Louisiana Purchase

Louisiana Purchase (1803), an agreement by which the United States bought from France that part of France's North American empire roughly defined by the Missouri and Mississippi River watersheds.The deal doubled the size of the nation, creating what Thomas Jefferson termed an “empire for liberty.”

French control of the region dated from 1682, when the explorer René‐Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed on behalf of King Louis IX a vaguely defined area he named “Louisiana.” Rather than lose the colony to Britain as a result of its defeat in the Seven Years’ War, France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763. Rising tensions between the United States and Spain led to Pinckney's Treaty (1795), which guaranteed American navigation rights on the Mississippi River and the right to deposit goods for export at New Orleans, through which most of the trade of the western states passed.

In 1801, rumors that Spain had transferred Louisiana back to France alarmed many Americans. Fearing that access to the Gulf of Mexico might be interrupted, some Americans, mostly from the West, called for the territory to be taken by force. To head off this sentiment, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched Robert Livingston of New York and, later, James Monroe to Paris to negotiate the purchase from France of New Orleans and the province of Florida west of the Perdido River.

Meanwhile, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, faced with defeat in the French sugar colony of Santo Domingo, decided to sell all of Louisiana in order to consolidate his forces in Europe. Although their instructions empowered them only to acquire New Orleans and West Florida, Livingston and Monroe jumped at the French offer. Understanding the territorial ambitions of many Americans, they recognized this acquisition as a unique opportunity. On 30 April 1803, American and French negotiators initialed agreements transferring the Louisiana territory to the United States in exchange for $11,250,000. In addition, the United States assumed $3,750,000 in claims of its citizens against France.

The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 brought back the first scientific and economic knowledge of a land purchased sight unseen by the United States. The expedition also helped undergird a U.S. claim extending the limits of the Louisiana territory as far west as the Columbia River region and as far south as West Florida and Texas. Spanish objections, first to the legality of France's sale of the territory, and then over its boundaries, resulted in a diplomatic dispute with the United States that lasted until the signing of the Adams‐Onís Treaty in 1819.

In the long run the United States paid a steep price in blood and treasure for the Louisiana territory. The region saw a series of bitter conflicts with Indians, and the controversial question of slavery in the new lands exacerbated sectional tensions between northern and southern states, leading to both the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and its eventual repeal in the Kansas‐Nebraska Act of 1854. In this respect the Louisiana Purchase can be understood as one of the long‐term causes of the Civil War.
See also Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Henry Adams , History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, vols. 2 and 3, 1889–1891.
Alexander DeConde , This Affair of Louisiana, 1976.
Dolores Egger Labbé , The Louisiana Purchase and Its Aftermath, 1998.

William Earl Weeks