Louisiana Purchase
The United States bought roughly 828,000 square miles of North America from France in 1803 for about $15 million, some four cents an acre, doubling its territory at a stroke. Spain had ceded the territory back to France secretly in 1800, and Napoleon intended it as the granary of a restored American empire centred on the sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. That plan died in Haiti. The army sent to reconquer the colony from Toussaint Louverture's revolution lost tens of thousands of men to combat and yellow fever, and without Saint-Domingue, Louisiana had no purpose. War with Britain was resuming, and the territory was indefensible. Jefferson had sent envoys to Paris with authority to buy New Orleans and West Florida for up to $10 million, because the right of American farmers to ship produce down the Mississippi had been suspended and the west was threatening to act on its own. Talleyrand asked what they would give for the whole of it. Robert Livingston and James Monroe accepted without instructions. Jefferson, a strict constructionist who believed the federal government had only the powers enumerated, could find no clause authorising the acquisition of territory, considered a constitutional amendment, and decided the opportunity would not wait. The Senate ratified it in October 1803. The land was not empty, and the purchase transferred a French claim rather than possession; it made the subsequent dispossession of the Plains nations a matter of American policy. It also settled that the country would face west. It also postponed nothing about slavery. Whether the new territory would be slave or free became the central question of American politics, producing the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and, eventually, the civil war. The boundaries were vague, and the disputes with Spain and Britain took decades to settle.
- Year: 1803 CE
- Category: Political
