What was paid for the louisiana purchase

Domingue from a slave rebellion, and then use Louisiana as the granary for his empire. France acquired Louisiana from Spain in and took possession in , sending a large French army to St. Domingue and preparing to send another to New Orleans. It is New Orleans. Failing that, they were to attempt to create a military alliance with England. Meanwhile, the French Army in St.

Domingue was being decimated by yellow fever, and war between France and England still threatened. You'll also notice that some areas, including a large patch of the modern-day state of Louisiana, appear not to have been ceded at all. In most of these cases, the U. Neither contemporary nor historical reservations are shown. For the complete interactive, please view this page on a larger screen. The trouble with the textbook version of the Louisiana Purchase lies with its easy reduction to a real estate transaction.

Europeans had only colonized a tiny fraction of the territory by Over those areas where they had established control, France sold the United States the right to tax and govern.

Over the rest, it sold the right to expand political authority into Indian country without the interference of other would-be colonizers overlapping British and Spanish claims were settled in and In these sections of the purchase, the U. But the distinction between real estate and pre-emption is not a minor or academic quibble. Federal authorities preferred acquiring Indian land by treaties because it was a more humane, and cheaper, method than outright war.

But the treaties were backed by the looming threat of violence. The deals the government made specified compensation that came in a variety of forms, from one-time disbursements to annuities, goods, services, and more.

In the allotment era , it became increasingly common to promise indirect compensation in the form of pledges to manage assets in tribal trust funds generated by the sale or lease of reservation land. Most arrangements for direct payments have long since ended. They were either broken, amended, exhausted, or, in the case of permanent annuities, commuted for lump sums.

The breathtakingly stingy offers from the U. The first Indian cession within the Louisiana Territory established the mold. Louis to try to prevent U. There they found themselves pressured by William Henry Harrison, then the governor of the Indiana Territory and the newly formed district of Louisiana, into signing away 3. In , a federal commission found that this arrangement amounted to a valuation of a half a cent an acre for the ceded land.

It also found the part of the Sac and Fox cession west of the Mississippi had a market value of 60 cents an acre in To make the Sac and Fox whole, the commission ordered an additional payment of Reports of the secret treaty worried Thomas Jefferson, who was then the president of the newly independent United States. Louisiana and the Mississippi River had become increasingly important to the United States as it strained against its westernmost borders.

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.

In an attempt to quell those tensions, lawmakers drew an imaginary line across the newly expanded country, separating it into slave and free states. All rights reserved. The Louisiana Purchase was a bargain.