At 4 cents an acre, the Louisiana Purchase was perhaps the best deal in real estate history.
The deal not only doubled the territory of the new United States, it was also a drastic change from French policy merely three years prior.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of fortune. He saw an opportunity in the French Revolution and the incompetencies of the French government after the execution of Robespierre.
In 1799, Bonaparte was behind a coup d’etat that overthrew the government of the French Revolution. But that didn’t mean Bonaparte rejected the Revolution - he wanted to export it.
In 1800 he began laying plans for an empire, not just in Europe, but in America.
The French had long had a tenuous claim to the Louisiana Territory, land west of the Mississippi extending to the Rocky Mountains. It included modern-day Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Bonaparte solidified those claims by signing a secret treaty in 1800 with the Spanish, which gave the French full control over the territory. Then he began growing his army.
The plan seems to have been to bolster the French colony of New Orleans and to turn it into a center of French military action on the North American continent.
When Thomas Jefferson, then the president of the United States, heard of Bonaparte’s plans in 1802, he was alarmed and began sending diplomatic missions to France to try and negotiate to buy New Orleans. The early diplomatic missions were unsuccessful, and by early 1803, Jefferson had sent both James Monroe and Robert Livingston to France to try and negotiate again.
The problem with Bonaparte’s plans to build an empire was that he wanted to build an empire everywhere and all at once - by 1803, Bonaparte was attempting to control Italy while expanding into the rest of Europe. England, understandably, was concerned, and war with the British Empire looked imminent.
On April 11, 1803, the French Foreign Minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, scheduled a meeting with the American diplomat Robert Livingston. Talleyrand walked into the room and asked, “What will you give for the whole?”
He didn’t mean the whole of New Orleans; he meant all 828,000 square miles of the Louisiana Territory.
In late April, Monroe and Livingston signed a treaty to buy the Louisiana Territory for $11,250,000. Two weeks later, Great Britain and France were at war.
Bonaparte didn’t choose to see the sale of the Louisiana Territory as some kind of failure of the British Empire - rather, it was a play against the British for the future.
Napoleon believed the United States could become an empire, and he believed he had given the fledgling country the territory it needed to begin its path toward imperial success.
“I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride,” Napoleon later wrote.