with energy what would
take place when it should arise." He only meant by this, probably, that
from the beginning of his administration he had been prepared to take
advantage of circumstances when war should break out again between
England and France, as it was evident enough to the whole world that it
must break out sooner or later. That the particular conjunction of
circumstances, however, would occur that did occur, could not have been
foreseen. Jefferson could have had no prescience that Spain would
reconvey Louisiana to France; that Napoleon would enter at once upon
extensive preparations for colonization on the banks of the Mississippi;
and that he would be willing to relinquish this important step in his
great scheme of a universal Latin Empire, that he might devote himself
to the necessary preliminary work of subduing his most formidable enemy
of the rival race. But it is Jefferson's best title to fame that he was
ready to take advantage of this conjunction of incidents at exactly the
right moment. Doubtless the progress of civilization would have been
essentially the same had he never been born. But having been born it
fell to him to contribute largely to the events that have distributed
the race speaking the English tongue the most widely over the globe, and
to exercise a powerful influence upon the age. It does not detract from
the merit of his act, however, that he by no means saw all its
importance, nor even dreamed of its consequences. The region beyond the
Mississippi, he thought, might be made useful as a refuge for Indian
tribes of the East; but he neither saw nor could see then that the
purchase of Louisiana was the essential though only the preliminary step
toward the occupation of the continent to the Pacific by the English
race. The expedition of Lewis and Clarke, which he sent out the next
year, was in the interest of science, and especially of geography,
rather than of any possible settlement of that distant region. Indeed,
he said that if the new acquisition of territory were wisely managed, so
as to induce the eastern Indians to cross the great river, the result
would be the "condensing, instead of scattering, our population." But
"man proposes and God disposes."

The immediate consequences, however, of the acquisition of Louisiana
were enough to bring almost universal popularity to the President,
especially at the South and West, without any revelation of the future.
Nor was the act the less po