Louisiana Purchase

In 1803 United States President Thomas Jefferson set the example of getting new territory by purchase rather than by war. He did so by buying from France the vast tract of land known as Louisiana. The Louisiana Purchase included the western half of the Mississippi River basin—far more land than what is now the state of Louisiana. Ultimately, 13 states, either in whole or in part, were carved out of this territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.

In the early 1800s the United States was still a young country with a strong desire to expand westward across the continent. Americans had already begun settling in the river valleys west of the Appalachian Mountains. Those settlers very much wanted the United States to control the city of New Orleans, a port at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The country that controlled New Orleans could control the river. Western farmers depended on the Mississippi to send their grain, hogs, cattle, and other produce to market.

Spain had held this important gateway to the West since 1762. France had given New Orleans to Spain by treaty. Then suddenly, in 1802, news came that two years earlier Napoleon had forced a weak Spain to give New Orleans and the whole Louisiana territory back to France. This was bad news for the western farmers. France was then the most powerful country in the world, and there was no hope of forcing any privileges from it.

But Napoleon’s dream of a vast colonial empire in North America vanished almost as suddenly as it had come. One big reason was France’s failure to end a revolution led by enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. By 1804 this island in the Caribbean Sea would free itself from French rule and become the independent country of Haiti. The loss of this colony made Napoleon question whether defending and maintaining the huge Louisiana territory was worth the effort and cost. Plus, war with Britain was looming, and France needed money to pay for it. Napoleon was ready to talk.

Robert R. Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, had already been talking with the French government about purchasing New Orleans. Then Jefferson sent James Monroe to France to help Livingston with the negotiations. The diplomats were authorized to buy New Orleans and West Florida—a strip of land along the Gulf of Mexico coast in present-day Alabama and Mississippi—for not more than $10 million. West Florida was controlled by Spain, but the United States believed it might rightfully belong to France as part of the territory that Spain gave up in 1800.

Napoleon, however, made a surprising offer. He was prepared to sell the whole Louisiana territory for approximately $15 million. Although the American agents didn’t have the authority to spend such a large sum, they signed the treaty of purchase on May 2, 1803 (though it was backdated to April 30, 1803). In December 1803 the American flag was raised over New Orleans.

Thus at one stroke the area of the United States was doubled. President Jefferson believed that annexing and governing so vast a territory was unconstitutional. He wanted an amendment to the Constitution to ratify it. The members of his Cabinet did not think this necessary, and their views prevailed. The Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7.

Exactly what the United States had purchased was unclear. The wording of the treaty was vague, and the setting of boundaries required talks with Spain and Britain. The United States claimed that West Florida was part of the purchase, but Spain disagreed. This dispute was finally settled in 1819 when Spain gave up its claim to Florida in exchange for U.S. recognition of Spanish control of Texas. The northern boundary had been set the previous year by a treaty with Britain. With its final boundaries, the Louisiana Purchase included all of the land that would become the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. In addition, it included parts of what are now the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.