But Jefferson also understood that the Louisiana Purchase raised new problems. On the one hand, he considered the purchase to be unconstitutional. Jefferson and his followers were strict designers with regard to the Constitution of the United States; They considered that it granted limited powers to the federal government and insisted that it be interpreted restrictively. There was no provision in the Constitution that gave the federal government the power to acquire new land and promise that it would be added to the existing union. Jefferson also feared that too rapid settlement of the new territory would disrupt the Union by leading to the creation of new states whose interests were at odds with those of existing states. Madison`s instructions for Monroe and Livingston offered a number of options for resolving the crisis, most of which involved acquiring uncharted territory. However, even the most extensive of these options did not include anything beyond the Mississippi River. Ideally, Monroe and Livingston would buy everything east of the river — the island of New Orleans and the two Floridas — with a border that runs down the river to the Gulf — for up to $6 million. But other acceptable outcomes have been the purchase of west Florida and New Orleans or west Florida alone, or New Orleans alone, or even land along the banks of the Mississippi River, where the United States could build its own port city to replace New Orleans. 1.
The France had just regained control of the Louisiana Territory. French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle first claimed the Louisiana Territory, which he named after King Louis XIV, in 1682 during a canoe expedition on the Mississippi River. The France ceded the country to Spain for 80 years. After the American Revolution (1775-1783), Spanish control of New Orleans and lower Mississippi became an important issue for the first generation of American politicians. Spain had retaken Florida from Britain during the Revolution, giving it control of the entire Gulf Coast. While the boundary between the United States and Spanish Florida remained blurred, there was no doubt that Spain had both banks of the Mississippi River from the thirty-first parallel to the mouth of the river. The seven senators who opposed the deal of the century — all federalists — opposed Jefferson`s exercise of executive power in the absence of specific constitutional authority. Delaware Senator Samuel White further warned that the resettlement of settlers two or three thousand miles from the capital could alienate their affection for the Union. Senator James Jackson, a Jeffersonian from Georgia, had a more positive view of the pioneers. Predicting that within a century, these settlers would turn a „desert“ into a „seat of science and civilization,“ he urged senators to overcome their concerns and immediately approve the Louisiana purchase, reminding them, „We now have a business in our power that, once missed, we will never have again.“ Fortunately, two-thirds of the Senate agreed. On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase Agreement, the first state to be cut off from the territory – Louisiana – became the 18th U.S. state to join the Union.
In fact, Lee said, the U.S. paid well over $15 million for the Louisiana Territory. In his work, he followed the agreements that the United States had made with Native Americans and found that the United States paid them the equivalent of about $8.5 billion (adjusted for inflation). In 1784, Spain closed the river to American trade. The American colonization of appalachia, which had begun after the French and Indian War and had increased during the Revolution, was poised to increase further with the return of peace. But new colonies in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee could only succeed if they could use the region`s rivers to transport bulky agricultural surpluses to foreign markets; All these rivers eventually flowed into the Mississippi River. Spain`s closure of the river seemed certain either to slow down the Western movement of the Americans, which was Spain`s intention, or to cause the Western settlers to separate from the United States, establish their own nation-states, and negotiate separate access to the river. In response to these two concerns, Jefferson drafted a constitutional amendment, declaring Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia: „I had preferred to call for an expansion of the nation`s power where deemed necessary rather than accept it by a construction that would make our powers unlimited. The change would have legalized the purchase, at least retroactively, while the vast majority of Louisiana — all land north of the thirty-first or thirty-second parallel — would have been closed to American colonization.
Jefferson`s idea was to use it instead as a home for the American Indians who lived east of the Mississippi River and whose land would then become available to American farmers and planters. Slowing the pace of expansion in this way, Jefferson said, would give more time to strengthen ties between East and West while preventing the emergence of new U.S. nation-states in the Mississippi Valley. Over the next few months, however, the president failed to gain support for the change in his cabinet or in Congress. On October 20, 1803, the Senate approved the ratification of a treaty with the France by which the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory. As a result of this treaty, the size of the nation doubled, adding territories that would become the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Minnesota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. The vote was taken by 24 votes to 7. The purchase agreement was due to be ratified at the end of October, giving Jefferson and his cabinet time to discuss border and constitutional issues. The exact limits would have to be negotiated with Spain and England and would therefore only be determined in a few years, and members of Jefferson`s cabinet argued that the constitutional amendment he proposed was not necessary. As time ran out for the ratification of the purchase contract, Jefferson accepted the advice of his cabinet and rationalized: „This is the case of a caretaker who invests the money of his community in the purchase of a large adjacent territory; and said to him: when I come of age, I have done this for your good.
6 children in pens. The crushing stench of human waste. Auctions in which human bodies were roasted, compared and bought. It was in one day`s work in the slave market in New Orleans, Louisiana, the largest and most lucrative in the United States before the Civil War. But if it is . Read more 5. Jefferson to Garrard, January 18, 1803, in PTJ, 39:348. Transcript available online in Ford, 8:203. The most persistent and ultimately divisive problem raised by the Louisiana Purchase was slavery. Urban and agricultural slaves constituted a significant part of the population of the territory of Orléans. Jefferson and Congress never thought of ending slavery there, but they forbade the importation of new slaves unless they were brought with owners from other states.
Local opposition even quickly lifted this restriction, with the territory of Orleans quickly becoming a major buyer of slaves from the United States and, before the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, from Africa and the Caribbean. French claims to the Mississippi watershed and the central gulf coast date back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when French explorers descended the Mississippi from the Great Lakes and French officials founded Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702) and New Orleans (1718). These new cities and their surrounding settlements developed slowly, but their place in French aspirations was immense. New Orleans was to be the southern counterpart of Quebec and Montreal, fulfilling the same commercial and state functions for Louisiana – the entire Mississippi watershed – that these cities provided to New France – the entire St. Lawrence watershed. In the 1740s and 1750s, the France began building new forts and trading posts hundreds of miles north of the Gulf of Mexico to strengthen ties between its colonies and secure its claims against the British colonies along the Atlantic coast. In 1803, the United States nearly doubled when it purchased the Louisiana Territory as part of an agreement that shaped history. On the evening of Barbé-Marbois` proposal, Livingston decided that he and Monroe would accept the offer, but try to lower the price. Over the next two weeks, the three men worked on an agreement on prices and conditions, understanding that their task would become much more difficult if it was not completed before the resumption of the war between France and Britain. They agreed on 80 million pounds ($15 million), a quarter of which would be used to settle U.S. merchants` claims against the France.
Thus, all the current states of Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri and Oklahoma, as well as most of Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming became part of the United States. .