Mapping America’s Future: Lewis & Clark and the Louisiana Purchase | The American Story | Ep 11

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Choice Hotels get you more of what you value.

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It is a sweltering August 9th in 1791, deep in the mountains of Saint-Domingue. We now know that as Haiti. The air is humming with the sound of cicadas and frogs and something else. Whispers, hurried footsteps, the rustle of bodies moving through tall grass. Tension coils in the atmosphere, just like it does right before a violent storm. A small clearing opens up among the thick trees, torches flare, shadows jump against the tree trunks. Dozens of men and women gather in a tight circle, their faces streaked with sweat, eyes wide with fear and anticipation. They're runaway slaves and they have nothing to lose.
At the center stands a man, a priest of African voodoo tradition, a leader of this insurgency. He chants incantations that echo through the trees. Beside him, a priestess dances with hypnotic repetition. Drums quicken, the rhythm builds, a black pig is dragged forward, a knife flashes, blood spills out in the dirt as an offering to the spirits. A cup catches the blood and is passed around. One by one, the participants take a drink and make a vow of vengeance against their white oppressors.
There is no turning back now.
As later recorded by a French doctor, one of these runaway slaves recalled the words that were spoken that night.

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The hour of vengeance is coming.
Tomorrow night, all the whites are to be exterminated. No more delays, no more fears. The conspiracy extends everywhere, leaving the whites no refuge or hope of salvation. All will meet the same fate. And if some elude our blades, they will not escape the fire that is going to reduce the plane to ashes.

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Just days later, the spark turns into an inferno.
Sugar fields become walls of flames. Night skies glow orange. Armed bands surge from the hills. Masters are dragged from beds. Whole families are slaughtered. Over the next month, 800 plantations burn to the ground. More than a thousand French slaveholders and their families meet gruesome ends. Hacked with machetes, impaled, sawed in half, the slaves rise up in a brutal frenzy of retribution and blood. The most profitable colony on earth collapses in blood and smoke.
This is the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. It is the first and only successful slave revolt in history.
This bloody uprising on a Caribbean island doesn't just reshape Haiti somehow, improbably. This night in the jungle, this blood oath, this explosion of violence and terror sets off a chain reaction that leads to the greatest real estate bargain in world history. It's a land deal. It will double the size of the United States and forever change the nation. A deal that sets the stage for a new century of scientific discovery, commerce, innovation, heroes, villains, trauma, and triumph. A deal that complicates the fragile American experiment in self-government.

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This is the American Story, The Beginnings, adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton. Episode 11, Lewis & Clark and the Louisiana Purchase.

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In 1762, France claimed an enormous swath of North America and named it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV.
It was not a small colony, it was an inland empire about four times larger than France itself. It stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to the cold plains of the North. Then France lost the French and Indian War to the British. France quietly handed Louisiana to its ally, Spain, to try to keep it out of British hands. In the treaty that followed the war, Britain stripped France of all of its other mainland possessions in North America. But France did not walk away empty handed. They got to keep their sugar islands in the Caribbean, colonies that were so profitable that they made the vast forests and rivers of Louisiana seem like a bad investment by comparison.
Britain basically shrugged at Spain owning the Louisiana territory. Spain was a power in steep decline and really wasn't considered a threat. For decades, Louisiana remained mostly wilderness. The one town that mattered was New Orleans, a humid port at the mouth of the Mississippi River, a home to about 5,000 people, most of them French speaking. It was the hub on the river highway that carried the crops of America's western farmers to the sea.
For years, under Spanish rule, Americans had access to the Mississippi River. A 1795 treaty guaranteed the US right to ship on the river and store goods in New Orleans. But then the French Revolution rippled across the Atlantic. The old alliance between the US and France shattered. When John Adams became president, the US stopped paying its Revolutionary War debt to France, arguing that the money had been owed to a king who no longer had a head.