In a ceremony at the Cabildo in New Orleans, French colonial prefect Pierre Clément de Laussat handed over control of Louisiana to American commissioners William Claiborne and James Wilkinson. The transfer completed a deal Napoleon Bonaparte had struck to fund his European wars, adding roughly 828,000 square miles to the United States at less than three cents an acre.
The ceremony itself was almost anticlimactic given its consequences: French tricolor came down, American flag went up, and a crowd of Creole residents watched with mixed feelings as their city changed hands for the second time in twenty days—Spain had ceded it back to France only three weeks earlier. Laussat, who had arrived to govern a French colony, instead presided over its liquidation.
Napoleon had never intended to hold onto Louisiana. Facing a slave revolt in Haiti that had devoured a French army and renewed war with Britain, he needed cash more than he needed a foothold in North America. Thomas Jefferson's envoys, sent merely to negotiate access to the port of New Orleans, found themselves offered the entire territory instead. The purchase price, $15 million, worked out to less than three cents per acre for land that would become all or part of fifteen future states.
Few in the crowd that December day grasped the scale of what was changing hands. Jefferson himself worried about the purchase's constitutionality, since the Constitution said nothing about acquiring new territory. He justified it anyway, reasoning that doubling the size of the republic was worth the legal stretch.
Key people: William C. C. Claiborne, James Wilkinson, Pierre Clément de Laussat