The Louisiana Purchase

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In 1803, one of the most important real estate transactions in world history occurred.

France, under Napoleon Bonepart, sold approximately 530 million acres of territory in the middle of North America to the newly founded United States.

The reasons for France’s selling and the United States’ buying were varied, and they attracted considerable controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the end, however, some deals are just too good to pass up.

Learn more about the Louisiana Purchase, the reasons behind it, and how it shaped history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Louisiana Purchase was the single largest territorial acquisition in the history of the United States and one of the largest in world history. The purchase doubled the size of the young country with the stroke of a pen… and several million dollars.

All you have to do is look at a map, and you can see just how significant this event was in shaping both the US and the entire western hemisphere.

To understand why France sold the Louisiana territory and why the United States purchased it, we have to go back to early European claims in North America.

Spain was the first European power to set foot in the Americas and the first to make land claims in the New World.

By the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Spain considered the interior of North America to be its territory, and early expeditions provided Madrid with a basis for a broad, if undefined, claim to the territory.

The English developed sweeping, overlapping claims from their Atlantic seaboard colonies that, at least on parchment, ran “sea to sea.” The Virginia Company’s charter in 1606 and the Carolina charter in 1663 both envisioned jurisdictions extending westward to the Pacific.

The English really had no clue what was between the Atlantic and the Pacific, but that didn’t stop them from claiming it.

The first nation to make an actual, formalized claim was France.

France first claimed the Mississippi basin as “La Louisiane” on April 9, 1682, when René-Robert Cavelier, aka Sieur de La Salle, reached the mouth of the Mississippi River and carried out a formal ceremony taking possession in the name of Louis XIV.

Other explorers, such as Louis Jolliet and Fr. Jacques Marquette, had mapped parts of the river in 1673. Still, La Salle’s act in 1682 was the first explicit French claim to the territory that later formed the Louisiana Purchase.

The biggest thing to come out of this claim was the settlement of New Orleans, which was founded in 1718. It was strategically located at the mouth of the Mississippi River and became the capital of French Louisiana in 1722.

New Orleans grew in importance, and the region in proximity to New Orleans, in what is today the state of Louisiana, attracted settlers, but the vast majority of the territory remained unsettled and unexplored.

The territory changed hands on November 3, 1762, when France secretly ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, along with New Orleans, to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau as compensation for Spain’s losses in the Seven Years’ War.

Spain tried to take possession under Governor Antonio de Ulloa in 1766, faced a local revolt in 1768, and then formally assumed control when Alejandro O’Reilly arrived and proclaimed Spanish sovereignty at New Orleans in 1769.

Spain didn’t do much with it, and their control of the territory only lasted 38 years.

Spain returned Louisiana to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso on October 1, 1800, due to French pressure, Bourbon dynastic interests, and the harsh realities on the North American frontier, all of which pointed in the same direction.

By 1800, Spain had become a weakened ally of revolutionary France, seeking to avoid open conflict with Britain and maintain its relationship with Napoleon. Napoleon sought to regain Louisiana to revive a French presence in the Americas. Spain could not easily refuse a demand from the dominant military power in Europe without risking war, blockade, or the loss of more valuable possessions.

In exchange for Louisiana, France promised to carve out a kingdom for the Spanish Bourbon heir of Parma, Italy.

The treaty revived fears in the United States that a powerful and ambitious France would seal the Mississippi Valley and choke off western trade. New Orleans was the hinge of the interior because flatboats carried produce down the Ohio and Mississippi to that port, where goods were reloaded onto ocean-going vessels.

When Spanish officials in 1802 suspended the American right of deposit in New Orleans, westerners erupted, and President Thomas Jefferson faced the prospect of either war or rapid diplomacy to secure a commercial lifeline.

The “right of deposit” was a treaty privilege that allowed Americans to store goods at New Orleans duty-free and then reload them onto ocean-going vessels for export. It originated from the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, also known as Pinckney’s Treaty, in which Spain recognized the United States’ right to navigate the Mississippi River to its mouth.

In practice, the arrangement was the lifeline of the trans Appalachian economy. Flour, pork, tobacco, whiskey, and other produce relied on the Mississippi and New Orleans to get to market.

The uproar helped prompt Jefferson to send James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris, with instructions to secure New Orleans for the United States and, if possible, West Florida.

Napoleon Bonaparte initially viewed Louisiana as the granary that would feed a revived French Caribbean empire centered on Saint Domingue, or modern-day Haiti. That vision collapsed when the Haitian Revolution, yellow fever, and determined resistance led by Toussaint Louverture and later Jean Jacques Dessalines broke French power on the island.

Here I will point you to my previous episode on the Haitian Revolution.

Without Saint Domingue, Louisiana lost its immediate economic purpose. Furthermore, Napoleon knew that a war with Britain was soon inevitable. He recognized that he could not defend an enormous inland colony that relied on control of the sea, which was dominated by the British Navy.

Napoleon saw the sale of Louisiana to the United States as solving several problems in one stroke. By selling what was now a useless territory to the Americans, he could raise desperately needed cash for the war, and, perhaps more importantly, he could keep the territory out of the hands of the British.

The American incentives to buy were just as strong. Jefferson and his advisers believed the republic’s future rested on access to land and unobstructed navigation of the Mississippi River. Securing New Orleans and the river meant securing the entire trans Appalachian economy and preventing constant friction with a European power.

If you recall my episode on the Mississippi River, the Mississippi Basin is the largest navigable water system in the world, and it is longer than all other navigable waterways on Earth combined.

There was a strategic calculation as well. If the United States had not bought, it might have been pushed into an alliance with Britain against France, which would have violated Jefferson’s preference for avoiding entanglements.

By purchasing the entire territory rather than just New Orleans, the United States would also remove France from the continental interior, reduce the chance of great power conflict on its borders, and create an immense zone for settlement and resource extraction that matched Jefferson’s agrarian vision.

The Americans were surprised by the proposal, which was tendered in April 1803, as they had only intended to buy New Orleans. Here I should note that the Americans were so keen to get New Orleans that they were willing to ally with Britain should France not agree to terms.

Monroe and Livingston struck a deal with French Treasury official François Barbé-Marbois for the territory. The price was 15 million dollars, with 11.25 million paid to France and 3.75 million used by the United States to assume American claims against France. The territory comprised roughly 828,000 square miles, or about 530 million acres.

Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans had constitutional qualms because the Constitution did not explicitly authorize the acquisition of new territory.

Federalists were concerned that new, vast western lands would swell the ranks of agrarian states and diminish New England’s industrial influence, possibly shifting the republic toward a frontier majority that would be harder to govern.

Other critics attacked the price as reckless debt. They doubted the government’s ability to defend and administer such a remote expanse, noting unresolved boundaries with Spain and the certainty of new conflicts with Native peoples.

Others feared that the purchase would widen and entrench slavery in the West or bring in French and Spanish-speaking Catholic communities.

Jefferson briefly considered an amendment to the Constitution to allow the purchase, but ultimately just sent the treaty to the Senate, which ratified it in October 1803.

Formal transfers took place in New Orleans in December and in St. Louis in March 1804.

Laws, maps, and boundary lines complicated things immediately after the transfer. Spain protested the sale and disputed the western and southern edges of the territory, which were vague in eighteenth-century treaties.

Exploration followed quickly. Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to trace the Missouri River, reach the Pacific, and document the people, flora, fauna, and topography. Expeditions led by Zebulon Pike on the southern Plains and along the Red and Arkansas rivers added to American knowledge of the new interior.

These journeys had both diplomatic and scientific goals, as they asserted American presence, offered trade relations to Native nations, and laid the groundwork for future military and commercial routes. At the same time, the United States began to graft its institutions onto a region that had long operated under Spanish and French civil law.

Today, Louisiana’s private law is built on a French civil law foundation, not the English common law used by every other state.

For Native peoples, the long-term impact was profound and often catastrophic. The transfer did not take into account the sovereignty of dozens of nations that had their own diplomatic histories with France and Spain.

American expansion into the Louisiana Purchase accelerated land cessions, treaty-making under pressure, and eventually forced removals. The pace of settlement increased after the War of 1812, and by the 1830s, removal policies had pushed many eastern tribes into lands that had been part of the purchase, which in turn set off renewed conflicts with the Plains nations.

Expansion raised the question of whether slavery would spread west, and each step in organizing the territory forced a reckoning over the balance of free and slave states. The Missouri Crisis of 1819 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 were the clearest early signs that the purchase of 1803 had carried slavery into new lands where it would be debated, resisted, and eventually fought over.

The Louisiana Purchase also established powerful precedents. It showed that the United States would acquire territory by treaty and purchase when possible, which influenced later deals from Florida to Alaska.

It also set the stage for the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, by removing a European power from the continent and bringing the United States to the Rocky Mountains.

An interesting thing to consider is what would have happened if France hadn’t sold the territory to the United States. It wasn’t something that anyone was considering at the time, but in hindsight, I think it would have wound up in American hands anyhow.

Using the example of what happened in Texas, you probably would have eventually had settlers flooding into the territory from Ohio and Kentucky to start farms. The French were in no position to enforce anything over such a large territory.

As the United States grew in the 19th century, they would have, within a few decades, been able to take New Orleans by force. In fact, they did defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

The fact is, once the United States began to seriously grow, there was nothing any European power could do to hold on to territory that far inland.

I want to close this episode on one of the most astonishing facts about the Louisiana Purchase: the price. The United States paid 15 million dollars for 530 million acres, which averages out to 2.8 cents per acre.

Adjusted for inflation, which is extremely difficult to do with prices that far back, the price that is usually given is about $430 million today.

However, $15 million was approximately 3% of the US economy in 1803. Based on a similar percentage of the economy today, it would be around $930 billion.

The current value of the Louisiana Purchase today, now that the land is mostly inhabited and developed, would be about $1.2 trillion just for the land.

If you include all of the development and buildings, the value is probably closer to $40 trillion. However, these numbers should be taken with a massive grain of salt because this type of estimate is extremely difficult to calculate.

That, of course, is just the value today and doesn’t include all of the economic activity that has taken place over the course of two centuries.

The Louisiana Purchase stands as a pivotal moment when the United States transformed from a regional coastal nation into a continental power with hemispheric ambitions. It provided the territorial foundation for American economic development, facilitated westward expansion, and created the geographical framework for the modern United States.

Thomas Jefferson called the Louisiana Purchase “an ample provision for our posterity”, and he was right.

It also happened to be one of the best real estate deals in history.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Today’s review comes from listener Mark Young over on the Facebook Group. He writes:

Today I joined the Completionist Club. Thank you, Gary, for sharing your stories, and an even bigger thank you for getting rid of the gunshot that ended your early shows. You are welcome to visit Mason City, Iowa, anytime.

I believe I am the first member of the CC, and it can be lonely at the top. We are home to composer Meridith Willson (The Music Man) and yes, it’s spelled with two Ils, AND Bill Baird, the first successful puppeteer on television. It’s not far from your home, so consider this your invitation to the key to our small clubhouse.

Thanks, Mark! Believe it or not, I have been to Mason City, Iowa, many times. It was the regular stop in college when we drove south on I-35 to go to debate tournaments.

Granted, I haven’t been there recently, but I’d certainly be willing to stop by someday and visit your chapter’s completionist club.

As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app, Facebook, or Discord, you too can have it read on the show.