The Deal That Doubled the Nation
In 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France: about 828,000 square miles of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, according to the National Archives. The price was $15 million. Overnight, the young country roughly doubled in size, and the western border of the United States moved from the Mississippi to the Rockies. It is one of the defining moments in the story of the United States.
President Thomas Jefferson never set out to buy half a continent. He wanted one city: New Orleans, the port at the mouth of the Mississippi River where western farmers shipped their crops to the world. When Spain secretly handed Louisiana back to France and then closed New Orleans to American trade in 1802, Jefferson sent diplomats to Paris to buy the city and, if possible, the Floridas.
The offer that came back was far bigger. Napoleon Bonaparte, France's leader, had lost an army to disease and a slave revolution in Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti), and he was about to go to war with Britain again. In April 1803 he offered all of Louisiana. The American envoys, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, agreed to buy it without permission from Washington, because there was no time to ask.
The purchase raised hard questions: whether the Constitution allowed it, who would govern the people already living there, and whether slavery would spread west. Its land eventually became all or part of 15 states. Together with the land gained after the Mexican-American War, it turned a country of coastal states into one that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
At a Glance
1803
Treaty signed in Paris, dated April 30, 1803
828,000 sq mi
Land acquired, about 530 million acres (National Archives)
$15 million
Purchase price, including $3.75 million in claims
15
Present-day states made from all or part of the land
The U.S. flag goes up over the main square of New Orleans on December 20, 1803, as painted by Thure de Thulstrup for the purchase's 100th anniversary.
Did You Know?
The treaty is dated April 30, 1803, but historians note it was actually signed a few days later, around May 2.
Americans learned of the purchase on July 4, 1803, the 27th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
New Orleans flew three flags in three weeks: Spanish, then French from November 30, then American from December 20, 1803.
No one defined the borders. The treaty described Louisiana only by its extent under Spain and France, and the U.S. spent until 1819 settling them.
The United States paid mostly in bonds, which French officials sold to banks in London and Amsterdam to get cash right away.
Louisiana became a state on April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the date on the treaty.
Jefferson wrote privately that the purchase was "an act beyond the constitution," but he approved it anyway.
Toussaint Louverture, whose revolution helped push France to sell, died in a French prison 23 days before the treaty's date.
The Road to the Purchase
Why a single port city mattered so much, and how events in Spain, France, and the Caribbean put all of Louisiana up for sale.
By 1800 hundreds of thousands of Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio country. Hauling crops east over the mountains was slow and costly, so farmers floated their wheat, corn, pork, and whiskey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers on flatboats to New Orleans, where the goods were loaded onto ocean ships.
Spain controlled both banks of the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans. France had founded New Orleans in 1718 and had claimed the whole Mississippi basin, which the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, named Louisiana after King Louis XIV in 1682. At the end of the Seven Years' War, France gave Louisiana west of the river, with New Orleans, to Spain in 1762.
In Pinckney's Treaty of 1795, Spain gave Americans the right to use the Mississippi and the "right of deposit" at New Orleans: the right to store goods there, duty free, while waiting for ships. For western farmers that right was a lifeline, and for the national government keeping it open was a question of whether the West would stay loyal to the Union.
Thomas Jefferson put it bluntly in an April 18, 1802, letter to Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister in Paris: "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market."
Napoleon Bonaparte, who took power in France in 1799, dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas. On October 1, 1800, in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain agreed to return Louisiana to France in exchange for a kingdom in Italy for a member of the Spanish royal family.
The deal was confirmed by the Treaty of Aranjuez in March 1801, but it stayed secret for months, and Spain kept governing Louisiana while France prepared to take over. Rumors of the transfer reached Washington in 1801.
Jefferson was alarmed. A weak Spain on the Mississippi was a manageable neighbor, but Napoleon's France was the strongest military power in Europe. In the same 1802 letter to Livingston, Jefferson warned that if France took New Orleans, the United States might have to seek an alliance with Britain, its old enemy.
France and the United States had only just made peace. The Convention of 1800, also called the Treaty of Mortefontaine, ended the undeclared naval Quasi-War between them, and the purchase treaty itself begins by referring to it. The wider struggle for power in Europe at the time is part of world history.
In October 1802 the Spanish official in charge of New Orleans, Intendant Juan Ventura Morales, suspended the American right of deposit. American goods could no longer be stored in the city duty free, and western trade was thrown into turmoil.
Many Americans assumed France was behind the move. Westerners were furious, and some Federalist politicians in the East called for seizing New Orleans by force. In Congress, a resolution to raise troops and take the city was debated in early 1803.
Jefferson chose diplomacy. In January 1803 Congress quietly approved $2 million for the purchase of New Orleans, and Jefferson named James Monroe as a special envoy to join Livingston in Paris. Monroe and Livingston were authorized to offer as much as $10 million for New Orleans and West Florida, according to the Office of the Historian.
If France refused, Monroe was to seek at least a permanent right to use the river and a place to store goods. If that failed too, Jefferson was prepared to approach Britain. Spain restored the right of deposit in the spring of 1803, but by then events in Paris had moved far beyond it.
Napoleon's American plans depended on Saint-Domingue, the French colony that is now Haiti. It was the richest colony in the world, producing much of Europe's sugar and coffee with the forced labor of about half a million enslaved Africans. Louisiana was meant to supply it with food and timber.
In 1791 the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose up in one of the largest slave revolts in history. Under Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became a skilled general, they won their freedom and took control of the colony.
In 1802 Napoleon sent an army of more than 20,000 soldiers under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to retake the colony and restore slavery. Toussaint was captured by trickery and shipped to a prison in France, but the revolution went on under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and yellow fever destroyed the French army. Leclerc himself died of the fever in November 1802.
Historians widely agree that the loss in Saint-Domingue helped convince Napoleon that an empire in North America was not worth the cost. Haiti declared its independence on January 1, 1804, becoming the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people. The fight against slavery in the Americas is also part of Black American history.
By early 1803 the peace between France and Britain was collapsing, and war resumed in May 1803. Napoleon needed money for the fighting, and he knew Britain's navy could easily seize Louisiana if war came. Selling it would raise cash and keep it out of British hands.
On April 10 and 11, 1803, Napoleon told his treasury minister, François Barbé-Marbois, that he had decided to sell the whole territory, not just New Orleans. On April 11 the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, surprised Livingston by asking what the United States would pay for all of Louisiana.
Napoleon also saw a strategic benefit. A larger, stronger United States would be a rival to Britain at sea and in trade. Barbé-Marbois later wrote that Napoleon expected the sale to give Britain a maritime rival that would one day humble its pride.
Monroe arrived in Paris on April 12, the day after Talleyrand's question. Within about three weeks the two Americans and Barbé-Marbois had agreed on terms for a territory neither Jefferson nor Congress had ever asked to buy.
The Deal, Step by Step
From Monroe's mission to Paris to the treaty that finally fixed the borders, the key events in order. Open any entry for the full story.
On January 11, 1803, Jefferson named James Monroe "minister extraordinary" to France and Spain. The appointment was a political signal as much as a diplomatic one: Monroe was trusted in the West, and his mission showed angry westerners that the government was acting.
Monroe sailed from New York on March 8, 1803, with instructions to buy New Orleans and West Florida. Congress had already set aside $2 million, and Monroe could offer considerably more.
In Paris, Livingston had been pressing the French for months with little success. French officials insisted that Louisiana was not for sale, and Livingston had even floated the idea of buying only the land north of the Arkansas River.
Everything changed in the days before Monroe arrived. On April 11, 1803, Talleyrand asked Livingston what the United States would give for the whole territory. Livingston, caught off guard, answered that the United States wanted only New Orleans and the Floridas. The French were not interested in selling pieces.
Monroe and Livingston negotiated with Barbé-Marbois through late April. France first asked for a much higher price. The two sides settled on 80 million francs, about $15 million, and the documents were dated April 30, 1803, though historians note they were signed a few days later, on or about May 2.
The deal was made up of three documents: the treaty of cession, a convention in which the United States agreed to pay 60 million francs ($11,250,000), and a second convention in which the United States took on up to 20 million francs ($3,750,000) of claims that American citizens held against France, according to the National Archives.
Article I described the land only as Louisiana "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it." No one defined the borders. Article III promised that the people living there would be made part of the Union and would receive the rights of U.S. citizens "as soon as possible."
According to Barbé-Marbois's later account, Livingston rose after the signing and said, "We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives." The two envoys had gone far beyond their instructions, and they knew Jefferson and the Senate would have to accept the result.
News of the treaty took about two months to cross the Atlantic. It reached Washington on July 3, 1803, and was published the next day, on the 27th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Most Americans, especially in the West and South, celebrated. Newspapers loyal to Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party hailed the purchase as a peaceful triumph that secured the Mississippi forever.
Jefferson was delighted but also troubled. He believed the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to add new territory, and he began drafting a constitutional amendment to authorize it, as the Debate at Home tab explains.
Time was short. France could still back out before ratification, and Spain protested that Napoleon had promised never to sell Louisiana to a third country. Jefferson called Congress into an early session in October to approve the treaty and the money.
Jefferson sent the treaty to the Senate when Congress met on October 17, 1803. The Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to approve a treaty, and Jefferson's party held a comfortable majority.
After a short debate, the Senate ratified the treaty on October 20, 1803, by a vote of 24 to 7. Most of the votes against it came from Federalists, who questioned both the price and the power to make such a purchase.
Ratifications were exchanged in Washington on October 21. The House of Representatives then passed the laws needed to carry out the treaty, including authority to issue the bonds that would pay France.
With ratification complete, the United States owned Louisiana on paper. It still had to take possession from officials who, in New Orleans, were still Spanish.
Because Spain had never formally handed Louisiana to France, two ceremonies were needed. On November 30, 1803, in the main square of New Orleans, the Spanish flag was lowered and the French colonial prefect, Pierre Clément de Laussat, took possession for France.
Twenty days later, on December 20, 1803, Laussat handed the territory to the American commissioners, Governor William C. C. Claiborne of the Mississippi Territory and General James Wilkinson. The French flag came down and the U.S. flag went up over the square, which is now Jackson Square.
The transfer documents were signed in the Cabildo, the Spanish government building facing the square. New Orleans then had about 8,000 residents, most of them French-speaking Creoles and enslaved and free people of African descent, and few of them had been asked whether they wanted to become Americans.
Claiborne became governor of the new territory. The city's mix of French, Spanish, African, and American cultures is part of the history told on the Louisiana state page.
Upper Louisiana, governed from the river town of St. Louis, had its own transfer. On March 9, 1804, the Spanish flag was lowered and the French flag raised, and on March 10 the French flag came down and the U.S. flag went up. The two days are remembered as Three Flags Day.
U.S. Army Captain Amos Stoddard acted for France on the first day, at the request of the French government, and for the United States on the second.
Meriwether Lewis attended the ceremonies as an official witness. His expedition with William Clark was camped across the river, preparing to explore the new territory. St. Louis would become the gateway to the West, a story told on the Missouri state page.
In 1804 Congress divided the purchase in two: the Territory of Orleans in the south, roughly today's state of Louisiana, and the District of Louisiana to the north, which was governed at first from the Indiana Territory.
On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out up the Missouri River. Jefferson had asked Congress for money for the expedition in January 1803, before he knew he would own the land. Their journey is told in full on the Lewis and Clark page.
Lewis and Clark crossed the Louisiana Territory and continued beyond it, over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, returning to St. Louis in September 1806. They mapped rivers, recorded hundreds of plants and animals new to science, and met dozens of Native nations.
Other expeditions explored the southern and western parts of the purchase. William Dunbar and George Hunter explored the Ouachita River in 1804 and 1805, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis explored the Red River in 1806 until Spanish troops turned them back, and Zebulon Pike explored the Arkansas River and the southern Rockies in 1806 and 1807.
These journeys told Americans what they had bought, and they also strengthened the U.S. claim to land whose borders were still in dispute with Spain and Britain.
Many residents of the Territory of Orleans were unhappy with their new government. Congress at first gave them an appointed governor and council rather than an elected legislature, and in 1804 leading residents sent a petition, known as the Remonstrance, to Congress demanding self-government.
Congress gave the territory an elected assembly in 1805. In January 1811 more than 200 enslaved people rose up along the Mississippi above New Orleans in the German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. Militia and U.S. troops crushed it, and dozens of the rebels were killed or executed.
On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the date on the purchase treaty, Louisiana became the 18th state, the first carved from the purchase. It was also the first state with a majority of residents whose background was not English.
Louisiana kept a legal system based on French and Spanish civil law, unlike every other state, which follows English common law. That difference, rooted in the colonial era, survives in Louisiana's civil code today.
Because the treaty never defined Louisiana's borders, the United States spent years arguing with Spain and Britain over them. Livingston had asked Talleyrand where the borders were, and, by Livingston's report, Talleyrand answered that he could give no direction, adding, "you have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it."
In the southeast, Americans argued that West Florida, the Gulf Coast between the Mississippi and Pearl rivers, was part of the purchase. After settlers there rebelled against Spain in 1810, President James Madison proclaimed the area part of the United States.
In the north, the Convention of 1818 with Britain set the border along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, the line that still divides much of the United States and Canada.
In the southwest, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and the Spanish minister Luis de Onís signed the Adams-Onís Treaty on February 22, 1819. It fixed the western border of the purchase along the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas rivers and the 42nd parallel, and Spain gave Florida to the United States. The treaty took effect in 1821.
The Debate at Home
Was the purchase constitutional, who opposed it, and how did a young country with a small treasury pay for it?
Jefferson believed in a "strict construction" of the Constitution: the federal government had only the powers the document clearly listed. Nowhere did it say the government could buy new land or promise statehood to its people.
In the summer of 1803 Jefferson drafted a constitutional amendment to approve the purchase after the fact. In an August 12, 1803, letter to Senator John Breckinridge, he described the purchase as "an act beyond the constitution" and hoped the nation would approve it with an amendment.
Then warnings arrived from Livingston that Napoleon was having second thoughts. Jefferson's advisers, including Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, argued that the power to make treaties included the power to acquire territory. Jefferson dropped the amendment and urged his allies to say as little as possible about the constitutional question.
The question was settled later by the courts. In American Insurance Co. v. Canter (1828), Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for the Supreme Court that the Constitution gives the national government the power to acquire territory by treaty or by war.
Jefferson's opponents, the Federalists, were strongest in New England. Their objections mixed principle and politics. The rivalry between the parties is covered on the political party history page.
Some argued that the government had no constitutional power to add territory or to promise its residents citizenship. Others objected to the price, calling it an enormous sum for a wilderness, or feared that new western states would reduce the influence of New England in Congress.
A few Federalists went further. In 1803 and 1804 a small group of New England politicians, sometimes called the Essex Junto, talked privately about taking the northeastern states out of the Union. Their plans never gained wide support.
Most Americans, however, supported the purchase, and it helped Jefferson win reelection in 1804 in a landslide. Even some Federalists admitted that controlling the Mississippi was worth the price.
The purchase showed how the branches share power over foreign affairs. The president negotiates treaties, but the Senate must approve them by a two-thirds vote, one of the checks described on the legislative and executive powers page.
The House of Representatives has no vote on treaties, but it controls spending. Because the United States had to issue bonds and pay money to France, the House also had to pass laws to carry out the treaty, and Federalists there argued against it.
Livingston and Monroe had gone far beyond their instructions, which authorized them to buy only New Orleans and the Floridas. Jefferson could have rejected the deal; instead he embraced it and asked Congress to finish the job.
Historians often point to the purchase as an example of a president using the executive's power boldly, and of Congress accepting a fact the president presented to it, a pattern repeated many times since.
The price was larger than the federal government's entire income for a year, so the United States could not pay in cash. Instead it issued $11.25 million in bonds that paid 6 percent interest, and it agreed to pay the claims of its own citizens against France, up to $3.75 million, directly.
Napoleon wanted money right away, so France sold the American bonds to two European banks, Baring Brothers of London and Hope and Company of Amsterdam, at a discount. The banks paid France and collected the interest from the United States.
The U.S. government finished paying off the bonds in 1823. Counting interest, the total cost came to more than $23 million, a figure that shaped the national debt of the early republic.
At the $15 million purchase price, the land cost less than 3 cents an acre. The National Archives, figuring in the full cost, puts it at roughly 4 cents an acre. Either way, it is considered one of the greatest land bargains in history.
The Purchase by the Numbers
| Measure | Figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Land acquired | About 828,000 sq mi | About 530 million acres (National Archives; Office of the Historian) |
| Purchase price | $15 million | 80 million francs in all |
| Paid to France | $11,250,000 | 60 million francs, in 6 percent bonds |
| Claims assumed | Up to $3,750,000 | 20 million francs owed by France to American citizens |
| Total cost with interest | More than $23 million | Bonds fully paid off in 1823 |
| Cost per acre | Under 3¢ (about 4¢ with interest) | The National Archives uses roughly 4 cents |
| Senate vote | 24 to 7 | Ratified October 20, 1803 |
| Size of the United States | About doubled | The western border moved from the Mississippi to the Rockies |
| States formed | 15 | All or part of 15 states, plus small parts of two Canadian provinces |
Key Figures
The leaders, diplomats, and revolutionaries on three continents whose decisions made the purchase happen.
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, became president in 1801. He imagined the United States as an "empire of liberty" of independent farmers, which required land, and access to the Mississippi was central to that vision.
He set the purchase in motion by sending Monroe to Paris, but the offer to sell all of Louisiana surprised him as much as anyone. He accepted it, even though he doubted the Constitution allowed it.
The purchase is usually counted among the greatest achievements of any president. Jefferson followed it by sending Lewis and Clark to explore the land and by organizing its first territorial governments.
Jefferson's record is also complicated by slavery. He enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, and the land he bought would become the center of the national fight over whether slavery could spread west.
Napoleon Bonaparte, a Corsican-born general, seized power in France in 1799 and ruled as First Consul. He regained Louisiana from Spain in 1800 as part of a plan for a new French empire in the Americas.
The failure of his army in Saint-Domingue and the coming war with Britain led him to sell instead. He made the decision himself, against the objections of some of his ministers.
According to Barbé-Marbois, Napoleon said the sale would strengthen the United States and give Britain a rival at sea. The money helped pay for his wars in Europe.
Napoleon crowned himself emperor in December 1804. After years of war he was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821.
Robert R. Livingston of New York was one of the most experienced statesmen of the founding era. He served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and as New York's chancellor, its highest judge, he gave George Washington the oath of office in 1789.
Jefferson appointed him minister to France in 1801. He spent two years lobbying French officials for New Orleans, a job that fell under the State Department, then led by James Madison.
When Talleyrand asked on April 11, 1803, what the United States would pay for all of Louisiana, Livingston was the first American to hear the offer. He and Monroe later argued over which of them deserved more credit.
After returning home, Livingston backed the inventor Robert Fulton, whose steamboat the Clermont made its first successful run on the Hudson River in 1807, beginning the age of steam travel on American rivers.
James Monroe of Virginia was a Revolutionary War veteran, a former U.S. senator and governor of Virginia, and a close political ally of Jefferson.
Jefferson sent him to Paris in 1803 as a special envoy with authority to spend more than Congress had openly approved. He arrived on April 12, just after France offered the whole territory, and he and Livingston agreed to buy it.
Monroe later served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War under James Madison, and as the fifth president from 1817 to 1825.
As president, his administration negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty that settled the purchase's southwestern border, and he issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, warning European powers against new colonization in the Americas.
François Barbé-Marbois knew the United States well. As a young French diplomat he had lived in Philadelphia during the American Revolution, and he married Elizabeth Moore, the daughter of a Pennsylvania official, in 1784.
As Napoleon's treasury minister he negotiated the sale with Livingston and Monroe and signed the treaty for France.
In 1829 he published a history of Louisiana and the sale. It is the source of several famous quotations from the negotiation, including Livingston's "noblest work" remark and Napoleon's comments about Britain, so historians treat those words as his recollection rather than an exact record.
Barbé-Marbois served in French governments for decades after the sale, including as head of France's national audit court, and died in 1837.
Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery in Saint-Domingue around 1743 and gained his freedom before the revolution. He became the most important leader of the uprising that began in 1791.
A brilliant general and politician, he defeated Spanish and British invaders and by 1801 governed the colony, issuing a constitution that abolished slavery there.
In 1802 French forces seized him by deception and sent him to Fort de Joux in the mountains of eastern France. He died there in prison on April 7, 1803, just over three weeks before the purchase treaty was dated.
The resistance he led helped wreck Napoleon's plans for the Americas. Many historians argue that the Haitian Revolution was one of the main reasons France sold Louisiana, and that Toussaint and the people of Saint-Domingue deserve a place in the story of American expansion.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was one of the most skilled and most distrusted diplomats in European history. He served the French monarchy, the Revolution, Napoleon, and the restored kings in turn.
Americans already knew his name from the XYZ Affair of 1797 and 1798, when his agents demanded a bribe from American diplomats before talks could begin, a scandal that led to the undeclared Quasi-War between the two countries.
On April 11, 1803, Talleyrand asked Livingston the question that opened the door to the sale: what would the United States pay for all of Louisiana?
When Livingston later asked him about the borders of the territory, Talleyrand declined to define them, leaving the United States to argue about them with Spain and Britain for years.
Legacy
How the purchase shaped the map, the Native nations of the West, the fight over slavery, and the country's path from coast to coast.
Land from the purchase makes up all of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, and part of Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, along with small parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Louisiana became the first state from the purchase in 1812, and Missouri followed in 1821. Oklahoma, the last state lying entirely within the purchase, joined the Union in 1907, more than a century after the treaty.
The purchase gave the United States the whole Mississippi River and its great western branches, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red. Those rivers became highways for settlement and trade, and the region became one of the richest farming areas on earth.
The United States was never the same shape again. In 1800 the country ended at the Mississippi; by 1803 it reached the Rocky Mountains, and within half a century it would reach the Pacific.
The United States began as 13 states along the Atlantic coast. The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, extended its land west to the Mississippi. The Louisiana Purchase doubled that area in a single step.
The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 added Florida. Texas joined as a state in 1845, and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with Britain secured the Pacific Northwest.
The last great addition in the contiguous United States came from the Mexican-American War, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 gave the United States about 525,000 square miles, including California. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 completed the southern border.
The Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the two largest additions to what became the lower 48 states. One was bought peacefully from France; the other followed a war with Mexico. Together they account for most of the land between the Mississippi and the Pacific.
The land in the purchase was home to many Native nations, including the Osage, Quapaw, Caddo, Pawnee, Otoe, Missouria, Kansa, Omaha, Ponca, Lakota, Dakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfeet. Almost none of them had ever been ruled by France or Spain. Their history is part of Native American history.
What the United States bought was France's claim: the right, as European powers saw it, to govern the territory and to acquire land from its Native owners, by treaty or by force, without competition from other countries.
Acquiring the land itself took most of the next century. In 1808, for example, the Osage signed a treaty giving up most of present-day Missouri and northern Arkansas. Later treaties, wars, and reservations followed across the Plains.
Parts of the purchase were also used for the forced relocation of eastern tribes under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Present-day Oklahoma was set aside as "Indian Territory" for the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations and others before it became a state in 1907.
Slavery was already legal and widespread in Louisiana under French and Spanish rule, and the U.S. government allowed it to continue. Cotton and sugar plantations spread rapidly across the lower Mississippi Valley in the decades after the purchase.
The first great fight over slavery in the new land came in 1819, when Missouri asked to join the Union as a slave state. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and banned slavery in the rest of the purchase north of 36°30′ latitude.
In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned that line and let settlers in Kansas and Nebraska vote on slavery. The result was violence in "Bleeding Kansas" and the rise of the new Republican Party.
The question of slavery in the western territories, which began with the Louisiana Purchase, became one of the main causes of the Civil War.
For the 100th anniversary, St. Louis hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the 1904 World's Fair. It opened on April 30, 1904, a year late, and drew nearly 20 million visitors. The Summer Olympics were held in St. Louis the same year, the first Olympics in the United States.
New Orleans marked the centennial with ceremonies in the Cabildo, where Thure de Thulstrup's painting of the flag raising still hangs. The Cabildo is now part of the Louisiana State Museum.
The original U.S. copy of the treaty is kept by the National Archives. Jefferson's decision to accept it is regularly ranked among the most important presidential accomplishments in American history.
For the 200th anniversary of the purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the U.S. Mint issued new nickels in 2004 and 2005 as part of its Westward Journey series, including a design based on the peace medals Lewis and Clark gave to Native leaders.
Sources & Further Reading
- Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803), National Archives
- The Louisiana Purchase, 1803, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian
- Louisiana Purchase: Primary Documents in American History, Library of Congress
- The Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello)
- Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 1802, Founders Online, National Archives
- Thomas Jefferson to John Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, Founders Online, National Archives
- Louisiana Purchase, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Adams-Onís Treaty, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian
Treaty dates, the area, and the price follow the National Archives' Louisiana Purchase Treaty page, which also holds the treaty text quoted here. The Library of Congress, the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) were used for the negotiation, the constitutional debate, and Jefferson's letters. Some quotations from the negotiation were recorded years later by participants, and the page notes where that is the case.