The
Louisiana Purchase (French: Vente de
la Louisiane "Sale of Louisiana") was the acquisition
by the United States of America of of the French
territory
Louisiana in 1803. The U.S. paid 60 million
francs (
$11,250,000) plus cancellation of debts
worth 18 million francs ($3,750,000), a total cost of 15 million
dollars for the Louisiana territory.
The Louisiana Purchase encompassed all or part of 14 current U.S.
states and two Canadian provinces.
The land purchased contained all of
present-day Arkansas
, Missouri
, Iowa
, Oklahoma
, Kansas
, Nebraska
, parts of
Minnesota
that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota
, nearly all of South Dakota
, northeastern New Mexico
, the portions of Montana
, Wyoming
, and
Colorado
east of the Continental Divide, and Louisiana
west of the Mississippi River, including the city
of New
Orleans
. (The Oklahoma Panhandle, and southwestern
portions of Kansas and Louisiana were still claimed by Spain at the
time of the Purchase.) In addition, the Purchase contained small
portions of land that would eventually become part of the Canadian
provinces of Alberta
and Saskatchewan
. The purchase, which doubled the size of the
United States, comprises around 23% of current U.S. territory. The
population was estimated to be 97,000 as of the 1810 census.
The purchase was a vital moment in the presidency of
Thomas Jefferson. At the time, it faced
domestic opposition as being possibly
unconstitutional. Although he felt that
the US Constitution did not contain any provisions for acquiring
territory, Jefferson decided to purchase Louisiana because he felt
uneasy about France and Spain having the power to block American
trade access to the port of New Orleans.
Napoleon Bonaparte, upon
completion of the agreement, stated, "This accession of territory
affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given
England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her
pride."
Background
The city of New Orleans controlled the Mississippi River through
its location; other locations for ports had been tried and had not
succeeded.
New Orleans was already important for
shipping agricultural goods to and from the parts of the United
States west of the Appalachian Mountains
. Pinckney's
Treaty, signed with Spain on October 27, 1795, gave American
merchants "right of deposit" in New Orleans, meaning they could use
the port to store goods for export. Americans used this right to
transport products such as flour, tobacco, pork, bacon, lard,
feathers, cider, butter, and cheese. The treaty also recognized
American rights to navigate the entire Mississippi River, which had
become vital to the growing trade of their western territories. In
1798 Spain revoked this treaty, which greatly upset Americans. In
1801, Spanish Governor Don Juan Manuel De Salcedo took over for
Governor Marquess of Casa Calvo, and the right to deposit goods
from the United States was fully restored.
Napoleon Bonaparte returned Louisiana
to French control from Spain in 1800, under the
Treaty of San Ildefonso
(Louisiana had been a Spanish colony since 1762.) However, the
treaty was kept secret, and Louisiana remained under Spanish
control until a transfer of power to France on November 30, 1803,
just three weeks before the cession to the United States.
James Monroe and
Robert R. Livingston traveled to
Paris
to negotiate the purchase in 1803. Their
interest was only in the port and its environs; they did not
anticipate the much larger transfer of territory that would
follow.
Negotiation

The original treaty of the Louisiana
Purchase.
Jefferson initiated the purchase by sending Livingston to Paris in
1801, after discovering the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to
France under the
Third
Treaty of San Ildefonso. Livingston was authorized to purchase
New Orleans.
In 1802,
Pierre Samuel
du Pont de Nemours began to help negotiate with France at the
request of Jefferson. Du Pont was living in the United States at
the time and had close ties to Jefferson, as well as to the
political powers in France. He engaged in back-channel diplomacy
with Napoleon on Jefferson's behalf during a visit to France, and
originated the idea of the much larger Louisiana Purchase as a way
to defuse potential conflict between the United States and Napoleon
over North America.
Jefferson disliked the idea of purchasing Louisiana from France as
that could imply that France had a right to be in Louisiana. A
strict constructionist,
Jefferson also believed that a U.S. President did not have the
authority to make such a deal: it was not specified in the
Constitution. He also
thought that to do so would erode
states'
rights by increasing federal executive power. On the other
hand, he was aware of the potential threat that France could be in
that region, and was prepared to go to war to prevent a strong
French presence there. Meanwhile, Napoleon's
foreign minister,
Talleyrand vehemently
opposed to selling Louisiana since that would mean an end to
France's secret plans for a North American empire. .
Throughout this time, Jefferson had up-to-date intelligence on
Napoleon's military activities and intentions in North America.
Part of his evolving strategy involved giving du Pont some
information that was withheld from Livingston. He also gave
intentionally conflicting instructions to the two. He next sent
Monroe to Paris in 1803. Monroe had been formally expelled from
France on his last diplomatic mission, and the choice to send him
again conveyed a sense of seriousness.
Napoleon
was faced with an uprising in Saint-Domingue (present-day Republic of
Haiti
). An expeditionary force under his
brother-in-law
Charles Leclerc had
tried to re-conquer the territory and re-establish slavery. But
yellow fever and fierce resistance
destroyed the French army.
Napoleon needed peace with Great Britain
to implement the Treaty of San Ildefonso and take
possession of Louisiana. Otherwise, Louisiana would be an
easy prey for Britain or even for the U.S. But in early 1803, war
between France and Britain seemed unavoidable. On March 11, 1803,
Napoleon began preparing to invade Britain.
Napoleon had failed to re-enslave Haiti; he therefore abandoned his
plans to rebuild France's New World empire. Without revenues from
sugar colonies in the Caribbean, Louisiana had little value to him.
On April 10, 1803 Napoleon told Treasury minister
Barbé-Marbois that he
was considering selling the whole Louisiana Territory to the U.S..
On April 11, 1803, just days before Monroe's arrival, Barbé-Marbois
offered Livingston all of Louisiana instead of just New Orleans, at
a price of $15 million, equivalent to about $ in present day
terms.
The American representatives were prepared to pay up to $10 million
for New Orleans and its environs, but were dumbfounded when the
vastly larger territory was offered for $15 million. Jefferson had
authorized Livingston only to purchase New Orleans. However,
Livingston was certain that the U.S. would accept such a large
offer.
The Americans thought that Napoleon might withdraw the offer at any
time, preventing the United States from acquiring New Orleans. So
they agreed on April 30, 1803. The treaty was signed on May 2.
On July
14, 1803, the treaty reached Washington
The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from
the Gulf of
Mexico
in the south to Rupert's
Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east
to the Rocky Mountains in the
west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the
United States at a cost of less than 3 cents per acre.
Domestic opposition
The American purchase of the Louisiana territory was not
accomplished without domestic opposition. Jefferson's philosophical
consistency was in question because of his strict interpretation of
the Constitution. Many people believed he was being hypocritical by
doing something he surely would have argued against with
Alexander Hamilton. The
Federalists strongly
opposed the purchase, favoring close relations with Britain over
closer ties to Napoleon, believing the purchase to be
unconstitutional, and concerned that the U.S. had paid a large sum
of money just to declare war on Spain. The United States House of
Representatives also opposed the purchase. Majority Leader
John Randolph led the opposition.
The House called for a vote to deny the request for the purchase,
but it failed by two votes 59-57. The federalists even tried to
prove the land belonged to Spain not France, but the papers proved
otherwise.
The Federalists also feared that the
political power of the Atlantic
seaboard states would be threatened by the new citizens of the
west, bringing about a clash of western farmers with the merchants
and bankers of New
England
. There was concern that an increase in slave
holding states created out of the new territory would exacerbate
divisions between north and south, as well.
A group of
Federalists led by Massachusetts
Senator
Timothy Pickering went so far as
to plan a separate northern confederacy, offering Vice President
Aaron Burr the presidency of the proposed
new country if he persuaded New York
to join. Burr's relationship with
Alexander Hamilton, who helped bring an
end to the nascent northern secession movement, soured during this
period. The animosity between the two men ended with Hamilton's
death in a duel with Burr in
1804.
Treaty signing

At the Purchase's centennial fair, one
illustrator imagined the treaty signing as above.
On April 30, 1803, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, called by some
"the letter that bought a continent", was signed by
Robert Livingston, James
Monroe, and
Barbé Marbois
in Paris. Jefferson announced the treaty to the American people on
July 4. After the signing of the Louisiana Purchase agreement in
1803, Livingston made this famous statement, "We have lived long,
but this is the noblest work of our whole lives...From this day the
United States take their place among the powers of the first
rank."The United States Senate ratified the treaty with a vote of
twenty-four to seven on October 20; on the following day, it
authorized President Jefferson to take possession of the territory
and establish a temporary military government. In legislation
enacted on October 31, Congress made temporary provisions for local
civil government to continue as it had under French and Spanish
rule and authorized the President to use military forces to
maintain order. Plans were also set forth for several missions to
explore and chart the territory, the most famous being the
Lewis and Clark Expedition.
France
turned New Orleans over on December 20, 1803 at The Cabildo
. On March 10, 1804, a formal ceremony was
conducted in St.
Louis
to transfer ownership of the territory from France
to the United States.
Effective on October 1, 1804, the purchased territory was
organized into the
Territory of Orleans (most of which
became the state of Louisiana) and the
District of Louisiana, which was
temporarily under the control of the governor and judges of the
Indiana Territory.
Boundaries

The Purchase was one of several
territorial additions to the U.S.
The tributaries of the Mississippi were held as the boundaries by
the United States. Estimates that did exist as to the extent and
composition of the purchase were initially based on the
explorations of
Robert LaSalle.
A dispute immediately arose between Spain and the United States
regarding the extent of Louisiana. The territory's boundaries had
not been defined in the 1762
Treaty of Fontainebleau that
ceded it from France to Spain, nor the 1800
Third Treaty of San Ildefonso
ceding it back to France, nor the 1803 Louisiana Purchase agreement
ceding it to the United States.
The United States claimed Louisiana included
the entire western portion of the Mississippi River drainage basin
to the crest of the Rocky Mountains
and land extending southeast to the Rio Grande
. Spain insisted that Louisiana comprised no
more than the western bank of the Mississippi River and the cities
of New
Orleans
and St. Louis
. The relatively
narrow Louisiana of
New Spain had been a special
province under the jurisdiction of the
Captaincy General of Cuba while
the vast region to the west was in 1803 still considered part of
the
Commandancy
General of the Provincias Internas. Louisiana had never been
considered to be one of New Spain's internal provinces.
If the territory included all the tributaries of the Mississippi on
its western bank, the northern reaches of the Purchase extended
into the equally ill-defined British possession—
Rupert's Land of
British North America, now part of
Canada. The Purchase originally extended just beyond the
50th parallel. However, the territory
north of the
49th parallel
including the
Milk
River and
Poplar
River watersheds was ceded to the UK in exchange for parts of
the
Red River Basin south of
49th parallel the in the
Anglo-American Convention of
1818.
The
eastern boundary of the Louisiana purchase was the Mississippi River, from its source to the
31st parallel, although the source of the Mississippi
was then unknown. The eastern boundary
below the 31st parallel was unclear; the U.S. claimed the land as
far as the Perdido
River
, and Spain claimed the border of its Florida Colony
remained the Mississippi river. In early 1804, Congress
passed the
Mobile Act which recognized
West Florida as being part of the
United States. The
Treaty with
Spain of 1819 resolved the issue. Today, the 31st parallel is
the northern boundary of the western half of the
Florida Panhandle, and the Perdido is the
western boundary of Florida.
The southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase (versus New Spain)
was initially unclear at the time of purchase; the Neutral Ground
Treaty of 1806 created the
Sabine Free
State during the interim and the
Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 began to
lay down official dividing lines.
Financing
The American government used $3 million in gold as a down payment,
and bonds for the balance to pay France for the purchase. Because
of the impending war with Britain, French banks would not buy or
market the American bonds. The American diplomats Livingston and
Monroe therefore recommended the firms of
Baring and Company of London and
Hope and Company of Amsterdam for the
transaction which France agreed upon. Because of their reputation
as the two most stable financial houses in Europe and because
Napoleon wanted to receive his money as quickly as possible, the
French treasury minister
Barbé-Marbois made
arrangements with the two firms to convert the bonds France would
receive into cash. After the American bonds had been delivered, the
French government then sold them to Baring and Hope at a
discount.
The original sales document of the Louisiana Purchase was exhibited
in the entrance hall of Baring's London offices until the bank's
collapse in 1995 and is
now in the custody of
ING Group, which
purchased Barings.
See also
- Historic
regions of the United States
- Territorial evolution
of the United States
- Territories of Spain
that
encompassed land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase:
- Territory of France
that
encompassed land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase:
- U.S. territories that
encompassed land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase:
- Territory of Orleans,
1804-1812
- District of Louisiana,
1804-1805
- Territory of Louisiana,
1805-1812
- Territory of Missouri,
1812-1821
- Territory of Arkansaw,
1819-1836
- Indian territory,
1834-1907
- Territory of Iowa,
1838-1849
- Territory of Minnesota,
1849-1858
- Territory of New Mexico,
1850-1912
- Territory of Kansas,
1854-1861
- Territory of Nebraska
, 1854-1867
- Territory of Colorado,
1861-1876
- Territory of Dakota,
1861-1889
- Territory of Montana,
1864-1889
- Territory of Wyoming,
1868-1890
- Territory of Oklahoma,
1890-1907
- U.S. states that encompass land that
was part of the Louisiana Purchase:
- State of Louisiana
, 1812
- State of Missouri
, 1821
- State of Arkansas
, 1836
- State of Texas
, 1845
- State of Iowa
, 1849
- State of Minnesota
, 1858
- State of Kansas
, 1861
- State of Nebraska
, 1867
- State of Colorado
, 1876
- State of North Dakota
, 1889
- State of South Dakota
, 1889
- State of Montana, 1889
- State of Wyoming
, 1890
- State of Oklahoma, 1907
- State of New Mexico
, 1912
- Territorial
evolution of Canada
References
- The American Pageant by David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and
Thomas A. Bailey
- Table 1.1 Acquisition of the Public Domain
1781-1867
- http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cab4.htm
- [1]
- Godlewski, Guy; Napoléon et Les-États-Amis, P.320, La
Nouvelle Revue Des Deux Mondes, July-September, 1977.
- Meinig, D.W. The Shaping of America: Volume 2, Yale
University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-300-06290-7
- Duke, Marc; The du Ponts: Portrait of a Dynasty,
P.77-83, Saturday Review Press, 1976
- Thomas, Fleming(2003). The Louisiana Purchase. John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., P:149
- http://www.lpb.org/education/tah/lapurchase/quotes.cfm
- online at Google Books
- online at Google Books
- http://www.tuchdesign.com/case-studies/in-print.html
External links