1803 The Louisiana Purchase

“We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives.”

-- Robert Livingston

Livingston was the American minister in Paris, and this quotation comes from the treaty signing for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled America’s territory as well as secured the country from France’s shadow and its imperial reach, for only about three cents an acre.

Interestingly, partisan politics were running so hot, that the Federalists could actually denounce the deal. One wrote in a local paper, “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much. … [a wasteland] unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” No one was going to turn the gift away, though.

[Source: Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy”]

William Faulkner

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INTERVIEWER

Does that mean an artist can use Christianity simply as just another tool, as a carpenter would borrow a hammer?

FAULKNER

The carpenter we are speaking of never lacks that hammer. No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

-- William Faulkner at The Paris Review

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