Fortunate Accident: The Louisiana Purchase

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Great Achievement . Jefferson’s acquisition of the vast lands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains was by far the greatest achievement of his first term as president. Ironically, it came about as an accident. Jefferson had opined in his inaugural address that the United States already had enough land to provide “for a thousand generations,” and he was not planning a major land purchase from European powers. However, the purchase of Louisiana, as the territory was called, made perfect political and geopolitical sense to Jefferson and his followers.

New Orleans . By 1801 nearly a half million Americans lived west of the Appalachian mountains. Federalists, many of them New England descendants of Puritans who had migrated to America in the seventeenth century, openly feared that the white residents of the frontier were illiterate barbarians. Jefferson’s Republicans, on the other hand, saw Western expansion as the best hope for the survival of the Republic. As the nineteenth century began, settlers in the West remained under the political control of foreign powers who controlled the Mississippi River system. As a result these settlers depended on French and Spanish commercial systems to get their produce to markets—hardly a recipe for the continual renewal of the republican spirit. Jefferson understood that the key to securing permanent control of the West was to gain possession of New Orleans, located at the mouth of the Mississippi. “There is on the globe,” Jefferson wrote, “one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”

Spain Threatens Commerce . In 1801 Spain owned New Orleans and under a treaty allowed Americans to transport produce from the interior. The year before, Spain had secretly ceded all of Louisiana to France, a move that allowed Napoleon to dream of creating a new French empire in America. In his scheme farmers in Louisiana would produce food for the immensely profitable French sugar-producing colonies based in Haiti. In late 1802 Spain closed New Orleans to American commerce, giving rise to panicked rumors that the city would soon be transferred to France. Such a move would have posed a serious threat to the existence of American settlements in the West.

Napoleon’s Surprise . To avoid this potential debacle, Jefferson sent a high-level delegation to France with instructions to offer up to $10 million for New Orleans and West Florida (the southern portions of Mississippi and Alabama). By the time they got there, Napoleon’s plans for a new French empire in America had cooled—thanks to the armed former slaves of Haiti, who rose up in 1793 and by 1801 had gained control of the entire island. At the same time, another war between France and England seemed imminent. When Jefferson’s diplomats met with Napoleon on 11 April 1803, the French leader astonished them by offering to sell not only New Orleans but the entire territory of Louisiana for the bargain price of $15 million. The resulting treaty doubled the size of the United States and gave the new nation absolute control of the entire Mississippi River valley. Jefferson predicted Louisiana would make the West an “empire of liberty.”

Source

Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).