How the Louisiana Purchase Worked

When Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory for 15 million dollars, the US nearly doubled in size. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the effects of the Louisiana Purchase.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
editor Candis Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane Hey. Jane
and I are huge friends buffs. We can stand around

(00:22):
the break room over coffee and quote lines along the
best of them. And this morning I went over to
Jane's test and was like, Jane, I have this great
friends line and I cannot remember the episode that it
came from. And it's when um Phoebe is trying to
help Ross get over his ex wife remarrying so soon,
and she says, you can't be mad about the past,

(00:42):
because you know you and Emily were in the past,
and you're not still mad about the Louisiana purchase, are you?
And Rachel says, well, I don't think anyone's mad about that,
and I don't think that's true. Actually, yeah. And you
know it's funny because after you pointed out which episode
this came from and I had a context for everything,
I was like, who would be mad about the Louisiana purchase?

(01:03):
And Phoebe is so quirky that I typically don't put
a lot of stock and the things that she said
that people were mad about it. Yeah at the time.
I mean now we look back on and we're like, wow,
they doubled the country in this in this great deal,
and we were able to expand the country and grow
in power. But at the time, if you think about it,
um take a walk in their shoes. I guess of
someone living in New York or something. At that time,

(01:24):
they had a lot of worries about this new land
and what they were going to do with it and
the people there, and how are they were going to
handle the people, and whether they were not going to
become citizens. There are so many parts to this equation,
and I guess it's almost comparable to when the US
acquired Alaska, and we know that people were kind of
mad about that. It was called Stewart's Folly because everyone
thought it was a bad decision, or are they going

(01:45):
to use this huge chunk of land for But aside
from caribou, perhaps there weren't a lot of living things
that came with Alaska. And I'm sorry the native population,
of course I shouldn't fail to mention that. But when
we're talking about Louis Sienna, this was a territory that
was highly prized because I had a great port and
it was perfect for trade. So everyone wanted it, and

(02:07):
it had changed hands from France to Spain, and then
Thomas Jefferson wanted it for the US. And there were
lots and lots of people there, about a hundred thousand,
not to mention the Native Americans too. The port was
so important. Jefferson actually wasn't that interested in the rest
of the land. He sent his um, his people over
two guys. One was a representative to France named Robert Livingston,

(02:33):
and the other was James Monroe, who technically had presidential
power UM when he went over to make the deal,
and Jefferson was like, you know, make sure you get
New Orleans, like the poor is what's important. And if
if you have to, if they make you buy other
land too, it's sort of like a gift with purchase.
And he wanted to spend only I think ten million dollars.

(02:56):
But again, because Monroe was as Minister of Plantentiary, he
was vested for the power to act in Jefferson's stead.
So when Napoleon said here's the deal, it's New Orleans,
Louisiana and then this whole other parcel of land for
fifteen million, take it or leave at Monroe said, I
take it. That's right, and it Actually he had a

(03:17):
few reasons for doing this, um that it would help
out America desplite the problems that might come. One was
that farmers in the South, especially UH, they hadn't perfected
by this time this uh, this idea of crop rotation
and so um the land was being used for, particularly
tobacco and corn, and these after a few harvests, it
would um basically deplete the land of the nutrients that

(03:40):
it needed. And so the pet the farmers would have
to uproot everything and go and move westward, basically where
more land was, and so they could start again with
new fresh land. And then I think about the Louisiana
purchasing all the land that it gazed to the United States.
Is that at the time the borders still weren't clearly defined.
So in the minds of the armors at least, this

(04:01):
was a great opportunity because they could just keep pushing
west as long as they needed to, you know, for
the sake of their farms and their crops. And this
was maybe a foreshadowing of the later idea of manifest
destiny that would come around eighteen forty five, the idea
that civilization, you know, could take over the entire North
American continent and American ideals could be pushed to you know,

(04:22):
every single corner of North America, and you know that
power would radiate, and the Americans felt really entitled to
do that. Yeah, it seemed rather natural for them to
push westward, westward. And now we look back and we
were completely comfortable with the idea that you at ninety
states looks now, and back then they even had that
idea that it was natural for them to move that
way and to take more land. I think that was

(04:43):
part of the young American spirit too. You know, they
had won the Revolution not too terribly long ago, and
people were still excited about being part of a fledgling nation.
Even though the constitution was in place, powers were still
certain shifting and contracting, and people were getting you to
all the new freedoms that they had. You know, it
was a separation from a monarchy, and people were still

(05:04):
testing the limits of the United States. But back to
the parcel of Lane in question, So fifteen million dollars today,
it would have cost around two hundred eighty four million
to make that purchase, and it actually didn't technically cost
the US fifteen million, ended up costing them twenty three million,
five hundred twenty seven thousand, eight hundred seventy two dollars

(05:26):
and fifty seven cents. That's right. And that actually even
with that added song with they got, with the interest
and the loans that they had to take out, it
still ended up being a really good deal for them,
only about four cents an acre I think it was.
Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's a great deal. So they
went over to France around April of eighteen o three,

(05:47):
and they got Napoleon to make this deal with them
around April, I guess thirty toward the end of the month.
But then time was not on living Stoneham in the
row side because the Polly and saw maybe I haven't
made the best deal, and he was about to take
back his offer because I think he realized what he
was giving away. That's a ton of land. And so

(06:09):
Congress reserved to hurry up and ratify this treaty, and
then it was official. I was, gosh, I'm gonna throw
in another number at you guys, five hundred twenty nine million,
four hundred two thousand, eight hundred eighty acres, which today
is divvied up into about thirteen different states. It's crazy. Well,
we could look back on why is it that Napoleon,
if this was such a bad deal, why did he
sell in the first place? And it turned out that

(06:30):
he was kind of strapped for cash, and also the
plan that he had, the reason why he got his
land back from Spain in the first place, was because
he had this plan for a colony in the America's
uh sunt dominique I guess um, but actually um it
fell through. He wanted to make money from this colony,
but the indigenous people they revolted and threw off the French,

(06:52):
the French rule there. And so when that happened, Napoleon
was basically, well, why do I have this land at all?
And that's when he was willing to sell it off
at such a cheap price. And even though he kind
of learned to regret that decision a little bit, maybe
he did. And part of the price included for giving
a debt that France has the US of I think
about three point seven five million, and it took twenty

(07:13):
years for the US to finally pay it off, and
and people were not happy about it, and not necessarily
because it was such a huge expense. So that was
certainly part of the equation. Something that we were talking
a little bit about in the beginning, the idea that
this was gift with purchase. You know, you you've got
a whole lot of land, but you also got around

(07:34):
a hundred thousand people. And to put that in perspective,
you know, by today's standards, that would be like acquiring
another state full of people. You know, the United States
wasn't too densely populated back then, and all of a sudden,
these people are like, okay, so all these ideals that
our forefathers who are fighting for, now we're going to
have to share them with people who don't have our

(07:54):
same religion, They don't have our same customs, they don't
even speak the same language as us. How can they
be declared cool? That's true. And you know, they didn't
have the same history or understanding of the government. And
you know, you look at so the cities in the
Northeast especially, and they had they had power back then
because their areas were so densely populated, and so in
the government they had a little bit more sway and

(08:15):
when all these people were suddenly added, they were like,
what was going to happen to our power? It's going
to be sort of diluted a bit. And also like
the land is so cheap out there, Obviously we're gonna
lose some of our own people and they might move out,
you know, in a max exodus exactly. So the harshest criticism,
like Jane was saying, came from places like Boston, Hartford,
New York, and Philadelphia. And something else that was running

(08:39):
pretty rampant at this time was anti Catholic sentiment, and
people weren't comfortable with assimilating these people into the US population.
And that was a question that that the US had.
Should these people be assimilated, Should Louisiana be a colony? Yeah,
there was sort of a sense that they wouldn't listen
to the government, they would only listen to the pope. Yeah,
and that was a big problem, especially again not the

(09:01):
Harp on this point, but it is so important. These
people had just fought for their freedom, and these foreigners,
like Jane said, they weren't schooled in the same history.
And another sort of elite idea that people had was
that as foreigners, they wouldn't understand or grasp the concept
of democracy. You know, this was still a pretty lofty
turn back then, even though it's sort of a common
one to us today. It was pretty novel at the time.

(09:24):
And it's a little ironic too. They were worried about
these things. At the same time, they were worried about
how loosely the people mingled in this new area of
Louisina purchased and blacks and whites and you know, all
different kinds of people, and they sort of were seen
as more equal in a sense, or they at least
treated each other a little more more equal than at
least people in the southern states of the United States

(09:44):
at the time. And this would eventually lead to the
bigger conflicts that escalated into the Civil War. And if
you trace the events back to your history, you really can.
You can see the trouble brewing. Because we know that
the Governance Acts of eighteen and four and eighteen five
outlawed the international slave trade. And while that may have
been bad news for New Orleans, it was good news

(10:05):
for the American South because that meant they could, you know,
they could sell off their own slaves and keep it
an in house sort of business limited the supplies with
their own property um as they saw rosen value precisely, precisely,
and later on, because the US was so big, we
would see the Missouri Compromise come into play, and we
would see that dividing line between north and south, and

(10:26):
which states would be free states and which states would
be slave states. And another group that we shouldn't forget
to mention as the Native Americans, and a lot you know,
wasn't done for this part of the population. I think
Thomas Jefferson's plan was just to you know, keep nudging
them westward and let them deal with the situation themselves.
There was no sympathy shown towards them, and we wouldn't

(10:49):
see the kind of cruelty that came with Andrew Jackson's
administration on the Trail of Tears for some time. But
there was no question of assimilating them, that's right. And
we didn't really know much about all the different tribes
and stuff that we're out there. Actually it took um
an expedition, a special special expedition, right after we purchased, uh,
the huge plot of land. Um. Thomas Jefferson actually commissioned

(11:12):
these two guys merywether Lewis and William Clark to go
out and explore this new area that they had just acquired,
and a little bit more as well. And basically his
plan was to find waterways. Basically they would make it
easy to bring um products and commodities from one side
to the other. And they did find some waterways and
some uh sometimes they didn't. But um, what they are

(11:35):
also commissioned to do is actually explore the land itself
and find the plants and the animals and even the
Indian tribes there. And that's how we know, or at
least the early Americans knew what was out there. Isn't
that crazy to think that if you get that huge
parcel of land, like we've been saying along, your task
with the responsibility of dividing it up, your tasks with
the responsibility of what to deal with the people, but

(11:56):
also what to deal with the natural resource says I mean,
Jefferson knew he was going to get a happy bustling
poured out of New Orleans, but little detain no probably
you know all the other vast resources that would come
with it too, And so you know, all along, I
think that t. J. Thought he was making a really
really sound decision, but the Federalists, which were still you know,

(12:18):
very politically active at this point in time, felt that
he was not. And you know, they fought tooth and
nail about this, you know, not only about the land out,
only about the citizens, but the fact that it was unconstitutional.
There was nothing in the Constitution that provided for naturalizing
a group like that, like that's a big group of people.
There was a question because there's nothing specifically said in

(12:40):
the Constitution. So there was this debate over or they're
implied powers in the Constitution that would allow this to happen,
and that was ultimately the decision. I mean, what else
were they going to do? Basically, I guess, but um
it was. It was difficult at the time. And one
of the biggest problems with that naturalization debate was that
that had been one of the points outlined in the

(13:00):
Treaty of France. And again we know that Jefferson was
not the acting person when i treaty was created, it
was Monroe, but still, you know, he was he was
held accountable for it. And you know, that's what I
love about history, is that just looking back at some
of these debates about limiting the president's power acting constitutionally,
acting outside the parameters of the constitution. It's so fun

(13:21):
to see people pushing these boundaries at the beginning of
our nation's history and today, you know, looking at what
sort of problems the president has to face today. And um,
a question that's raised in the article that we have
about Louisiana purchase is you know, Jefferson probably would have
laughed at the border disputes of today. You know, it's
nothing compared to Oh, I just thought, you know, millions

(13:42):
of acres of land. I wonder what's out there. And
the same goes for the constitutional questions, and they've sort
of of there. He was sort of left at the
kind of things that we're supposing like or or they
employed powers or not. And another clincher for that is that, um,
you know, we all know Dictaney how an accident, a
hunting accident and accidentally shot one of his friends. But

(14:03):
Jefferson's vice president was Aaron Burr, and he shot Alexander
Hamilton's and killed him. So yeah, I mean again, there
probably wasn't a you know, a lot of videos circulating
on YouTube, you know, making fun of that. And actually
a similar thing happened with Lewis and Clark's expedition. Lewis
I believe was accidentally shot by one of his his
crew um in a hunting accident, So I guess it's

(14:25):
not very new phenomenon. I'm sorry about that pality to
do anyway. If you want to learn more about the
Louisiana purchase, Lewis and Clark, Manifest Destiny, and your best
friend in Mind, Thomas Jefferson, be sure to check out
our site how stuff works dot com for more on
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(14:46):
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