Napoleon had sent 35,000 crack French troops to the island to crush a rebellion led by a brilliant former slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, and it proved to be a very bad idea.For 60 million francs (about $15 million), the Louisiana Purchase gave the United States an area that stretched from New Orleans to Canada and from the Mississippi River to what is now Colorado and Idaho. That’s 828,000 square miles for about three cents an acre, surely one of the best real-estate bargains in history.Instead, he decided to try to buy a way out first. And he knew it, confessing privately that he had “stretched the Constitution till it cracked.” Undaunted, he pushed a treaty ratifying the sale through the Senate, and America doubled in size almost overnight. After some dickering, they struck a deal.Cashing In on Chips: Gordon Moore, U.S. Inventor10 Pre-21st Century U.S. Inventions That Changed Life as We…But by 1803, Napoleon’s plans for an American empire had hit a snag on what is now the island of Haiti. The Louisiana Purchase was the largest and most extraordinary land purchase in the history of the United States.
Settlers had crossed the Appalachian Mountains and headed for parts known and unknown. So when the Americans made their pitch, the French flabbergasted them with a counteroffer: Why not buy all of Louisiana? So he sent his friend James Monroe to France in 1803 and instructed Monroe and Robert Livingston, the U.S. ambassador to France, to offer up to $10 million for New Orleans and Florida, or $7.5 million for New Orleans alone.Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France, scourge of Europe, and namesake of a good dessert pastry, was in kind of a jam.
Napoleon took it with plans to create a vast new French empire on the North American continent.Having Fun, American Style: Baseball and U.S. HistoryMore than 24,000 of the French soldiers were wiped out by the Haitians or yellow fever, and the disaster soured the French dictator on the whole subject.But there was a problem.
In 1791, taking advantage of divisions among colonial rulers created by the roiling French Revolution, slaves on the French Caribbean island colony of Saint-Domingue—a.k.a.
Under the Constitution, Jefferson had no legal power to make such a deal without congressional approval first.
It was also the cheapest (per square mile).
TRANSCRIPTIONS. THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE .
“The day France takes possession of New Orleans,” he wrote, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”Jefferson Makes the Louisiana Purchase Now it was time to go see what the new half looked like.10 Events That Defined American CultureThe following year, Spanish and French officials clamped down on the rights of Americans to use the Mississippi to float their goods and produce to New Orleans for overseas shipment. [Louisiana Purchase Page] Note: The three documents transcribed here are the treaty of cession and two conventions, one for the payment of 60 million francs ($11,250,000), the other for claims American citizens had made against France for 20 million francs ($3,750,000). BACK; NEXT ; A Sweet Deal.
https://www.dummies.com/.../jefferson-makes-the-louisiana-purchase In 1800, Spain had reluctantly transferred its control of the vast territory of Louisiana, including the key city of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, to France. U.S. farmers and traders howled, and Jefferson considered siding with the British against France.
Theirs was no small accomplishment.
The story of the Louisiana Purchase begins, improbably, with burning fields of Haitian sugar cane. Louisiana Purchase and Lewis & Clark Summary & Analysis. At the time, sugar was one of the world's most valuable commodities, and Saint-Domingue was the greatest producer of sugar in the world. TREATY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE FRENCH … At the turn of the 19th Century, Americans were moving further westward.