Jefferson Doubled America With a Purchase the Constitution Never Mentions
The 1803 deal added more than 800,000 square miles and helped turn the United States from a coastal country into a continental one.
The Rest Is History · The Man Who Really Founded America: Thomas Jefferson | Founding Fathers EP 4In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon, though the Constitution says nothing about the federal government buying foreign territory.
One historian argues there is a case for calling it the most consequential act by any American president. In that view, when self-interest clashed with ideals, Jefferson was good enough a politician to set his principles aside for the result he wanted.
The attraction was scale. The block was about 16 times larger than the present state of Louisiana, adding more than 800,000 square miles and making the country twice as large as it had been.
It helped turn America from a country clustered along the Atlantic coast into one that stretched across the continent. The land would become Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and much of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, essentially the middle third of the country.
Questions people ask
How much did the United States pay for Louisiana?
The United States agreed to pay $15 million, roughly $340 million in today's money. That worked out to about three cents an acre for 828,000 square miles, often called the best real estate bargain in American history.
Why was Napoleon willing to sell so much land?
Napoleon needed money for his wars in Europe and had just effectively lost his colony in Haiti to a slave revolt. Without Haiti as a base for a New World empire, Louisiana was far less useful to France, and cash was more useful than distant land he could not easily defend.
If it was unconstitutional, did the purchase still stick?
Yes. Jefferson himself worried about the constitutional problem, but he sent the treaty to the Senate, which ratified it by 24 to 7. The purchase was then carried out under the president's treaty-making power, and Congress funded it, creating the precedent for later acquisitions.