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Essay on Louisiana Purchase
Louisiana Purchase, a vast region in North America was purchased by the United States from France in 1803. Some 2,100,000 sq km (more than 800,000 sq mi) in area, the territory comprised present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, nearly all of Kansas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River but including the city of New Orleans.
The Louisiana Purchase was the name assigned to a series of three conventions in which France sold the territory of Louisiana to the US. On the 30th of April 1803, Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, of the US, and the French finance minister, Francois Barbe-Marbois, singed the three conventions of the Treaty (Weber, 1992).Jefferson was greatly puzzled when these three documents reached his hand. He had offered to buy an island for a dock-yard and the place of deposit; he was offered a magnificent domain. He had been authorized to expend two millions of dollars; the sum demanded was fifteen. As a strict constructionist he could not, and for a while he did not, consider the purchase of foreign territory as a constitutional act.
But when he thought of the evils that would follow if Louisiana remained with France and of the blessings that would follow if Louisiana came to the United States, his common sense got the better of his narrow political scruples, and he soon found a way of escape (Weber, 1992). He would accept the treaty, summon Congress, urge the House and Senate to perfect the purchase, and trust to the Constitution being amended so as to make the purchase legal......
