of administration of this Empire was based on empowerment. That authority is passed on but it has passed on specifically from someone higher up. And you receive specifically that authority given you and you may pass on only that authority allowed you to pass on. All authority ultimately rests in the hands of the Emperor. So that the logical structure has but one resolution for its reason for being. And that is the person and the will of the Emperor. And going along with that logical structure of administration is a counterpart. Sort of the yin to this yang. And that is to create a scarcity of custom. A scarcity of beliefs that might slow down the administration. Slow down or compromise the logical structure.

Napoleon inherited a historical situation where the french revolution had wiped clean the slate of custom. He received a social tablu rasa, a blank tablet. And he took advantage of it.


In his exile in St. Helena writing his memoirs the Emperor called Lafayette naive because he had been in position before him to seize power and had not done it. Napoleon said Lafayette was a simpleton. Here he was the great General with all the charisma and the popular acclaim, the military know-how, at the right place in history with the right instrument to seize power and he had refused to do it. To Napoleon this was stupid. And Lafayette became for him the symbol of the man who will not seize the time. But we will see that Lafayette had been trained well in the Jeffersonian tradition.

And whereas Napoleon led to Empire. Jefferson led to the Republic. Just as Napoleon manifested the idea of empire Jefferson manifested the idea of Republic. And there are two elements in that which are balanced. One of them related to the second point in the French question in Napoleon's Empire. And that is the question of custom and belief. But for Jefferson instead of there being no custom, no belief, there were new customs. Again and again in his letters we find Jefferson say there is something new under the sun. That this...this country coming into being is new under the sun. There has never been a country where there are four million people who are going to be free. Not just an aristocracy it's going to be free but the people themselves, this is new. And with these new customs and beliefs their integration is founded upon nature. The natural rights of man. They're not the rights that anyone gave. They're not the rights of custom or history. They are the rights of the natural structure of reality. Which belong to human beings because they exist in an integrated natural way. And going with that was a natural structure of the political expression that a Republic was a natural organism. And that what it expressed, the way in which it expressed the structure of natural relation was through representation leading towards unity. So a Republic was an organic living entity. It was in fact the people themselves. The body politic.

Whereas for Napoleon the Empire was a social machine that must work precisely and properly. For Napoleon, for his idea of empire, the great code Savannah, the code Napoleon, was the the integrating central programming pattern. The code Napoleon reduced all law 220,081 articles in one big thick volume and that was it. all law is codified and centralized. And so the system of empire is run on this logical structure of administration. And the impulse of decision-making is a legal understanding of the machine necessity of the working of the parts. And if someone gets in the way they have to be taken out.

Napoleon in fact completed in himself the betrayal of the democratic principles of the French Revolution. We haven't had time to go into it in detail but the French Revolution was intimately tied up to the American Revolution. It was Franklin's presence in Paris for year after year after year that laid the intellectual foundations, the social expectations for the revolution. It was Jefferson's five years in Paris that ended late in 1789 that schooled the first idealistic flush of the French revolutionaries. It was the lack of a population who could understand the personal meaning of freedom that soured the French Revolution. And led to the downfall of the Girondin party, the inculcation of the Jacobins and their abject failure at the most basic decencies of humanity that led to the counter revolutionary Napoleon coming in and taking control. The provincialism of many French people today out in the provinces is still a record of the psychological damage done by Napoleon. the haughtiness of the Parisian who will pour you Napoleonic brandy with great pride and say ah the Emperor and they mean it.

Jefferson sized up Napoleon as being the archetypal enemy of the liberty of man. But instead of fighting him as a military general would fight him on a field of battle. Jefferson chose the wide-open scope of history and nature combined together as the arena of human endeavor. and through a period of several years brought Napoleon to his first major defeat strategically at a time when Napoleon was just beginning to be invincible in terms of military strategy.

The code Napoleon is the focus for a moment to understand Napoleon. It emphasized the rights of property rather than the rights of man. And the rights of property defined the legal participation of those people who happen to own that property at that time. Or be in control of that property at that time. Those who were without property were without rights, largely. But not only that it set up the structure of human life in such a way that the male patriarch of the family was a representation, a projection. We can't say emanation, it was a projection, that Napoleon as the first council projected his authority through the code napoleon to the male head of each household and he was in his family the first council. Everyone had to obey papa, father, husband. Women had no rights. It wasn't just in this time period. When I went to Canada to design an educational program in 1970 in Montreal women could not have a bank account in their own name. Because of code napoleon, 1970!

We're dealing with archetypal energies we're not dealing with personal decisions. There are no good guys and bad guys here. There are massive glacial movements that are carving out of time and space. Out of history and geography. Out of lies. Great sculpted valleys and leaving cert(?) lakes of mystery all over the place. We inhabit this nightmare landscape today. And have still not come to deal with it.

The woman had no rights, no rights to..because of no rights of property. The phrase equality before the law was a legalism. And this legalism engendered liberty beyond the law. Equality before the law meant that as long as the code Napoleon was applicable you were defined. You had a reality. You had a viability. Outside of that code, nothing exists. So that Liberty became an adjective, a subsidiary, to equality before the law.


And the tyranny of a legal structure first asserted itself, almost completely over Western man. For the first time since the Augustine Principate some eighteen hundred years before it. And evoked as archetypal situations will do similar psychic reactions to visionaries and prophets.

One of the clearest indications of that are the prophetic writings of William Blake. he's every bit an Old Testament prophet saying doom has come to the people. Shelly, Goethe, Beethoven, Hinkle, the list goes on and on. Their prophetic visions were a response to what had happened. What was occurring before them. None of those great individuals could do anything about it. The only individual who was viable against Napoleon at the beginning was Jefferson. He's the only figure in the world who is not only mobile against this spread of the idea of empire as a machine socialle but he was the valiant warrior who won the battle that had to be won.

But he had an even more difficult problem before him. Not enough to face the greatest military general in history. Just at the beginning of his career. We have to understand something here about Napoleon. The best indication I think is the the battle of Marengo, June of 1800. Marango's in northern Italy. It's a plain. One of the few large plains in northern Italy where cavalry can be deployed. The French and the Austrians. The Austrians had through superiority of cavalry and guns and men and position had finally strung out the French lines into one long line of about 20,000 men. And were just step by step pushing them into oblivion. Napoleon had set off so many raiding parties right and left to try to discover where the army was that the French forces were weakened. And it seemed that the battle was over. That it was a massive victory for the Austrians. The commander Melas even went back to his camp to have a smoke and a brandy. And over the hills came Napoleon and his great military companion Desaix, who died in that battle of Marengo. And they came over the hill just like in a John Wayne movie with the cavalry. And it was an unbelievable magical moment in military history. They simply refused to quit. They rode into the Austrian lines again and again and again and something stirred in the response in the French soldiers, called the will to win. And when that came out Napoleon realized that he had the one spark of divine energy that he needed to create a world in his image. He had found the way to do it. And late that afternoon the Austrian lines fled in panic before the French forces who were more than human. some superhuman power had grabbed control of human destiny.

And the name napoleon began to be like a lightning bolt, a thunder bolt. Goya painted that great visionary painting of that Colossus on the field of battle. Naked and brutal. Arms as clubs striding through mankind. It was the vision of the..the god man of vengeance who had come. It was like a sacred lethal Cobra of hidden history that hypnotized all of Europe and just began striking right and left. And from then on for a decade Napoleon was unbeatable. He was militarily one of the greatest strategic thinkers since Hannibal.

But right at that moment where he was rising to power Jefferson beat him. And beat him in a strategic way. And the complication for Jefferson was not just this incredible scintillating image of Napoleon but the problem with the United States. Because the United States was not yet formed. It was like some young twelve-year-old adolescent of great promise who wasn't yet a man. Wasn't yet able to really carry it load. And he knew that if he fought in a traditional way that it would change the mix. There was an alchemical mix that was going on in the hopes and aspirations, the psyches and the minds of the American population. And Jefferson was trying to nurture it and keep it alive. Not to drain its energy in a war. He had to be Napoleon without going to war. He had to beat Napoleon on paper in a strategical way. He had to present the case in such an overwhelming way that the battle would never materially happen. And this was a problem. But that other part, how to do it without ruining the nascent American mind that was what bothered Jefferson.

All these Titanic energies, and he well knew what they could do, they'd almost come back again like a haunting ghost in the 1790s. The Federalist Party had again and again almost on the verge of addressing Washington as king. Almost had brought this whole structure back. and with the Jay Treaty, 1795 with England it looked like the United States and England were gonna all slide back together. Well Jefferson was in the driver's seat. Behind the scenes. Remember he was Washington's Secretary of State. He was Adams vice president. He was there. He had been there since the Declaration of Independence almost a quarter of a century before. Conscious about the whole situation.

Jefferson's response, very much schooled on Franklin's early indications, one thing the American people have got to keep doing is thinking west. Thinking westward. They've got to be trans-Appalachian in their consciousness. To the French mind, Tellerand(sp?) used to love to grill Livingston, Jefferson's friendship Council, with the the specter that you know once enough Americans get on the other side of the Appalachians it'll be a totally different country. And they'll fight you. There'll be a civil war. Why do you want to go there anyway. This is the Empire mind speaking. Anytime there was a possibility of a faction large enough to really count it eventually would mature it would come into conflict.

Yeah the French predicted the civil war but they predicted an east-west civil war. But in the 1790s, in 1792 Kentucky was admitted to the Union. It was the first state outside the original 13 colonies. And it pushed a finger of the United States to the Mississippi River. Do you recall that in the Revolutionary War that it was through the liaison with Jefferson that George Rogers Clark went to that very region. To the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, Kaskaskia and those settlements, Vincennes and had taken them away from the French. And just less than a generation later the United States as an entity was already inhabiting those regions. And a few years later Tennessee came into the Union. Broadening...broadening this base. And 1803 just at the time when Jefferson and Napoleon were angling over the French presence in North America, Jefferson saw to it that Ohio was brought into the Union. 1803 right at the critical juncture. It was a reminder enlarge that the United States will stretch westward.
Later on, a generation or two later on, this manifest destiny became a right of the American archetypal expectation. That the country was not a frozen entity but was open-ended.

The great hero that we'll see in the next section, that James Fenimore Cooper would divine through his writings. Who begins as deer slayer matures as Hawkeye. And then moves west and dies out on the Western prairies as an old man. The leathers docking saga. The archetype of the American who's free to open up another section of nature. To continue the experiment. and it will be this drive, this energy, this visionary capacity that Jefferson will strive to preserve in its nascent childhood for the American people. It was his notion that we have to beat the idea of empire not just by opposing it and being a reaction to it. Which would only magnetize ourselves and produce an empire reactiveness in ourselves. But to oppose it by a different vision, which by the veracity of its own vitality provides the victory. And it was this that he attended to.

So that we come to a quotation of Napoleon. This is what he thought about government. He said, "There must not be any opposition. What is government? Nothing if it does not have public opinion on its side. How can it hope to counterbalance the influence of a tribune if it is always under attack. Therefore public opinion must be handled." And in days before there was media exploitation and all of those psychological, sociological profile techniques there was the charismatic leader. With all the entrapments of empowerment. the Crowns, the scepters. The kind of convoluted regality. Citizen Bonaparte was not a king but he was an emperor but he was the People's Emperor. And so we get the first of the double-talk. The first of the Orwellian new speak. the language of the French Revolution is telescoped and put into an old familiar pattern. But the throne was to be in the saddle of conquest. It was only then that the dynamic could be continued.

Jefferson realized the situation quite clearly. And in a letter to Livingston had this to say about the nature of the situation. "The cessation of Louisiana and the Florida's by Spain to France works most sorely on the United States. There is on the globe one spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans. Through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market." And of course that's going to grow. That's the growing into the three eighths. "And from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants."

The American population of the trans Appalachian regions in 1802 was 900,000 people. The population in the Revolutionary War of the whole thirteen colonies was four million. So you begin to see that in just one generation there was perceptible already this massive shift.

You know Jefferson didn't get many votes north of Delaware. the old New Englanders suspected him. But he drew better than 95% of the votes of the new men. He said in his correspondent. He said, "I feel a very curious relationship to these pioneers. To these mountain people. These wilderness people. They're my people and there's some bond between us."

And of course the large manifestation of that bond would be when Andrew Jackson, born in a log cabin would come into the White House. And in a way produced the coda to the whole Jeffersonian notion that everyman given a chance could run this show. That that's the kind of country we have to have. Because then we'll be safe from the Empire builders. If you have a hundred men they can kill 60 and you still have 40 that could run it. What are you going to do with a people like that? You can't conquer them. There's no sense in even trying.

So he's writing here to Livingston he saying, "New Orleans is the center. It's the key. It's the place where all the marketing comes together." In 1790 I think there were a dozen river boats that went down the Mississippi to New Orleans. In 1800 there were 500. The genius of man turned free. Let's find a new way to do it and let's make some money. Let's open up some land. Was producing a revolution. An economic revolution. And by that kind of a rate one could see that in another 10 years there might be 5,000. So he's saying, "France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Her Pacific disposition. Her feeble state would induce her to increase our facilities there so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us."

Jefferson was a great believer that the natural course of man is going to open towards Liberty. That they were the harbingers. They were the forerunners of a natural occurrence. That the rational understanding of the full significance and meaning of human Liberty was an inevitable heritage that would belong to all men in the future. It would be a matter of course. No one would have to argue about it, it would just be assumed. But they saw themselves as the forerunners. The profits in the wilderness, literally. Saying we've got to keep this open ended because closing the door now will sour the whole situation. Will turn everything back so that office politics will rule the day. And people become interested in backbiting and spinning their wheels instead of in exercising this new natural visionary capacity to open up the natural possibilities of man set
35:54

Notice that Liberty is a woman. Liberty is a woman. It's the feminine. It's the natural feminine. In Napoleon's vision she has no property. The feminine has no Kingdom in this world other than the masculine context within which she must live and have her being. But Liberty is a woman in the front lines who holds the torch up so that others may see the way to go. And this is exactly the vision. This is why the Statue of Liberty incidentally is a feminine. And why it was given to us by France later on when the French remembered. They finally came to at one point in their history. And this is why it was placed in the immigration Harbor in New York. Because that was the way people coming from the old world would come into the new and realize we don't have a code Napoleon here. We have a Statue of Liberty. And we mean it. We may have to from time to time fight for it. But that's alright we're used to that.

He says that Spain could have held on to this territory and we would not have felt it at all. Because Spain was on the decline. Spain did not have that Empire lightning energizing bolt but France did. So he wrote, "It can never be so in the hands of friends. The impetuosity of her temper the energy and restlessness of her character, placed in a point of eternal friction with us." Notice the choice of words, eternal friction. He said it very clearly. He saw it on the large scale of civilized projection where archetypal energies manifest their miracles.

It's going to be a point of eternal friction with us and with our character. Open-minded natural man is a threat to Empire every time. Napoleon liked nothing better than to rant and rave and throw pots down and swear at the ideologues who still talked with the old enlightenment idea of the rights of man. The ideologues, he would say, the ideologues they're like vermin on my clothes. But he couldn't get Jefferson off. He couldn't get rid of him. He kept being there.

And Jefferson says of our character, "Which though quiet and loving peace and the pursuit of wealth is still high-minded. Despising wealth if need be in competition with insult and injury. Enterprising and energetic as any nation on earth. These circumstances will render it impossible for France and the United States to continue long friends when they meet in so irritable a position. They as well as we must be blind if they do not see this." And he's saying Napoleon certainly understands the truth the strategic struggle that's going on here.

You know he, when he amassed his 20,000 troops to regain Santo Domingo back from Toussaint L'Ouverture. Many of the old Federalist council Jefferson said well he wasn't coming for us after he just wanted his brandy islands, his sugar islands, his rum source. And Jefferson nodded and said uh-huh sure a man like that thinks only in terms of extending the Empire to the whole world. That's the only limitation. He wrote, "They as well as we must be blind if they do not see this. And we must be very improvident if we do not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. It seals the union of two countries who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean."
Jefferson's already thinking of the ocean. Britain and France vying for each other on the ocean. Spain quickly falling out of position. Within two generations of Jefferson American ships were all over the world, freely. Because preparations were made at this time. The accounts that we have most beautifully presented in Melville. Moby Dick is that epic that the American spirit will quest in its epic self-revelation throughout the oceans of the world if need be to find a resolution. It assumes that the whole world is a province for the American spirit to find itself. To fulfill its destiny. That all the oceans of the world are open. The hidden premise in Moby Dick is that the oceans are open. It was not so in 1801, 1802. Was not so at all. it had to be made so. And Jefferson is the godfather in a way, planning all the time. What happens if the French take New Orleans is that the Americans will be driven back into British hands. We'll be forced to make an alliance with them. They will co-opt us. and the whole American experiment will collapse.

Well I can see by the tape recorder and your faces, we need a break. So I'll calm down.

Second half of Mr Weir's lecture is continued on the other side. Please turn it over now.

END OF SIDE 1

One of the books that we have around here at PRS is The Metaphysical Foundations of American History. Published in Holland so it's not generally available and you might like to inspect it around here sometime. The preface does an interesting quotation from Alfred North Whitehead. Three lines. "A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress."

Say it again. "A civilization which cannot burst through its abstractions, current abstractions, is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress."

As Tony B(?) put it succinctly in his formula, that we are always given a challenge and we must make a response to that challenge. And that what kills us is the failure of nerve so that we do not make a response. This is death. This is the this is the thing to watch out for. It's not so much the, the response but it's the fearfulness that the response might be wrong and so one gets caught into a extended limbo. And this comes from not living life but from being overly cautious that one should do it right according to the interpretive hermeneutical capacities of one's projected intelligence. And these are the current abstractions. one has to live through those. Grow through those.

And Napoleon's idea of Empire shattered. And when it shattered it took most of Europe down with it. So that there was a vacuum, a gap. the Congress of Vienna in 1815 brought everybody together to bake a new pie and cut it in various pieces again. And the Congress of Vienna led exactly in 100 years to the first world war. There are seeds which must grow into the plants that those seeds are.

When Jefferson first took office he said to a Frenchman, a friend of his DuPont de Nemours, "The speck that I saw on the horizon when I was Secretary of State is becoming a tornado." And that was the apparition of the energies of revolution that had been stirred and awakened and given momentum. That were coming back around to destroy its own creation. The founder of the counter resolution. And he recognized in Napoleon that the quality, the charismatic quality of the man, was the psychological key to that Empire. To that structure. It was the pride of Napoleon. more than the will it is the pride that's the kicker in the works. Napoleon's art of war what does a bab...his ability to project his pride onto his General Staff. They rode beautiful horses with red Roman capes and helmets with the clipped a headdress. They looked like Romans again. They looked like pictures out of...out of history. And when they were on the field at Austerlitz it seemed just like old times again. Who are we going to kill this time?

It was this projection of pride that Jefferson wanted to draw the venom from in the New World. He knew because he had been in Paris, knew many people there. He knew the French language well. You know Livingston our enjoy, Jefferson's envoy at that time was deaf. He couldn't hear. And he could not speak French. He could read it. And so he had the limited capacity. But Jefferson trusted him. He was an honest man. And what he had to have was an honest man to be there. He was also naive. He needed someone naively naturally open and honest so that he could tell by Livingston's responses what was happening.

And when it got to very difficult juncture. When it got to the part in the battle where you have to commit your cavalry, Jefferson superseded Livingston with two other individuals. One a Frenchman, an old man Du Pont de Nemour, who was a friend of Benjamin Franklin's. And when de Nemour went to Paris and stir it around ex-officio in the French society. You know Josephine was trying to bring all the old aristocratic powerful people back in and turn them into Bonaparte. So they would have all these soirees. Even, even Lafayette was going to these soirees to try and feel the air. Napoleon very, very uncomfortable but Lafayette. Very uncomfortable.

When he was on the outskirts of Vienna in 1797 one of the first things that was given to him, almost by mandate by the French people, free Lafayette. He'd been in prison for five year Napoleon sent the message to the Austrian King, free Lafayette but do not let him return to France. He sent Lafayette and his wife, who was ill, and his two daughters North to Hamburg. And Napoleon was still uncomfortable. He was still too close. Send him to Denmark. get him get him away. And as soon as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor the next week Lafayette showed up in person in Paris. And Napoleon was full of panic. He wouldn't see him. Sent his ministers, tell him to get out. And Lafayette with courtesy said I am just going to bring my family and they're going to retire to my estate at LaGrange.

But he showed by his courage of being one of the few people who would walk in personally, through all the bureaucratic complications and say Here I am. Here I am. I have no fearfulness. the simpleton with courageous and Napoleon couldn't stand this. Because it was an affront to his pride. Because pride is based on insularity. It cannot relate. Pride dissolves in relationality. It dissolves.

Lafayette went to all the soirees. He kept turning Napoleon down. Napoleon wanted to make him that his minister to America. You can talk to the man. You know the man. Lafayette said I have nothing to do with this man. I'll come to his wife's parties but I'm not going to have anything to do with him. Lafayette and Du Pont de Nemours agreed that eventually the French would sell not only New Orleans but the whole Louisiana empire. And they sent this turst message to Jefferson, that after all the complications he will sell. And Jefferson took that vow and held that up as a guiding star because he's dealing with all kinds of complications. He didn't work from plans. He worked like a like a Shaolin long fist kungfu fighter works. Whatever energy they throw at you that's what you work with. Whatever it is. No plan. And this is what exactly panics Napoleon because that was his technique. was to go into battle with the whole matrix of possibilities and moves and whatever the opposing generals would do he would use that as his basic plan. That's how he beat the Austrians at Marengo. They rode in with the cavalry with absolutely no plan. With Napoleon and Desigh(sp?) at the head and they just reacted and responded to the battle at the moment. And the Austrians trying to second-guess them. The commanders were going crazy because the patterns were erratic. And by the time they figured out that there was no pattern they were done.

But Jefferson was quite an adversary because he had no discernible plan. Napoleon could not find out what is the man after he must also be a simpleton. Began that European myth that Americans have no philosophy. They don't have..they don't have any kind of political savvy at all. Look at them. They're all the time just enjoying life. What's wrong with them? They're just living. they must be crazy. They don't...they don't consult the systems before they go and act. they just go and act. They must be simple. It's the Jeffersonian open-mindedness. And Napoleon was panicked by it. He couldn't stand that.

So Jefferson realizing, not through Livingston but from his old Franklin French buddy de Nemours, that the situation was just about right. Jefferson reached back and found somebody that would really cause consternation for Napoleon. He found James Monroe. Who was about as plain as you can get. And he sent Monroe to go and buy the whole Louisiana territory. It was a strategic coup. Because Monroe was not the sort of individual that you would invite to a soiree. He was boring. He was sort of single-minded. Many European historians say well Monroe really didn't do anything. I mean look at all these things were almost all done by the time he got there. They don't understand Jefferson's mind. They don't understand the alchemist who dissolves everything and then introduces something to precipitate a new form out of it. And Monroe was the esoteric precipitant added to this solution. Jefferson had naturally drawn everything into a soluble state. Napoleon didn't know what was going on.

And Jefferson would leak out certain information from time to time. He leaked out the Ross amendments which authorized him to equip an armed, 80,000 armed Americans, in case of trouble along the Gulf. The whole population. The whole French population of North America men women and children was a forty-two hundred...forty-two thousand people. That one of a little fact that Jefferson leaked out.

But when he sent Monroe Monroe was not a negotiator. He was not there to negotiate with Napoleon. He was there as an image of the plain, frank American man ready to do business. Are you gonna sell or you're not gonna sell? Remember now Monroe when he matured is the one who devised the Monroe Doctrine. This is ours and that's yours. We're not going to bother you and you're not gonna bother us. That was the Monroe docturine, essentially. He was that kind of an individual. His house Oak Hill was a couple miles away from Montecello(?). They could signal each other with a **(inaudible)** light. No rain today? Nope no rain today. So when honest men talk to each other there's no there's no complication.

And so Jefferson sending Monroe at a strategic time. His timing was masterful. Napoleon was skittish about everything. One thing he was very superstitious. Empire builders are always superstitious. He was trying to amass ships and men for an invasion of North America, let's put it that way because that's what he was thinking of, in Holland. And they had the worst winter in over a century and the ice was freezing, flooding the Dutch coast. For two months they couldn't get ships out. Napoleon is very skittish. What is happening? Nature herself is cooperating. What does it mean? What does it mean? The man is the simpleton but he's very dangerous. Napoleon's art of war, his strategic concepts, were all based on a collection of principles and ingredients that could be applied. They were like the various ways in which a saber can be used. And Jefferson wouldn't play. He wasn't the target that he should have been. He didn't respond.

And when the structure was finally set into motion and Monroe appeared on the scene, Jefferson realized that the time had come for the United States to be opened up completely. And the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 more than doubled the size of the country. It was finally settled upon the price that Monroe said that he would pay. Fifteen million dollars, about 80 million francs. But those funds were not to be paid until 1819. One third in 1819, one third in 1820, one third in 1821. Until then the United States would only pay interest twice a year, about 6%. They paid about five hundred thousand dollars every six months as interest. The U.S. gross national product,product at that time was about ten million dollars. So about one-twentieth of the gross national product was five percent. And Jefferson figured that the growth of this country with this kind of population the way they're going that by 1820 they're going to well able to afford the payments of the principle. And he was right.

If you look at the United States in 1799, before Jefferson got in, and you look at the United States after his sixth presidency. Madison and Monroe were sort of Jeffersonian, I guess you know that. You look at the United States in 1825, the differential in that generation is phenomenal. The United States stood up economical. There was no question anymore about people playing footsie with the United States in a commercial or military way. And of course by the time of the Civil War the European powers were sending military observers because the Civil War was the first modern war. The armaments, the techniques and everything completely outstripped the European books on warfare. It was the first indication to other powers that the United States was producing a very strange kind of humanity. They were opening up the traditional functions in ways that had not been foreseen.

And this of course unfortunately led to a great deal of pride. Exemplified by the smile and handshake of TR, Teddy Roosevelt. And it was this sense of incredible capacity that caused the humility, the over fawning humility, of Woodroe Wilson. Because he realized that if you unleash the United States in a war like economy there's no telling how far it will go. Because it doesn't have any of the governor's that stop it. And this is why Wilson's struggled for neutrality in the First World War. And we'll see that again and again. He kept saying other nations may fight but this nation is different. We don't know what its population will do if they become military like, war like. In the same echo we'll find when it comes to FDR. This reluctance to turn the American energies in vision and power into a military direction because it does not have the limitations of European Empire builders and nationalities.

We in our own time are seeing, in 1985, the first beginnings of the end of the Cold War. Because through sheer technological excellence over such a wide range, the United States is beginning to pull out ahead of the Soviet Union. and by 1992 the United States will simply out distance the Soviets as if they were just a second-rate power. And this is a problem. It's a problem in pride. Because after such a prolonged struggle what kind of hubris will come from that triumph. Jefferson was the first to realize that this is a real problem with the American character. That you have to watch yourself because you might really not only hurt the other fellow but yourself. In sociological ways. In indelible ways. And he saw the responsibility for creating a free people, an open-minded people for whom military thought and strategy was of a secondary nature. That it was not the primary response.

And so in coming into possession of the Louisiana territory, which was incidentally was illegal. The president was not empowered to do this. There was no machinery for this. There was no political machinery for this. Jefferson just did it. American stone(?) said well we got to figure out some way to work this in. We have a million square miles. And something as large as all of Europe. It's been deep populated by 200 years of warfare. And we saw that the British from the 1660s had provided guns to the Iroquois. And the Iroquois League had decimated the Indian tribe so that by the time of the Louisiana Purchase there were just a few tribes left. It was almost barren open land.

And Jefferson as he had done a generation before with George Rogers Clark picked a few individuals to send them to probe. And he picked George Rogers Clark's younger brother to go with Meriwether Lewis. And Lewis and Clark went all the way to explore the Louisiana territory. And notice that they went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Because that's what Jefferson said. On the map that says as we go as far as the sources of the Missouri River. But in here where I'm looking we're going to go to the Pacific, so that's where you go. All the way. And it was 1803 and he's already thinking that way. This is somebody who is born at a time when the Appalachians were a long way from the Atlantic Ocean.

Well next week we'll see a little bit more of Jefferson. And don't
worry about not covering everything. Next year we'll take a good long look on the Tuesday night series. And we'll just look at Franklin and Jefferson real close. Right now all we can do is highlight some of the developments. some of the nexus of intuition that manifested. And what we're looking towards now, more and more, is the way in which the Jeffersonian man was being formed. And of course the Jeffersonian men would not be primarily political. He would be primarily natural.

And we'll see that Henry David Thoreau is the perfect Jeffersonian natural man. Whose first instincts are not to fight with his fellow man for hegemony but to stand in a snowstorm and be a part of it because no one had done that before. Well they had done it maybe in the Tang Dynasty in China with the old Daoist poets like Lee Poe. But nobody in Europe had ever done that. And that was a giant step from the moment that Rousseau had in his rowboat outside of Geneva out on the lake. That little brief mystical flash of unity with nature. That was just a nanosecond of an intuition. But Thoreau coming a hundred years after Rousseau, after the Franklin Jeffersonian revolution, would spend years and years and years perfectly at home in nature.

And we'll see that. And I think that there might be some insights in that. Thanks for coming.

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