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"The province of Louisiana is incorporated with the U. S. and made part thereof. The rights of occupancy in the soil, and of self-government, are confirmed to the Indian inhabitants, as they now exist. Pre-emption only of the portions rightfully occupied by them, and a succession to the occupancy of such as they may abandon, with the full rights of possession as well as of property and sovereignty in whatever is not or shall cease to be so rightfully occupied by them shall belong to the U. S.

"The legislature of the Union shall have authority to exchange the right of occupancy in portions where the U. S. have full right for lands possessed by Indians within the U. S. on the East side of the Missisipi, to exchange lands on the East side of the river for those on the West side thereof and above the latitude of 31 degrees; to maintain in any part of the province such military posts as may be requisite for peace or safety; to exercise police over all persons therein, not being Indian inhabitants; to work salt springs, or mines of coal, metals and other minerals within the possession of the U. S. or in any others with the consent of the possessors; to regulate trade and intercourse between the Indian inhabitants and all other persons; to explore and ascertain the geography of the province, its productions and other interesting circumstances; to open roads and navigation therein where necessary for beneficial communication and to establish agencies and factories therein for the cultivation of commerce, peace and good understanding with the Indians residing there.

"The legislature shall have no authority to dispose of the lands of the province otherwise than is hereinbefore permitted, until a new Amendment of the constitution shall give that authority. Except as to that portion thereof which lies south of the latitude of 31 degrees; which whenever they deem expedient, they may erect into a territorial Government, either separate or as making part with one on the eastern side of the river, vesting the inhabitants thereof with all the rights possessed by other territorial citizens of the U.S.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jeffdraf.asp

This proposed constitutional amendment, drafted by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, had several purposes:

(1) To remove any uncertainty as to the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson had serious doubts whether, without such an amendment, the Purchase would be constitutional. As he wrote to Wilson Nicholas:

"I am aware of the force of the observations you make on the power given by the Constitution to Congress, to admit new States into the Union, without restraining the subject to the territory then constituting the U S. But when I consider that the limits of the U S are precisely fixed by the treaty of 1783, that the Constitution expressly declares itself to be made for the U S, I cannot help believing the intention was to permit Congress to admit into the Union new States, which should be formed out of the territory for which, & under whose authority alone, they were then acting. I do not believe it was meant that they might receive England, Ireland, Holland, &c. into it, which would be the case on your construction. When an instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I prefer that which is safe & precise. I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless. Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution..."
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl160.php

(2) To discourage white settlement in this vast new territory by reserving most of it (everything north of the southern part of the present state of Louisiana) for the Indians. Nowadays we are likely to think that only a few retrograde New England Federalists were afraid of too much western settlement. Actually, many people (even if they thought the Purchase was necessary for national security reasons, to prevent a hostile foreign power from getting the territory) shared this fear. As Daniel J. Boorstin has written (*The Americans: The National Experience*, p. 266), when the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was announced, there was:

"fear that indiscriminate westward expansion might dangerously diffuse the six million who were already scantily spread over an area several times that of any of the nations of western Europe. Many public men believed that the strength of a nation was measured not by its area but by the concentration of its population and the effective occupation of its territory. Some shared the views of a French geographer who in 1804 saw the great expansion of the territory of the United States as 'a prolific source of present weakness and future disunion.'

"Nor were these fears entirely groundless. It has been estimated that between 1809 and 1829, a period of great expansion, the per capita real income of the United States fell about twenty percent. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase some businessmen had already begun to fear the westward drain on their capital resources. A quarter century later their fears were still alive, when Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush warned, 'The manner in which the remote lands of the United States are selling and settling, whilst it may tend to increase more the population of the country...does not increase capital in the same proportion...the creation of capital is retarded, rather than accelerated, by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil. Anything that may serve to hold back this tendency...can scarcely prove otherwise than salutary.'"

Thus, while Jefferson's own motive for desiring to shut off all but the southernmost part of Louisiana "from settlement for a long time to come" http://jeffersonswest.unl.edu/archive/view_doc.php?id=jef.00004 may have mostly been related to his Indian policy, it could also be supported for economic reasons.

(3) To encourage the removal of Eastern Indians to the West. The fullest discussion of this I hace seen online is in Christian B. Keller, "Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy." https://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/Keller.pdf As Keller notes, by this time, Jefferson was beginning to doubt the feasability of his preferred earlier way of dealing with the Indian problem--assimilating the Indians to white civilization. Or at least he came to doubt that such a solution was possible as long as the Indians were at the mercy of frontier whites who both corrupted and despoiled them:

"With the Louisiana Purchase a possession of the United States, removing the Indians across the Mississippi became possible. They would still be within American jurisdiction and could still be cared for by the government, but would be far enough away from the frontier that very few white settlers would ever have contact with the displaced tribes. Thus, disease, which in fact continued to plague the Indians, and Indian-hating whites would no longer be present, and the all-important philanthropic program, albeit weakened, could continue isolated and unmolested. Somehow, Jefferson hoped, the government would protect the Indians undergoing philanthropic transformation by distancing them even further from the verycivilization they were to emulate.

"The removed Eastern tribes would, as a secondary consideration, also function as a buffer between the United States and European encroachment. By exchanging ancestral Indian lands to the east of the Mississippi for newly bought ones to its west, Jefferson hoped to consolidate the nation's frontiers and remove forever the possibility of future British influence over the Eastern tribes."

(Note btw that under Jefferson's proposed amendment, the "exchange of lands" meant that the federal government could even have forced the few existing white settlers west of the Mississippi to give up their lands to the Eastern Indians.)

Furthermore, removal of the Eastern Indians would answer the objection that territorial expansion would lead to too great a scattering of the US population: "If our legislature dispose of it with the wisdom we have a right to expect, they may make [Louisiana] the means of tempting all our Indians on the East side of the Mississippi to remove to the West, and of condensing instead of scattering our population." https://books.google.com/books?id=uShpZTHN1k4C&pg=PA221 Indeed, Jefferson may even have hoped to pay for the Louisiana Purchase with the funds gained from selling the Eastern Indians' lands to white settlers: "With respect to the disposal of the country, we must take the island of New Orleans and west side of the river as high up as Point coupee, containing nearly the whole inhabitants, say about 50,000, and erect it into a state, or annex it to the Missisipi territory: and shut up all the rest from settlement for a long time to come, endeavoring to exchange some of the country there unoccupied by Indians for the lands held by the Indians on this side the Missisipi, who will be glad to cede us their country here for an equivalent there: and we may sell out our lands here & pay the whole debt contracted before it comes due." http://jeffersonswest.unl.edu/archive/view_doc.php?id=jef.00004

(Of course, "A long time to come" does not mean forever. On August 12 Jefferson wrote from Monticello to John C. Breckenridge that "The inhabited part of Louisiana, from Point Coupee to the sea, will of course be immediately a territorial government, and soon a State. But above that, the best use we can make of the country for some time, will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Missipi, in exchange for their present country, and open land offices in the last, & thus make this acquisition the means of filling up the Eastern side, instead of drawing off it's population. When we shall be full on this side, we may lay off a range of States on the Western bank from the head to the mouth, & so, range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply."
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl159.php All this however would be in the distant future and would require additional constitutional amendments.)

It is thus apparent that Jefferson--the fierce defender of the Indians in *Notes of Virginia*, the man who was fascinated by the eloquence of Indian orators, the man who took a great interest in Indian languages and culture--had more than a little in common in his proposed Indian program with the supposed Indian-hater Andrew Jackson. Jefferson of course did not envisage a Trail of Tears; he hoped that the Eastern Indians would voluntarily recognize the advantages of relocation. Yet, in his letter to William Henry Harrison on 27 February 1803, after stating that "Our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi" he added that if any of the tribes should be "fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet," they would forfeit all their lands and be driven "across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace." Moreover, such events would cause a happy "furtherance of our final consolidation." http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl151.php

So suppose Jefferson's amendment had been enacted? In OTL he gave up on the idea, believing that quick ratification of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was necessary, and that (to quote the same letter to Wilson Nicholas I cited above) while he would prefer to set an example against broad construction, "If, however, our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall acquiesce with satisfaction; confiding, that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects." Yet it still seems plausible to me that there could have been quick ratification of the treaty *and* a constitutional amendment not only to remove all doubts about the constitutionality of the purchase but to regulate the subsequent use of the land. There would no doubt be some resistance to the amendment; yet it could appeal to (1) principled Republicans who shared Jefferson's suspicion of broad construction, (2) those who wanted to remove the Eastern Indians to somewhere west of the Mississippi, and (3) Federalists who were worried that the Purchase would lead to a flood of new (Republican) western states; this amendment guaranteed that there would be no such states north of 31 degrees without a further constitutional amendment. Objectors who complained that too much land was being set aside for the Indians would be assured that in the future additional amendments would open up more land. (And of course the patronage power of the presidency could also get the amendment some votes...)

The amendment would however lead to one difficulty Jefferson did not foresee. When the time came for settling the rest of the Louisiana Purchase Territory, the future amendments that would authorize it would run into the slavery issue. Of course in theory this could be solved by dividing the territory into slave and free sections--as was done in OTL by the Missouri Compromise. But that only required a simple majority in both houses of Congress--so a minority of Northerners could combine with Southerners to allow slavery in Missouri and the Arkansas Territory. A constitutional amendment, by contrast, can be blocked by one more than one-fourth of the states. What happens when antislavery men in New England (who don't care much for expansion anyway) refuse to allow further expansion unless slavery is banned from everywhere west of the Mississippi north of 31 degrees? Of course there will be "Sooner"-like illegal settlers, but eventually there must be some legal organization of the land on which they are settling or there will be calls for disunion. Another possibility: earlier pressure by Southerners to annex Texas, since they aren't going to get any more slave states out of Louisiana. (Yet the amendment could lead northerners to plausibly argue that *any* future annexation requires a constitutonal amendment--though the amendment itself does not state this.)

Any thoughts? (One thing that puzzles me is that Jefferson writes as if the Louisiana Purchase territory has practically no white inhabitants north of 31 degrees--which was already untrue of the St. Louis area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_St._Louis_(1763–1803) I assume that Jefferson is not going to force the whites there to leave, but it even seems unrealistic to expect the settlement there not to expand.)
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