The Louisiana Purchase

This week in history, I learned about the Louisiana Purchase. I also learned a lot of other things this week, but this essay is going to be about the Louisiana Purchase. I thought learning about it was very interesting this week, so I wanted to share it with you guys in case you didn’t know a whole lot about this event.

The Louisiana purchase starts in France. The king at the time was Napoleon, and he needed money. Napoleon was doing all these cool things in the country, including trying to build a massive French Empire, but those things were also very expensive. He found that he ran out of money very quickly.

The Louisiana Purchase was basically a desperation move made by Napoleon. He needed to find some way to finance his bankrupt government, and this was the way he came up with. 

Napoleon took the Louisiana territory from Spain. His plan was to use the natural resources from the land to support the sugar industry from the island of St. Domingue. Atleast, this was his plan until the slaves rebelled against the French plantation on the island. Because of this event, Napoleon could no longer use this land for the purpose he intended to use it for.

Moving from the French to the US, Thomas Jefferson was looking into buying some land. He started the negotiations of buying New Orleans from France to make shipping easier for the United States. Jefferson sent Robert Livingston and James Monroe in 1803 to see if they could buy the port city.

Napoleon wasn’t only willing to sell New Orleans to them, he also wanted to give them the whole Louisiana territory. Jefferson agreed to buy all of it, so they bought Louisiana for 3 cents an acre. That’s about 15 million dollars all together.

Because Jefferson bought this territory, the United States of America doubled in size. The states we get from this territory include: Nebraska. Missouri, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Louisiana, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansaw, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Texas. Some of this Louisiana territory made up all of a state, and some only made up part of a state.

The purchase of this territory was a very good decision on the U.S.’s side. As I said before, it doubled the size of America’s territory. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this paper. Have a good day!