Robert Livingston and James Monroe, sent to buy only New Orleans, instead struck a deal for the entire Louisiana Territory after Napoleon abandoned his dream of a New World empire following a disastrous campaign in Haiti. The purchase, roughly four cents an acre, opened land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and set the stage for westward expansion, though it displaced countless Native American nations already living there.
Napoleon's decision came suddenly. He had planned to use Louisiana as a granary for French sugar colonies in the Caribbean, but a slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint Louverture, devastated French forces and the colonial project. Facing renewed war with Britain and needing cash, Napoleon abruptly told his ministers to sell the entire territory rather than just New Orleans.
Livingston and Monroe, working without authorization for such a massive purchase, gambled that President Jefferson would approve. Jefferson, despite constitutional qualms about whether he had the power to acquire territory at all, embraced the deal, calling it an 'empire for liberty.' The Senate ratified it that October.
The purchase encompassed all or part of fifteen future U.S. states. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark would soon be dispatched to map the new territory, encountering it as inhabited land, not empty wilderness—home to the Osage, Sioux, Mandan, and dozens of other nations whose sovereignty the treaty simply ignored.
Key people: Robert Livingston, James Monroe, Napoleon Bonaparte