Examples Of Louisiana Purchase

When a person is in a position of power, no matter what the circumstances, there is always going to be an extreme amount of pressure on them. This proclamation is especially evident when you are the leader of our country, the president. One of the most relevant examples of this took place on December 20, 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was tasked with undermining the boundaries of the congressional constitution and his own morality to make a major purchase of 827,000 acres of land west of the Mississippi river known as the Louisiana Purchase. Said to be the most essential acquisition America has ever encountered, it undoubtedly doubled the size of the United States as a young republic. This Louisiana territory was owned by France at the time, acquired

He believed that this deal was a necessity due to the fact that Spain and France had recently signed a clandestine treaty relinquishing Louisiana to France. This caused a latent threat to the United States and would indefinitely lead to a war if not handled immediately. One of the biggest ideas that Thomas Jefferson advocated was a diligent coherence with the Constitution itself. By proposing the idea of following through with the purchase, he was blatantly ignoring the fact that nowhere in the constitution did it allow for immediate procurements of any new land. However, the Constitution does specifically mention that Congress is allowed to acknowledge new states, and that the President himself is permitted to negotiate treaties if they are sanctioned by two thirds of the Senate. The legislative branch of government denied Jefferson the aptitude to do this, but the executive office went against them and indefinitely signed the treaty with France on April 30th, 1803. As virtuous of a deal as it was, America could not afford to pay Britain the money outright. The nation borrowed the money from the British banks at six percent interest, and did not completely pay off the loans until 1823. By the time it was fully paid for, the accumulative worth of it had risen to twenty three million dollars. Although what Jefferson did was not entirely moral according to his own elevated

Being an agricultural civilization, Americans- especially southerners- were greedy to get their hands on profitable land for cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, and corn. When rumor of the possible land ordinance began to spread through the nation, people were ecstatic that they could have new, fertile soil to manifest their crops in. One group that was not so happy, however, was the Native American Indians who inhabited the Louisiana territory soon to be acquired by America. Acquiring 15 states meant that each territory had their own set rules, traditions, and lifestyles. Many people began to be concerned that blending all of these cultures would lead to turmoil. Soon to follow the acquisition, Choctaws in the east and Caddo peoples in the west were forcibly removed from their homelands, and instead given unstable reservation land in return. The title given to them would soon be “domestic dependents.” Native American children were taken away from their parents and put into school systems where they were educated on the “white” way of life. The rest of Louisiana’s populace, made up mostly of French speaking people, was far from celebrated. For years they were denied the right to vote, slowly introduced to democracy, and overall shown a lack of respect for the situation they had been dealt unwillingly. A heated controversial debate soon began over whether or not migrating