Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase ( Louisiana Purchase ; in French vente de la Louisiane , i.e. sale of Louisiana ) was the purchase of 2,144,476 km² of land that the United States acquired from France in 1803 . The purchase price at that time was 15 million US dollars or 80 million French francs (7 US dollars per km²). Measured in terms of purchasing power, this corresponds to a current value of around 251 million US dollars or just under 117 dollars per km² (as of 2018).
The area of the former Louisiana colony west of the Mississippi River was sold. This area is much larger than today's state of Louisiana : In addition to parts of today's Louisiana, it also includes the states of Arkansas , Missouri , Iowa , Oklahoma , Kansas and Nebraska as well as parts of Minnesota , North Dakota , South Dakota , Texas , New Mexico , Colorado , Wyoming , Montana , and the outskirts of the Canadian provinces of Manitoba , Saskatchewan and Alberta .
The Louisiana Purchase was the largest real estate deal in history. The land purchased then doubled the territory of the United States, making up almost a quarter of what is now state territory.
background
Agricultural goods from the areas of the USA west of the Appalachian Mountains were mainly shipped via the Mississippi River towards the end of the 18th century . However, the Mississippi was controlled by the port of the city of New Orleans , which belonged to Spain . American merchants only had the right to use the port of New Orleans because of the Pinckney treaty with Spain. After Napoleon Bonaparte brought Louisiana and with it New Orleans back under French control in 1800, the Americans feared that they might lose the right to use the port. The American President Thomas Jefferson came to the conclusion that it would be best to buy the city of New Orleans and its vicinity in order to secure long-term access to the Mississippi. Jefferson sent James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to Paris in 1801 to negotiate the purchase. Jefferson's request was initially rejected.
The negotiations
In 1802, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was won over to assist in the negotiations. Du Pont was living in the United States at the time and had close ties to both Thomas Jefferson and influential circles in France. During a private stay in France, he contacted Napoleon. He came up with the idea of a much larger purchase than originally planned in order to avoid a possible conflict between Napoleon and the USA.
Jefferson disliked this idea because buying Louisiana from France would mean France would have a right to be in Louisiana. In addition, Jefferson believed, like the opposition at the time, that a president should not make such a deal because nothing was in the constitution about it and the rights of the individual states would be further undermined. The French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was also strictly against such a sale because he saw it as an end to the French secret plans to take over North America.
When negotiations resumed in Paris in 1803, the French offered the whole of Louisiana for sale beyond New Orleans, while West and East Florida were declared by France to remain part of Spain. This contradicted the specifications of Jefferson, who had given the acquisition of the two Floridas and New Orleans as a goal. The American negotiators Monroe and Livingston, who were not authorized to buy all of Louisiana, had previously expected a price of $ 2 million for the city of New Orleans alone and were originally prepared to spend up to $ 10 million for New Orleans and the surrounding area . When they were offered the entire area of Louisiana - from the Gulf of Mexico to the southern border of Rupert's Land and from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains - for only $ 15 million, they recognized Napoleon's offer as a unique historical opportunity under the impression of the asking price and accepted it without prior consultation with Jefferson. The final negotiations were held with Napoleon's Finance Minister François Barbé-Marbois .
There were several reasons why Napoleon, who at that time had the strongest army in Europe, gradually abandoned plans for a consolidated French empire in the New World. Long before the Napoleonic reign, at least since the Peace of Paris on February 10, 1763, with which the eastern territories of Louisiana fell to England, as well as the colonies in Canada and India, America was no longer the focus of French interests. For France this peace treaty was a great colonial defeat and the end of the dream of a French North America . In view of the impending defeat of Napoleonic troops in the most profitable colony for Napoleon, Saint-Domingue (today: Republic of Haiti ), he had sent an expeditionary army under his brother-in-law Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc to try to regain control there. In June 1802, the French had successfully deported the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture to France, but yellow fever raged among the soldiers and in November also killed Leclerc. In addition, the racist policies of the French in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue led to guerrilla warfare and the defection of leading French officers such as the black general Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the officer Alexandre Sabès Pétion in October 1802. In November 1803 The French withdrew, but their defeat was in sight a year earlier.
Napoleon used the sale of Louisiana as a gesture of goodwill towards the US and as a strategic move against the British . A strong America could serve as a buffer against Britain when the inevitable battle came. Perhaps he was also hoping for US support in his naval blockade against England.
As early as the end of 1802, when the financial transaction to process the Louisiana Purchase had begun, Alexander Baring from the Barings Bank in Paris was looking for the chance to participate. In May 1803, the French Treasury reached an agreement with the Houses of Baring and Hope on the manner in which American payment should take place for Louisiana. Another war with England broke out and a sale of all relevant bills of exchange to Barings and Hopes seemed the surest way for the French treasury to keep a happy ending. For the most part, it was Pierre César Labouchère's job to negotiate an additional agreement signed in April 1804.
Napoleon added the sales proceeds to his war chest and was now striving for control over all of Europe. Between 1805 and 1807 he waged war against Austria , Prussia and Russia and made himself ruler over most of the European continent.
Opposition in the US
In the US, the federalists were strictly against buying the territory. They were in favor of close ties with Britain rather than Napoleon. In their opinion, the purchase was not constitutional and the US would have paid a lot of money just to declare war on Spain . There were also fears that the political influence of the states on the east coast might be limited by the new citizens in the west - a conflict between farmers in the west and merchants and bankers in New England . A group of federalists, led by Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering , went so far as to call for a separate Northern Confederation. Vice President Aaron Burr was offered the presidency of Separatist State if he could persuade New York State to participate. Alexander Hamilton turned against Burr. Their hostility grew with the election of 1801 and ended in 1804 with Hamilton's death in a duel with Burr.
Signing and implementation
On April 30, 1803, the contract was signed by Robert R. Livingston , James Monroe and François Barbé-Marbois in Paris. Thomas Jefferson used July 4th to announce the initially controversial treaty to the American people. The Senate ratified it on October 20 and authorized President Jefferson on October 31 to take possession of the territory and establish a provisional military government. Planning has also begun to explore and map the area. This later resulted in the Lewis and Clark Expedition .
On October 31, 1803, the US Congress passed laws that allowed the continuation of the existing civil administration and authorized the president to use the military to maintain public order. On December 20, 1803, France surrendered the city of New Orleans to the United States. On March 10, 1804, an official celebration of the transition of the territory from France to the United States was held in St. Louis .
At the instruction of James Monroe, the new areas began to be surveyed in 1815. For this purpose, a measuring point was specially constructed, in the place of which a memorial stone was placed in 1926 and which was the reason for the creation of the Louisiana Purchase State Park in 1961 .
Conflict with Spain
The Louisiana Purchase sparked a dispute between the US and Spain over the boundaries of the purchased area. According to the Spanish, Louisiana consisted roughly of the western half of the present-day states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri. The United States, on the other hand, claimed it extended to the Rio Grande and the Rocky Mountains . Spain couldn't accept that, because it would have meant all of Texas and half of New Mexico, both Spanish colonies, were part of it. There was also disagreement over the owner of West Florida , a strip of land between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers . The US also claimed that the area was part of the purchase. Spain contradicted this and took the view that east of the Mississippi only New Orleans belonged to the purchase.
Incidentally, the whole sale is illegal for two reasons: The agreement with which Louisiana was handed over from France to Spain after the Seven Years War ( Treaty of Fountainebleau , concluded on November 3, 1762 between the French King Louis XV and the Spanish King Charles III. ), Stated in a secret appendix that France was not allowed to transfer the territory to a third power. With the Treaty of San Ildefonso on October 1, 1800, Spain was forced to return Louisiana to France under Napoleon . Napoleon had not fulfilled part of this contract, namely to hand over a kingdom in Italy to a brother-in-law of the Spanish King Charles IV .
After a revolt in West Florida, the US annexed the area between the Pearl and Red Rivers in 1810 and the Mobile District in 1812 . With the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain finally ceded all of Florida to the United States. The boundary between the Louisiana Territory and the Spanish colonies was drawn along the Sabine River , Red River and Arkansas River and the 42nd parallel .
swell
- ↑ Consumer price index since 1800 in US dollars . The conversion factor between 2018 and 1803 is 752.9 / 45 ≈ 16.731.
- ↑ Marten G. Buist: At Spes non fracta. Hope & Co. 1770-1815. The Hague 1974, p. 403
- ↑ Marten G. Buist 1974: p. 57
Web links
- Text of the Louisiana Purchase Agreement
- Ronald D. Barley : The doubling of the USA . With the purchase of the Spanish-French colony of Louisiana 200 years ago, the rise of the United States to a great power began. In: Die Zeit No. 18/2003 . April 24, 2003.