Louisiana Purchase

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States bought from France most of the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Since achieving independence, the United States had repeatedly sought free access down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Terms had been negotiated in 1795 with the Spanish, who then held the territory, but in 1801 President Thomas Jefferson learned that Spain had secretly ceded Louisiana to France.

Jefferson instructed the American minister in Paris, Robert R. Livingston, to negotiate either for a port at the mouth of the Mississippi or, as a second choice, for permanent trading rights in New Orleans. In January 1803, James Monroe was sent to join Livingston, armed with an appropriation of $2 million to buy New Orleans and West Florida (the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi); secretly, Monroe was told he could go as high as $10 million.

Napoleon had acquired Louisiana in hopes of building an empire in North America, but a Haitian slave revolt and an impending war with England had led him to abandon his plans. On April 11, Livingston and Monroe were offered all of Louisiana. The price agreed upon was $15 million. For approximately four cents an acre, the United States acquired about 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the nation. The Mississippi River formed the eastern boundary, and the Gulf of Mexico, the southern; subsequent treaties defined the northern boundary as reaching to Canada, and the western, as running generally northwest to the middle of present-day Montana.

Monroe and Livingston had clearly exceeded their instructions. Indeed, Jefferson's opponents, the Federalists, argued that American law made no provision at all for buying foreign territory. Jefferson, who usually favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution, took the broadest view on this occasion, and the Senate approved the purchase on October 20, 1803. American expansion westward into the new lands began immediately. A territorial government was established in 1804, and in 1812 the first of thirteen states to be carved from the territory—Louisiana—was admitted to the Union.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.