It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream.”Thierry Lentz, a Napoléon historian and director of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, contends that, for Napoléon, “It was basically just a big real estate deal. by force of arms.” As Secretary of State James Madison explained, “The Mississippi is to them everything. “Let the Land rejoice,” Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of the deal reached Washington, D.C. “For you have bought Louisiana for a song.”The crunch came for Jefferson in October 1802. Spain’s King Charles IV finally got around to signing the royal decree officially transferring the territory to France, and on October 16, the Spanish administrator in New Orleans, Juan Ventura Morales, who had agreed to administer the colony until his French replacement, Laussat, could arrive, arbitrarily ended the American right to deposit cargo in the city duty-free.
(There is also a portrait of the marquis himself and a 1784 painting by French artist Jean Suau, Allegory of France Liberating America.) “The difficulties and risks . Although Louisiana became a state in 1812, that hardly settled the questions unleashed by the Louisiana Purchase.
Barbé-Marbois received his orders on April 11, 1803, when Napoléon summoned him. In financial straits at the time, Monroe sold his china and furniture to raise travel funds, asked a neighbor to manage his properties, and sailed for France on March 8, 1803, with Jefferson’s parting admonition ringing in his ears: “The future destinies of this republic” depended on his success.The favorable majority, however, easily prevailed and New England remained in the Union. Despite a clubfoot and what contemporaries called his “dead eyes,” he could be charming and witty when he wanted—which helped camouflage his basic negotiating tactic of delay. Start studying chapter 10 history. The French were fascinated by America—which they often symbolized in paintings and drawings as a befeathered Noble Savage standing beside an alligator—but they could not decide whether it was a new Eden or, as the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon declared, a primitive place fit only for degenerate life-forms. The Louisiana Purchase was a land purchase made by United States president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1803.He bought the Louisiana territory from France, which was being led by Napoleon Bonaparte at the time, for 15,000,000 USD.First, the men sent to France were allowed to spend up to 10 million USD in order to buy New Orleans and, if possible, the west bank of the Mississippi River.
The prospect had been all the more pleasing because the territory’s capital, New Orleans, he had noted with approval, was a city with “a great deal of social life, elegance and goodbreeding.” He also had liked the fact that the city had “all sorts of masters—dancing, music, art, and fencing,” and that even though there were “no book shops or libraries,” books could be ordered from France.On April 15, Monroe and Livingston proposed $8 million. There was an error. One man is everything.”But Livingston, although an inexperienced diplomat, tried to keep himself informed about the country to which he was ambassador.