Louisiana Purchase

Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase is remembered as one of the great acts of Jefferson as president as it expanded the nation and boosted the economy.

How the

Louisiana

Purchase

Worked...

• April 1803
• Jefferson sends representatives to France
• Goal- purchase New Orleans, and/or some extra land if France refused to sell the city alone

Ceremonial Transfer of the Louisiana Purchase

in New Orleans - 1803

• signed the document transferring the Louisiana Territory
• ceremoniously passed the keys of the city from French hands to American hands
• cost of $15 million (or less than five cents per acre)
• added 828,000 square miles to the United States(DOUBLED IN SIZE)
• 100 years to settle and divide it into 13 states

President Thomas Jefferson

Why did

the French

sell?...

Bonaparte saw selling the land to the U.S. as an opportunity to block the power of England on another front and it was worth it to him. He said that the United States would eventually humble the pride of England.

• 1800- Spanish and French signed a secret pact, the Treaty of Ildefonso, under which the spanish returned Louisiana to France.
• Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte has a vision of a renewed western empire for France.
• Wanted Louisiana for its strategic importance in his plan to make Saint Domingue in Haiti a profitable colony.
• In the early years of his rule, Napoleon sent a large army to quell a slave revolt in the French Caribbean sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, which he hoped to rebuild into the centerpiece of a North American French empire.
• When the slaves defeated the French army, Napoleon abandoned his plans for American empire and sold his mainland territory to the U.S.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led a small expeditionary group called the Corps of Discovery into the territory.

Thomas Jefferson was the current U.S. President in charge of purchasing Louisiana.

Napoleon sold his mainland territory - Louisiana- to the U.S.

• contained portions of 15 states in the US and 2 Canadian provinces
• Arkansas
• Missouri
• Iowa
• Oklahoma
• Kansas
• Nebraska
• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• New Mexico
• Texas
• Montana
• Wyoming
• Colorado
• AND...........
• The land purchased also included parts of what is now Alberta and Saskachewan in Canada.
• The land that was purchased in the Louisiana Purchase now makes up about 23% of the territory of the United States.

James Monroe and Robert Livingston went to negotiate the purchase in Paris in 1803.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed by Robert Livingston, James Monroe in Paris on April 30, 1803

Who claimed

the Louisisana

Territory?

• What he recieved was the Louisiana Purchase, a patch of land that nearly doubled the size of the young nation.

• He faced problems from 11,000 slaves & Native American population to an estimated 50,000 - 100,000 people

• Issues that Jefferson and the rest of the country had to deal with and who paid 15 million for the land.

Why the

United States

wanted

Louisiana...

The money crops, tobacco and corn, stripped the land of its minerals.

New Orleans is a gateway to the Mississippi river=

Americans were hungry for more land, and Jefferson knew they would continue pushing farther west as long as the land was there.