Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase was an 1803 agreement in which France transferred to the United States a vast territory within its North American empire known as Louisiana , about 530 million acres lying between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The United States paid France $15 million, or about 3 cents per acre. The lands transferred in the Louisiana Purchase comprise nearly one-quarter of the territory of the present-day United States.

French Louisiana

When Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826; served 1801–9) became president in 1801, Louisiana was a vast and vaguely defined territory. Notable mainly because it included the important port city of New Orleans, Louisiana had originally been part of French North America. In 1763, France had ceded Louisiana to Spain. In the spring of 1801, Jefferson received word of a series of secret agreements between French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) and Spain, in which Spain had restored the Louisiana region to France. Jefferson viewed this transfer with alarm because a powerful French colony in control of the mouth of the Mississippi River threatened American shipping and trade as well as westward expansion .

When French officials took over Louisiana, they refused to allow U.S. goods to be stored at the port of New Orleans. To reach Atlantic markets, farmers and merchants in the Tennessee River and Ohio River valleys needed to ship their goods down the Mississippi. Some unhappy Americans supported war with France to gain this important port. Jefferson, hoping to avoid conflict, sent his minister to France, Robert Livingston (1746–1813), and later, James Monroe (1758–1831), to Paris. The president instructed them to seek France's guarantee that Americans could use the port at New Orleans and ship goods to the Atlantic from the Mississippi. Failing that, the ministers were instructed to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and western Florida from France, limiting the amount they could spend to $9 million.

Napoleon had planned to create a large empire in North America, with its base on the French colonial island of Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti). Just as the American ministers were preparing to negotiate over Louisiana in 1801, however, an incident in the Caribbean changed the French emperor's mind. In the sugar colony of Santo Domingo, on Hispaniola, an army of black slaves led by Toussaint-Louverture (c. 1743–1803) seized power, successfully overwhelming the French. The revolution on Hispaniola made Napoleon realize it was too costly and difficult to maintain distant French colonies in the Americas. He quite suddenly decided to unload all of the vast territory called Louisiana.

The purchase is signed

Livingston and Monroe did not hesitate in agreeing to purchase the entire region, despite the fact that their instructions called only for acquiring New Orleans and western Florida. The two men knew that the United States and its citizens desperately wanted land to expand the new country; this was an opportunity not to be missed. On April 30, 1803, Livingston, Monroe, and a French negotiator initialed agreements transferring the entire Louisiana region to the United States in exchange for $11.25 million. In addition, the United States assumed $3.75 million in claims of U.S. citizens against France. Yet the deal did not clearly define Louisiana, only describing it as the land that France had possessed before 1763. The French ministers were evasive about the region's limits.

Signing the agreement was not as easy for Jefferson. He understood that the acquisition of Louisiana had enormous implications for the nation's development, setting the stage for future increased trade and westward expansion. If Jefferson accepted the offer, the United States would double in area, and both banks of the Mississippi River would be under American control. But he had no clear constitutional authority to make such a purchase. Besides, there was opposition. New England Federalists feared that adding the huge region would tilt the balance of political power in the direction of western and southern states and were ready to debate the acquisition at length. Jefferson pondered a constitutional amendment to authorize the purchase. But given the dim prospects of approval and the unlikelihood that Napoleon's offer would wait, Jefferson decided to go ahead with the deal. Despite the questionable constitutionality of purchasing the region, Congress approved it as well.

U.S. Louisiana

In January 1803, three months before the deal was made, Jefferson had requested congressional funding for a cross-continental survey of the Louisiana region and beyond. The Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804 to 1806, led by Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838), produced the first scientific and economic information about this land that had been purchased literally sight-unseen by the United States. The Lewis and Clark Expedition became the basis of a U.S. claim extending the limits of the Louisiana Territory as far west as the Columbia River region and as far south as western Florida and Texas . Spanish objections, first over the legality of France's sale of the territory and then over its boundaries, resulted in a dispute lasting until the signing of the Adams-Onis (or Transcontinental) Treaty in 1819, by which the United States gained all of Florida and a southern strip of Alabama and Mississippi , while Spain retained its claim to the Southwest, which was roughly the area of present-day Texas, New Mexico , Colorado , Utah , Arizona , Nevada , and California .

The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 virtually doubled the territorial extent of the United States. Out of the Louisiana Territory eventually emerged the states of Louisiana, Arkansas , Iowa , Missouri , Nebraska , North Dakota , South Dakota , Oklahoma , and parts of Kansas , Minnesota , Colorado, Montana , and Wyoming . Through this purchase, the United States became a continental power, controlled the continent's main navigation routes, and became the owner of vast new resources. These combined assets promised the young nation greater economic independence from Europe and set a precedent for future territorial expansion all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

While the cost of the new territory amounted only to about 3 cents per acre, in the long run the United States paid a steep price. The question of whether or not to allow slavery in the new land was a major bone of contention between the North and South, necessitating 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 to be one of the long-term causes of the American Civil War (1861–65).