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The Louisiana Purchase
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.
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