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Chapter VI - The Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase 1803
Rather than listening to the "persistent drumbeats" for war with France, Jefferson wisely decided on a diplomatic approach. In January 1803 he sent James Monroe to Paris with instructions to buy New Orleans. Meanwhile, under pressure from Eastern fawners and Federalists, Congress authorized the call-up of an eighty-thousand-man militia if necessary. Congress also appropriated two million dollars for the purchase of New Orleans and West Florida including the strategic port of Mobile, but Jefferson, as an experienced American diplomat in France, authorized Monroe to go as high as ten million dollars.
When Monroe arrived in Paris in April of 1803, he was astonished to learn that France was eager to sell nearly 830,000 square miles of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. Why did France decide to sell this vast territory? First, slaves in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Ouverture had recently overthrown the French government there, seriously hampering Napoleon's plans to use Haiti as a military base to "mount an effective occupation" of Louisiana. Second, because Napoleon expected a renewed war England, he concentrated French troops in Europe rather than deploying them to protect Louisiana from American settlement. In an effort to cut his losses, Napoleon offered the Louisiana Territory as an "all-or-nothing package."
The newly acquired land doubled the size of the United States and opened the way for westward expansion to the distant Pacific Ocean. The Louisiana Purchase was by far the most popular achievement of Jefferson's two terms as president. Yet for Jefferson himself it created a disturbingly complex problem. The opening of the territory would fulfill his dream of an "agrarian republic" reaching to the Pacific Ocean "with room for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation." It also offered a solution to the ever-present Indian-settler conflict by providing land to which Indian tribes could be safely removed. However, its legality was questionable. The Constitution gave the president no clear authority to acquire new territory. Jefferson viewed himself as a strict constructionist who strongly believed that no powers could be exercised by the federal government that were not specifically stated in the Constitution.
Caught in the middle, Jefferson, who deplored the Federalists' notion of loose construction and implied powers of the Constitution, eventually compromised his beliefs and justified the purchase as an exercise of the president's Constitutional authority to protect the nation. On December 20, 1803, Congress voted with Jefferson's blessings to acquire the immense Louisiana Territory and make it part of the United States.
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