The Louisiana Purchase

Napoleon’s decision to sell was forced by a slave revolt. The French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue — modern Haiti — had been the richest colony in the world, generating more revenue for France than all thirteen American colonies had generated for Britain. In 1791 the enslaved population revolted under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture. Napoleon sent an army of 30,000 in 1802 to reconquer the colony. Yellow fever killed most of them. By early 1803, Napoleon had lost his Caribbean army, his New World ambitions, and his need for the Louisiana territory that was meant to supply the colonies. He needed cash for the European war that was about to resume. He offered to sell.

What France could legally sell was its claim to Louisiana — not the land itself. The territory included the homelands of the Caddo, Osage, Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Comanche, Wichita, and dozens of other nations who had governed the basin of the Missouri and the southern Plains for centuries. None of them were consulted. None of them recognized any French sovereignty to transfer. The transaction was an exchange of paper claims among European empires; the actual incorporation of the land into the United States would take another century of treaties, broken treaties, removals, and military campaigns.

Jefferson struggled with the constitutionality of the purchase. The Constitution gave the president no explicit power to acquire foreign territory. Some Federalists argued that Louisiana should be admitted only by constitutional amendment. Jefferson, who had spent his career as a strict constructionist of federal power, swallowed the contradiction and submitted the treaty to the Senate. The Senate ratified twenty-four to seven on October 20, 1803. The formal transfer took place at the Place d’Armes in New Orleans on December 20.

Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory in 1804. The Corps of Discovery traveled with Sacagawea — a Lemhi Shoshone woman who guided and translated — to the Pacific and back over two years. Fifteen states were eventually carved from the Purchase: Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota (in part), the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas (in part), New Mexico (in part), Colorado (in part), Wyoming (in part), and Montana (in part). The Louisiana Territory became the geographic heartland of the country.

Haiti, whose revolution had made the Purchase possible, declared independence on January 1, 1804 — the only successful slave revolt to produce a sovereign state. The United States refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, after the Confederate states seceded and the southern senators who had blocked recognition for nearly six decades were no longer in their seats. The country that doubled in size because of a Black republic’s revolution waited fifty-eight years to acknowledge that republic exists.