The LA Buy out
Napoleonic France Acquires Louisiana
Happening October 1, 1800, within 24 hours of signing a peace settlement with the United States, First Consul of the Republic of France Bonaparte, nonheritable LA from Spain by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. To the distress of the United States, Napoleon held style to the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans.
With the signing of the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon sought to reestablish an extended French maritime and complex empire in the West Indies and the Mississippi Valley. He aforethought to develop a commercial bloc in the Caribbean Basin that consisted of the strategically important West Indian islands of Guadalupe, Martinique, and Saint Domingue, which successively would be linked with Louisiana. France would exportation factory-made goods to the islands, whose plantations would produce sugar, molasses, peculiar, coffee, and cotton for France. Flour, forest, and salt-cured kernel from Louisiana would sustain French troops stationed in the West Indies. What is more, French goods were due to find a ready market at New Orleans, a stepping-stone for settlers into the Mississippi River Valley.
To round out his sovereign presence in the region Napoleon intended to pressure Spain into ceding the Floridas to Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault. On the face of it anticipating the success of his plan, he ordered struck 200 copies of a medallionbearing his visibility for distribution to Autochthonal American chiefs in a gesture of grassroots diplomacy. Napoleon's plan did non succeed.
The head impediment to Napoleon's designs for a North American Empire lay aside in Saint Domingue, France's virtually valued trading resource in the Caribbean and the gateway to the Gulf approaches to LA. In 1791 the island's slaves, inspired away the French Revolution, revolted under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture. After various age of fierce conflict, L'Ouverture and his army of former slaves had driven complex forces from the island.
Because Napoleon did not hold enough troops to reconquer Saint Domingue and occupy Louisiana simultaneously, atomic number 2 decided first to subdue the rebel slaves and reestablish French authority happening Saint Domingue. In the fall and winter of 1801 he despatched to Saint Domingue an army of 20,000 workforce low his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Toussaint surrendered to Leclerc in ternary months. Napoleon also assembled an expedition at a Dutch larboard in the winter of 1802-03 for reinforcing Leclerc's army and, with Saint Domingue as it base of trading operations, took possession of Louisiana.
"Thither is on the globe one solitary spot"
Rumors of the mystical retrocession of Louisiana from Espana to France prompted anxiety in President Washington city. By May 1801 the Ground minister to Great Britain, Rufus Martin Luther King Jr., had apprised President Thomas Jefferson with some certainty of the transaction, an event that Jefferson said was an inauspicious circumstance to us. 10 Sorely aware of the potential difficulties in having Napoleonic France A a neighbor, Thomas Jefferson informed William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the Magnolia State Territory, that he regarded European nation "possession of the adjacent country as almost favorable to our interests, &adenosine monophosphate; should see, with extreme pain any past nation substituted for them. Should France get possession of that country, it leave comprise more to live lamented than remedied by USA ¦" 11 In November 1801 Secretary of State Epistle of James Madison received a written matter of the Treaty of San Ildefonso from Ambassador King, confirming the diplomatic transaction previously denied by France.
Concluded the run of several years President Dylan Thomas Jeffersonprepared to handle an impending French presence in the Mississippi Valley and his presidential term's first great diplomatic crisis. Jefferson was in all probability America's fore geographical thinker and a student of the Solid ground West. The affiance of the western farmers induced his empathy and his living. He was also a sesquipedalian-time friend of France; his stint as ambassador to City of Light (1784-89) had familiarized him with European country diplomacy and politics. A political old hand of the American Revolution, President Jefferson was also an Anglophobe.
By early 1802 events in Europe LED Jefferson to reappraise and reformulate American relations with France, especially in light of her intended occupation of the MS River and the port of New Orleans. War between France and Heavy Britain was expected. Jefferson realized that if French Republic claimed LA, Great Britain would stress to capture and occupy the region. In a April 18, 1802, letter to Minister of religion Robert R. Livingston, Jefferson revealed that the prospect of likely war with France and the unpleasant consequence of an alinement with Great Britain totally reverses all the political relations of the U.S.
President Jefferson and Foreign minister James Madison had hoped to fashion a foreign policy congenial to French interests. They rejected of the slave uprising in Saint Domingue, intimating through with politic channels that the United States might assist France in subduing L'Ouverture. They appointed the pro-French Robert R. Livingstonas Land minister to Paris. In May 1802 Madison instructed Livingston to negotiate for the buy in of New Orleans. Livingston was too directed to ascertain whether the cession enclosed East Florida and West Florida, and, if so, to negotiate a price for getting them, or at any rate the right of navigation and deposition on unmatchable of the rivers feeding into the Gulf.
10. Saint Thomas Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jn., Washington City, May 14, 1801, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress. (Return to text)
11. Saint Thomas Jefferson to William C. C. Claiborne, George Washington City, July 13, 1801, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress. (Return to text)
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why was thomas jefferson concerned about the louisiana purchase
Source: https://www.loc.gov/collections/louisiana-european-explorations-and-the-louisiana-purchase/articles-and-essays/the-louisiana-purchase/
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