In , the U. Residents of Ohio and Tennessee and even politicians in Washington threatened bloodshed. Hoping to put a stop to the crisis, Jefferson told diplomats Robert Livingston and James Monroe to negotiate with France. They offered to buy New Orleans from France. To their surprise, France suggested they buy all of Louisiana instead. Here's how Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo crushed his deams of creating a European empire. Though Jefferson himself was unsure if he had Constitutional authority to purchase territory, he gave the deal his blessing.
Read with your kids about the exploration of this new territory. In his paper, he tracked the agreements the U. But it came at a great cost to Native Americans.
By , the U. More than 5, people died along the way. The deal also exacerbated the plight of enslaved people in the United States. After the Louisiana Purchase, both the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans remained hubs of the slave trade. And the treaty stoked long-standing debates about whether the United States should permit slavery. Tanesse; courtesy the Library of Congress. Boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Louisiana Purchase Treaty. February Napoleon decides against sending more troops to Saint Domingue and instead orders forces to sail to New Orleans. March Napoleon cancels military expedition to Louisiana.
May 18 Britain declares war on France. July 4 Purchase is officially announced in United States. October 20 U. Senate ratifies purchase treaty. November 30 Spain formally transfers Louisiana to France. December 20 France formally transfers Louisiana to United States. Further Sources Bond, Bradley G.
French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World. Cunningham, Noble, Jr. Jefferson and Monroe: Constant Friendship and Respect. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, A picturesque assemblage of French and Spanish colonial architecture and Creole cottages, New Orleans boasted a thriving economy based largely on agricultural exports.
For more than a century after La Salle took possession of it, the Louisiana Territory, with its scattered French, Spanish, Acadian and German settlements, along with those of Native Americans and American-born frontiersmen, was traded among European royalty at their whim.
The French were fascinated by America—which they often symbolized in paintings and drawings as a befeathered Noble Savage standing beside an alligator—but they could not decide whether it was a new Eden or, as the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon declared, a primitive place fit only for degenerate life-forms. The treaty called for the return of the vast territory to France in exchange for the small kingdom of Etruria in northern Italy, which Charles wanted for his daughter Louisetta.
This must have been a wrenching moment for Jefferson, who had long been a Francophile. Twelve years before, he had returned from a five-year stint as American minister to Paris, shipping home 86 cases of furnishings and books he had picked up there. The crunch came for Jefferson in October He argued that the three-year term of the treaty that had granted America this right and free passage through Spanish territory on the Mississippi had expired.
Hulings, in a dispatch to Secretary of State James Madison. As Jefferson had written in April to the U. Livingston, it was crucial that the port of New Orleans remain open and free for American commerce, particularly the goods coming down the Mississippi River.
It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market. As it was, frontiersmen, infuriated by the abrogation of the right of deposit of their goods, threatened to seize New Orleans by force.
The idea was taken up by lawmakers such as Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania, who drafted a resolution calling on Jefferson to form a 50,man army to take the city. He also understood the potential military danger France posed if they controlled the Mississippi River. Livingston in an attempt to buy some part of the territory from the Napoleon regime, in order to head off a potential armed conflict. But when Monroe arrived in Europe, Napoleon had already made a decision to sell the territory to the United States, in order to protect other French territories in the Caribbean and to finance his military efforts in Europe.
It took several months for the official news to reach Jefferson in Washington, D. While the deal was instantly popular, there were problems. Negotiations would need to start with Great Britain and Spain about shared boundaries.
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