The Louisiana Purchase
The country doubled with a signature, without asking who lived there
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The Louisiana Territory was a French holding stretching from New Orleans north to present-day Montana, some 2.1 million square kilometres. What France actually sold was not land but the right under European law to negotiate for land with those who lived there — a distinction American authorities understood well and then set aside in practice. Jefferson believed the purchase exceeded his constitutional authority and made it anyway. The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–06 mapped what had been acquired, and the whole later westward expansion presupposes this transaction.
For children
The United States bought an enormous territory from France for fifteen million dollars — roughly doubling the country's size. France sold because it had just lost Haiti and needed money. Nobody asked the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people who lived there.
Sources
- Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense (2003)
- Library of Congress: Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803)
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