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The Louisiana Purchase
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US History – America on the World Stage, 1800-48
In this course, Professor Brian Rouleau (Texas A&M University) explains how and why American foreign policy developed and expanded over the period 1800-48. We start by looking at the Louisiana Purchase and how the US was able to purchase this vast area for itself. We will then turn to look at the War of 1812 in which America fought Britain with disastrous consequences. After this, we'll turn to examine the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and its consequences for US foreign policy. In the penultimate module, we will explore US expansion into the West and Indian Removal. And finally, we will explore the further expansion of 1830s and the Texas Revolution.
The Louisiana Purchase
In this module, we examine the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. We will explore a number of aspects of this including: (i) how the US was able to purchase this vast territory; (ii) why the US wanted to purchase this territory; and (iii) the consequences for the US of the purchase.
Hello. My name is Brian.
00:00:05Hello, and I'm a professor in the Department of History at Texas A and M University.
00:00:07Today I'll be talking to you about America's early entry upon the world stage,
00:00:11which is to say, the role of diplomacy, international relations
00:00:15in shaping the history of the United States during
00:00:18its first few decades as an independent nation.
00:00:20More specifically will be discussing the
00:00:23territorial expansion of the United States,
00:00:24the spread of slavery,
00:00:27persistent conflicts with Native Americans,
00:00:28the rocky relationship between the young republic and
00:00:31the imperial powers of the Old World,
00:00:33particularly Great Britain,
00:00:34and the ways that American navigated the
00:00:36various Latin American wars for independence.
00:00:37Through clever diplomacy, warfare,
00:00:40ruthless exploitation of North America's abundant natural resources
00:00:42and a good deal of luck,
00:00:46the United States soon became one of the world's great powers.
00:00:47It's a remarkable story that I look forward to sharing with you over the next few
00:00:50many lectures.
00:00:53Our story begins in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson
00:00:55was elected president of the United States.
00:00:58Now he came to power in a world ravaged by the wars and the Napoleonic age,
00:01:00navigating that complex situation of constant conflict
00:01:05was one of America's great challenges.
00:01:08Jefferson and his political allies, known as the Democratic Republicans,
00:01:10sought to avoid direct entanglements with the European states,
00:01:14which might draw them into an expensive and destructive war.
00:01:17One of Jefferson's first acts as president, therefore,
00:01:20was to shrink the size of the federal military establishment.
00:01:23This would save the government money and reduce
00:01:27the tax burden on ordinary American citizens,
00:01:29but also reflected his suspicion of standing armies and navies.
00:01:32Jefferson thought large militaries were an invitation
00:01:36to dictatorship.
00:01:39But even while seeking to avoid war,
00:01:41Jefferson still hoped to take advantage of
00:01:43any opportunities the Napoleonic conflicts might present.
00:01:44And most famously,
00:01:48one of these opportunities came knocking in the Louisiana territory.
00:01:50Louisiana was a broad swath of land west of the Mississippi River
00:01:53that had originally been claimed by France,
00:01:57but by the end of the 18th century had fallen into the hands of the Spanish.
00:01:59But by the year 1800
00:02:04by the terms of a secret pact between Napoleon and the king of Spain,
00:02:06France resumed control,
00:02:10and this set off alarm bells in Washington, D. C.
00:02:12When details of the land transfer leaked,
00:02:15American diplomats began to hit the panic button.
00:02:18Louisiana, in the hands of a weak power like Spain, had never presented a problem.
00:02:21Now Napoleon and his seemingly invincible army had
00:02:26a foothold on the North American continent,
00:02:29where they might block the territorial growth of the United States and potentially
00:02:32threaten to drag the country into expensive wars to dislodge French forces.
00:02:36Napoleon, Americans also feared,
00:02:43might begin to incite Indian or slave
00:02:45insurrections from their new base in Louisiana.
00:02:47Particularly vexing to Americans was the prospect of losing
00:02:51access to the vital port of New Orleans.
00:02:54Situated at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
00:02:57It was in an era before reliable overland or road transport,
00:02:59the primary means by which American farmers west of the Appalachian Mountains
00:03:04shipped their produce into the international market.
00:03:09Americans feared that without access to New Orleans,
00:03:12Western states full of desperate farmers
00:03:15might secede from the United States and seek a more economically
00:03:18favourable arrangement with the new power in control of New Orleans,
00:03:21France.
00:03:26For all these reasons,
00:03:27Jefferson's priority was to secure American control of New Orleans,
00:03:28at least and as much of Louisiana as possible.
00:03:32So he sent a negotiating team
00:03:36to purchase New Orleans, $46 million.
00:03:38Now expecting to buy New Orleans and little else,
00:03:43the Americans were shocked when the French
00:03:45foreign minister instead offered to sell the
00:03:48entirety of the Louisiana territory roughly 827,000
00:03:50square miles to the United States.
00:03:554 $15 million. Why had France offered this real estate bargain of a lifetime
00:03:57while America became the beneficiary of
00:04:04French military catastrophe in the Caribbean,
00:04:06where a massive slave rebellion in Haiti
00:04:09led by Toussaint Louverture sure
00:04:12successfully defeated the French army,
00:04:14sent to conquer and restore slavery on its lucrative sugar and coffee plantations?
00:04:17Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies! And enraged Napoleon was heard to scream.
00:04:23With Haiti now a lost cause militarily,
00:04:28Louisiana appeared a pointless possession,
00:04:31and hence France's eagerness to sell the territory.
00:04:34Now French strategy became to raise money with a real estate deal
00:04:37and in the process earned some good wheel
00:04:41from the United States, and Napoleon hoped,
00:04:44enriching and enlarging America to the point where it might become a power
00:04:47capable of defeating his hated British adversaries.
00:04:52By April of 18, oh three, a treaty had been signed,
00:04:56transferring Francis claims over the Louisiana territory
00:04:59to the United States for $15 million.
00:05:03That was a significant amount of money at the time for the United States.
00:05:06Indeed, it was more than the entire total federal budget for the year,
00:05:09but in exchange it would double the size of the country.
00:05:13Jefferson himself was a little nervous.
00:05:16He was unsure that the sale was constitutional.
00:05:18There was nothing in the Constitution which explicitly authorised
00:05:22the president to arrange transactions of this nature.
00:05:25But
00:05:27America's interest, Jefferson felt, had to trump principle.
00:05:28And so the Senate ratified
00:05:31the deal.
00:05:33In doing so, America secured title to the immensely valuable Port of New Orleans,
00:05:34which opened the entire Mississippi River Valley,
00:05:39one of the most fruitful and productive
00:05:41stretches of agricultural land on the planet,
00:05:43to eventual American domination.
00:05:45In addition,
00:05:49it removed a powerful European empire from the North American continent,
00:05:50an empire that might otherwise have
00:05:54blocked potential American westward expansion.
00:05:55Jefferson expected this newly acquired land to become
00:05:58what he called America's empire of liberty.
00:06:01It would be an act of bloodless conquest whereby small and
00:06:04independent yeoman farmers from the United States might peacefully move west,
00:06:08and in doing so,
00:06:13avoid the drudgery and hardship of industrial wage labour in America's
00:06:14expanding eastern cities.
00:06:18Um, in doing so, as the United States expanded West,
00:06:21it would spread democratic self government across the continent.
00:06:24Now the reality as opposed to Jefferson's imagined empire of liberty.
00:06:28The reality, as we know, was very different.
00:06:32Jefferson's so called empire of Liberty was
00:06:35rapidly dominated by slaveholders who force marched
00:06:37thousands of unfree African Americans into the region
00:06:41to carve the land up into slave plantations,
00:06:44plantations that were busily producing cotton,
00:06:48sugar and other cash crops for the international market.
00:06:51There was a dark irony then to Louisiana's origins as an American province.
00:06:54The heroic struggles of rebellious slaves in Haiti had provided
00:06:59a pretext for Napoleon to sell the Mississippi River region
00:07:03to the United States
00:07:06in winning their own freedom,
00:07:07Haiti slaves had inadvertently consigned millions of black Americans
00:07:09to a lifetime of suffering beneath the overseers Lash.
00:07:13Jefferson, meanwhile, repaid Haiti for their good deed with an embargo,
00:07:17a
00:07:23cessation of trade
00:07:24that attempted to strangle the infant infant nation's growing economy.
00:07:25Jefferson feared the dangerous example that rebellious slaves in
00:07:30Haiti might provide to America's own population of enslaved people
00:07:34now the Louisiana purchase,
00:07:38along with technological advances in the growing and processing of cotton.
00:07:40Therefore deeply entrenched slavery
00:07:44into the economy and politics of the early United States,
00:07:47triggering decades of sectional strife between North and south.
00:07:50Immeasurable, immeasurable human misery and eventual civil war.
00:07:54And, of course, there was one more dark or malevolent dimension
00:07:59to the Louisiana purchase and that dealt with the fate of Native Americans.
00:08:03France merely sold the United States
00:08:07its claim to Louisiana.
00:08:09The land itself was inhabited and controlled overwhelmingly by Indians.
00:08:11They had not participated
00:08:16in the negotiating process.
00:08:18They had not consented to the sale of their ancestral homelands.
00:08:20And many refused to recognise French or American authorities who argued that
00:08:24a piece of paper signed in Paris had power over their lives.
00:08:29To them, Louisiana was not French, Spanish or American.
00:08:34It wasn't even Louisiana. It was Natchez Land. It was Pawnee land.
00:08:38It was manned inland. It was Lakota land,
00:08:43and this was made abundantly clear by the Lewis and Clark
00:08:46exploratory expedition that the United States sent into the region.
00:08:49There they reported upon the dizzying diversity of Native American claimants
00:08:53to the so called Louisiana territory
00:08:58to Americanise. To the eyes of Lewis and Clark, these Indians were little more
00:09:01than savages, with no firm legal title to the land, they occupied
00:09:05two Indians.
00:09:09The Americans were trespassers at best, sources of trade goods and new technology,
00:09:10but with no legitimate claim to ownership over the region.
00:09:15This set the stage, therefore,
00:09:19for relentless conflict between American colonisers and indigenous peoples.
00:09:22We might then suggest that the actual
00:09:27purchase price of Louisiana was far more than $15 million.
00:09:30Decades of war required to dislodge the Indians
00:09:35cost many times more the original purchase price,
00:09:38not to mention the moral and ethical price paid for destroying
00:09:42native cultures and enslaving thousands upon thousands of black families.
00:09:46But those longer term consequences of the Louisiana purchase took time to play out.
00:09:51And Jefferson,
00:09:56though he had solved one problem in the West
00:09:58by purchasing Louisiana, now faced more immediate problems to the east
00:10:00in the Atlantic Ocean,
00:10:06
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Rouleau, B. (2022, January 13). US History – America on the World Stage, 1800-48 - The Louisiana Purchase [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/us-history-america-on-the-world-stage-1800-48/the-war-of-1812
MLA style
Rouleau, B. "US History – America on the World Stage, 1800-48 – The Louisiana Purchase ." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 13 Jan 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/us-history-america-on-the-world-stage-1800-48/the-war-of-1812