From the Editor: What if the Louisiana Purchase hadn't purchased Louisiana?

Counter-factuals are always fun for people interested in history.
What if Hitler had never been born? What if Columbus hadn’t discovered America?
A “Saturday Night Live” skit once proposed what may be the ultimate counter-factual: What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?
More recently, former Louisiana Secretary of State Jim Brown wrote on this page about what might have happened if Andrew Jackson hadn’t whipped the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
Brown speculated that the fledgling United States might have ended up as a member of the British Commonwealth, like Canada or Australia –– not exactly a colony, but not completely independent either. If that was the case, he suggested, slavery might have gone away when the British outlawed the peculiar institution in 1833. No slavery, no Civil War. No Civil War, no Reconstruction.
No Reconstruction, no Jim Crow. No share-cropping.
With such a rich and powerful ally as the United States would become, the British might not have been attacked by the Germans at the beginning of World War I. No World War I, no World War II, probably.
It’s tough to argue with Jim Brown, who studied at Cambridge as well as North Carolina and Tulane Law. But a couple of points:
—The British never seemed hot to regain their former American colonies (although the United States had grown a bit since the Revolution). Their army, the strongest in the world, was more interested in beating Napoleon than returning the Americans to the fold. Besides, the real colonial money-making action back then was in the West Indies sugar plantations. We were just tobacco and pine products.
—More famously, the Battle of New Orleans happened after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, ending the War of 1812. So no big change might have occurred had the British won at New Orleans.
—The Germans didn’t actually attack the British at the start of World War I. The Germans attacked France by way of Belgium, which Britain had pledged to defend.
Now, if you want to talk about a big What If in Louisiana history, how about this one:
What if Thomas Jefferson had never pulled off the Louisiana Purchase?
There would have been no Battle for New Orleans, for a start. Let’s say that Napoleon held on to the land between the Mississippi and the Rockies until getting whupped by the British for good in 1815. As Brown noted, the British lusted for the port of New Orleans, so let’s say they claimed the Big Easy as war reparation.
And what good is New Orleans, really, without the Mississippi River to go with it? So maybe the British would have snagged the territory on the west bank, giving them the rest of Louisiana, plus lead from Missouri, iron ore from Minnesota, timber from Arkansas and so on.
The American move westward, so central to our national narrative, might have bumped up against the British, setting off a sort of cold war, and maybe some hot ones. Or our drive westward might just have stopped in Illinois.
No cattle drives. No covered wagons. No cowboys.
There probably would have been no question of expanding U.S. slavery into the West, either. So there would have been no Mexican War, no Missouri Compromise, no Civil War, no Reconstruction, etc., etc. The British outlawed slavery, remember, so if Louisiana had remained a British colony, that part of our history would be very different.
If Louisiana remained in British hands, minorities living west of the Mississippi, including Native Americans and blacks, might not have had much to celebrate even in the absence of slavery. The history of British rule in South Africa, Rhodesia and India suggests they wouldn’t.
French-speakers living in Louisiana might have been treated as enemy aliens because Britain and France fought so often. The Acadians might have been expelled, just as the British had expelled them from Canada three decades earlier.
Cajun country might now be in Texas or Mexico.
Would Brashear, Morgan, Capt. Patterson and Thomas Berwick play the roles they played in our history if Louisiana hadn’t been part of the United States? Who can say?
Blocked from expansion by the British in the west, the United States might have remained a small country with less economic and military clout. If so, then in World War I, the Germans might not have launched an all-or-nothing assault in 1918, hoping to win before American soldiers arrived in great numbers. The war might have dragged on in the trenches of France.
Let’s say the British managed to hold on to Louisiana until 1939. Now the British war machine would have access to oil from Louisiana, probably shipping out of New Orleans. German submarines would have been there to stop the tankers.
Wait a minute. That happened anyway.
Instead of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Louisiana’s national anthem might have been “God Save the Queen.” We might have to sing it before cricket matches.
Now there’s a reason to thank heaven for Thomas Jefferson.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.