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Louisiana Purchase: United States
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The Louisiana Purchase was a landmark event in American history. One consequence of the purchase was that the United States nearly doubled its land mass and became one of the world's largest countries. Eventually all or parts of 13 states of the United States were formed from the Louisiana Territory: Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Later on, Americans learned that the territory included vast tracts of fertile soil and other natural resources. Louisiana turned out to be a richer prize than anyone had imagined at the time of its purchase.
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The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of 828,000 square miles (2,140,000 km²) of French territory ("Louisiana") in 1803. The cost was 60 million francs ($11,250,000) plus cancellation of debts worth 20 million francs ($3,750,000). Including interest, the U.S. finally paid $23,213,568 for the Louisiana territory.[1]
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In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, and brought with it new cultures, new citizens, and vast natural resources. For many Americans, the lands of the Louisiana Purchase became "the West" of dream and legend, representing personal opportunity and national destiny. For many others, such as the Osage and Fox peoples, as well as the French and Spanish residents, the Purchase brought mixed feelings about how American government and culture might affect their traditions and lands.
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The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States and brought with it new cultures, new citizens, and vast natural resources. The Purchase created the prospect (for better and worse) of a great nation, stretching from sea to sea. As the Purchase literally reshaped America, it would transform the struggle over slavery, the nature of relations between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, the cultures and ethnicity of the American peoples, and the scope and complexity of the economy.
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The American purchase of the Louisiana territory was not accomplished without domestic opposition. The Federalists strongly opposed the purchase, and favored close relations with Britain rather than Napoléon. The Federalists argued that the purchase was unconstitutional, and that the U.S. had paid a large sum of money just to declare war on Spain. It was ... feared that the political power of the Atlantic seaboard states would be threatened by the new citizens of the west, a clash of western farmers versus the merchants and bankers of New England. A group of Federalists led by Massachusetts senator Timothy Pickering went so far as to plan a separate northern confederacy and offered Vice-President Aaron Burr the presidency of the proposed break off if he would persuade New York to join. Alexander Hamilton helped stop the northern secession and showed hostility towards Burr, which grew in the 1801 election and ended with Hamilton's death in a duel with Burr in 1804.
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The first printed map depicting the topography of the Louisiana Purchase was published in 1804 in an atlas by Aaron Arrowsmith. All of the American maps within the atlas, including the one identified simply as Louisiana, were drawn by the American cartographer and draftsman, Samuel Lewis. Arrowsmith and Lewis based their product upon the best information at hand. Their representation of the upper Mississippi and Missouri basins, for example, was borrowed from a groundbreaking map of the American West drawn in St. Louis in 1795 by French engineer Pierre Antoine Soulard. Louisiana... included several readily evident errors and blank spaces, among them being a South Fork of the Platte River which extends far south into present-day New Mexico; the omission of the great Colorado River of the West, still awaiting discovery by the United States; an uncertain source of the Mississippi; the Rocky Mountains portrayed too far to the west and in a single broken chain; and a minimized Columbia River system.
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