Why was the acquisition of New Orleans significant to the United States?

Louisiana Purchase, western half of the Mississippi River basin purchased in 1803 from France by the United States; at less than three cents per acre for 828,000 square miles (2,144,520 square km), it was the greatest land bargain in U.S. history. The purchase doubled the size of the United States, greatly strengthened the country materially and strategically, provided a powerful impetus to westward expansion, and confirmed the doctrine of implied powers of the federal Constitution.

The Louisiana Territory under Spanish and French rule

The Louisiana Territory had been the object of Old World interest for many years before 1803. Explorations and scattered settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries had given France control over the river and title to most of the Mississippi valley.

The first serious disruption of French control over Louisiana came during the Seven Years’ War. In 1762 France ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain and in 1763 transferred virtually all of its remaining possessions in North America to Great Britain. This arrangement, however, proved temporary. French power rebounded under the subsequent military leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, and on October 1, 1800, Napoleon induced a reluctant King Charles IV of Spain to agree, for a consideration, to cede Louisiana back to France. King Charles gave at least his verbal assent on the condition that France would never alienate the territory to a third power. With this treaty of retrocession, known as the Treaty of San Ildefonso (confirmed March 21, 1801), would go not only the growing and commercially significant port of New Orleans but the strategic mouth of the Mississippi River.

Reports of the supposed retrocession soon were received by the U.S. government with deep misgivings. During the preceding 12 years, Americans had streamed westward into the valleys of the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Ohio rivers. The very existence of these new settlers depended on their right to use the Mississippi River freely and to make transshipment of their exports at New Orleans. By terms of the Treaty of San Lorenzo, Spain, in 1795, had granted to the United States the right to ship goods originating in American ports through the mouth of the Mississippi without paying duty and also the right of deposit, or temporary storage, of American goods at New Orleans for transshipment. But in 1802 Spain in effect revoked the right of deposit, and so it was in an atmosphere of growing tension in the West that Pres. Thomas Jefferson was confronted with the prospect of a new, wily, and more powerful keeper of the strategic window to the Gulf of Mexico.

Negotiations between France and the United States

Jefferson instructed Robert R. Livingston, the U.S. minister at Paris, to take two steps: (1) to approach Napoleon’s minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, with the object of preventing the retrocession in the event this act had not yet been completed; and (2) to try to purchase at least New Orleans if the property had actually been transferred from Spain to France. Direct negotiations with Talleyrand, however, appeared to be all but impossible. For months Livingston had to be content with tantalizing glimmerings of a possible deal between France and the United States. But even these faded as news of the Spanish governor’s revocation of the right of deposit reached the U.S. minister. With this intelligence he had good reasons for thinking the worst: that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been responsible for this unfortunate act and that his next move might be to close the Mississippi River entirely to the Americans. Livingston had but one trump to play, and he played it with a flourish. He made it known that a rapprochement with Great Britain might, after all, best serve the interests of his country, and at that particular moment an Anglo-American rapprochement was about the least of Napoleon’s desires.

There are good reasons to believe that French failure in Santo Domingo (the island of Hispaniola), the imminence of renewed war with Great Britain, and financial stringencies may all have prompted Napoleon in 1803 to offer for sale to the United States the entire Louisiana Territory. At this juncture, James Monroe arrived in Paris as Jefferson’s minister plenipotentiary; and even though the two American ministers possessed neither instructions nor authority to purchase the whole of Louisiana, the negotiations that followed—with Franƈois, marquis de Barbé-Marbois, minister for the treasury, acting for Napoleon—moved swiftly to a conclusion.

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Defining the purchase

A treaty was signed on May 2 but was antedated to April 30. By its terms the Louisiana Territory, in the form France had received it from Spain, was sold to the United States. For this vast domain the United States agreed to pay $11,250,000 outright and assumed claims of its citizens against France in the amount of $3,750,000. Interest payments incidental to the final settlement made the total price $27,267,622.

Precisely what the United States had purchased was unclear. The wording of the treaty was vague; it did not clearly describe the boundaries. It gave no assurances that West Florida was to be considered a part of Louisiana; neither did it delineate the southwest boundary. The American negotiators were fully aware of this.

But before the United States could establish fixed boundaries to Louisiana there arose a basic question concerning the constitutionality of the purchase. Did the Constitution of the United States provide for an act of this kind? The president, in principle a strict constructionist, thought that an amendment to the Constitution might be required to legalize the transaction; but, after due consideration and considerable oratory, the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7.

The setting of fixed boundaries awaited negotiations with Spain and Great Britain. The exasperating dispute with Spain over the ownership of West Florida and Texas was finally settled by the purchase of the Floridas from Spain in 1819 and the establishment of a fixed southwest boundary line. This line followed the Sabine River from the Gulf of Mexico to the parallel of 32° N; ran thence due north to the Red River, following this stream to the meridian 100° W; thence north to the Arkansas River and along this stream to its source; thence north or south, as the case might be (the source of the Arkansas was not then known), to the parallel of 42° N and west along this line to the Pacific Ocean. The northern boundary was amicably established by an Anglo-American convention in 1818. It established the 49° parallel N between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains as the American-Canadian border. The Rocky (then referred to as “Stony”) Mountains were accepted as the western limit of the Louisiana Territory, and the Mississippi River was considered for all practical purposes the eastern boundary of the great purchase. Much of the territory turned out to contain rich mineral resources, productive soil, valuable grazing land, forests, and wildlife resources of inestimable value. Out of this empire were carved in their entirety the states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma; in addition, the area included most of the land in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Minnesota.