Purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France under Thomas Jefferson’s administration.
In 1801, newly elected President Thomas Jefferson learned that Spain had surrendered the Louisiana Territory to the French under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. Like many other Americans, Jefferson feared that the French would rescind the right of American farmers to deposit their goods at New Orleans. He also worried that a reborn French empire across the Mississippi River would inspire the many Indian nations in the western country to rise up and attack settlements along the entire frontier. He even thought that Napoleon might send French settlers to the region to set up farms that would feed the slaves on the many plantations of France’s sugar islands such as Haiti.
One year later, Jefferson instructed Robert Livingston, his ambassador to France, to purchase New Orleans and western Florida from the French. If the French would not agree, then Livingston was instructed to purchase from them another tract of land along the Mississippi River, where America could build a new port for the deposit of western goods. Before Livingston could negotiate a purchase (and before Spain had surrendered Louisiana to the French), Spain closed New Orleans to American shipping. In response, Jefferson sent James Monroe to France in 1803 as a special minister with instructions to offer the French up to $10 million for New Orleans and western Florida.
Livingston and Monroe were stunned when French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand offered in 1803 to sell the entire Louisiana Territory including New Orleans to the United States for $15 million. Napoleon, preparing to renew his military campaigns in Europe, needed money quickly. Livingston and Monroe agreed to the sale, and in 1803 Congress approved the Treaty between the United States of America and the French Republic, which made Louisiana, which stretched from the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains, a territory of the United States.
