Louisiana Purchase

In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for about $15 million. In current coinage, this would equal about $250 million, or less than 42 cents an acre. This landmark event allowed the United States to double in size and became the catalyst for American expansion into the west and across the continent, creating modern-day America.

The deal included an area covering 828,000 square miles (2.1 million square kilometers) that is now the equivalent of 15 states, or a 23rd of the current United States, including all of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, and parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Louisiana. The deal also included parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, but these were later ceded to Canada. Prior to the purchase, parts of the territory were controlled by Native American nations, the Spanish, and the French. The United States, however, did not intend to gain control over all this land in the original brokering of the Louisiana Purchase. Luck and circumstance precipitated the event.

Although the land purchase would end up being called one of the greatest deals in American history, there were many concerns by politicians and the American public that had to be addressed before the purchase was made. It was also necessary to present a new vision about what the American landscape would entail, one that involved incredible imagination for such a fledgling nation.

Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, American democracy was still an experiment. The U.S. Constitution had been ratified only a decade earlier, and since then, only four new states (Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio) had joined the original 13 states. Thomas Jefferson was only the third president of this “empire of liberty.” The idea that America could double in size with one land deal was unimaginable at that point.