In this transaction with France, signed on April 30, 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. For roughly 4 cents an acre, the United States doubled its size, expanding the nation westward.
Robert Livingston and James Monroe closed on the sweetest real estate deal of
the millennium when they signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in Paris on April
30, 1803. They were authorized to pay France up to $10 million for the port of
New Orleans and the Floridas. When offered the entire territory of Louisiana—an
area larger than Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal combined—the American negotiators swiftly agreed to a price of $15 million.
Although President Thomas Jefferson was a strict interpreter of the Constitution
who wondered if the U.S. Government was authorized to acquire new territory,
he was also a visionary who dreamed of an “empire for liberty” that
would stretch across the entire continent. As Napoleon threatened to take back
the offer, Jefferson squelched whatever doubts he had and prepared to occupy
a land of unimaginable riches.
The Louisiana Purchase Agreement is made up of the Treaty of Cession and the
two conventions regarding the financial aspects of the transaction.
For more information, visit the National Archives' American
Originals online exhibition.
(Information excerpted from Stacey Bredhoff, American
Originals [Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2001], p. 26.)
