American history

IMPERIAL HISTORY

At its start, the United States was a collection of small colonies on the eastern seaboard with little international import. What was to become the United States had existed for almost two centuries as part of the British Empire. The emergence of independent nations through the American Revolutionary War was a rejection of this colonial relationship. Over the next two centuries the United States first spread across the North American continent and then rose to become the world's most dominant power.

The Louisiana Territory

The Louisiana Purchase, the 1803 transaction of the gigantic western Louisiana Territory from France (Napoleon Bonaparte) to the United States (Thomas Jefferson), is often considered the first major event in American expansion, although it is rarely cited an act of imperialism. However, the Louisiana Government Bill that followed it, although less well-known, is often cited as an early instance of heavy-handedness and hypocrisy in the early United States.

After the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Government Bill, which denied the new United States territory the right to self-government. Instead, it was to be ruled by military officials under direct orders from the capital of the Nation. Since most of the population of the territory consisted of non-whites and Catholics, Jefferson felt that the government should suspend its right to self-government until enough white settlers moved west to command a majority.

Modern-day critics of this choice point out the irony in the fact that Jefferson, who had decried British denial of American self rule in the Declaration of Independence, was now issuing the orders to deny self-rule in an American territory, issuing commands from half-way across the continent.