The Purchase of Louisiana: Jefferson and Missouri

These were, a treaty of cession, an instrument arranging the mode of payment, and one treating of the debts, their character, and the method of their settlement.

Jefferson was greatly puzzled when these three documents reached his hand. He had offered to buy an island for a dock-yard and the place of deposit; he was offered a magnificent domain. He had been authorized to expend two millions of dollars; the sum demanded was fifteen. As a strict constructionist he could not, and for a while he did not, consider the purchase of foreign territory as a constitutional act. But when he thought of the evils that would follow if Louisiana remained with France, and of the blessings that would follow if Louisiana came to the United States, his common sense got the better of his narrow political scruples, and he soon found a way of escape. He would accept the treaty, summon Congress, urge the House and Senate to perfect the purchase, and trust to the Constitution being amended so as to make the purchase legal.

A sharp debate in Congress, ensued, the old Federal party strongly opposing the consummation of the purchase. The enormous increase the purchase would make in the national debt became a favorite theme, and every effort was made by writers and printers to show the people what a stupendous sum fifteen millions of dollars was.

Fifteen millions of dollars! they would exclaim. The sale of a wilderness has not usually commanded a price so high. Ferdinand Gorges received but twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling for the province of Maine. William Penn gave for the wilderness that now bears his name but a trifle over five thousand pounds. Fifteen millions of dollars! A breath will suffice to pronounce the words. A few strokes of the pen will express the sum on paper. But not one man in a thousand has any conception of the magnitude of the amount. Weight it, and there will be four hundred and thirty-three tons of solid silver. Load it into wagons, and there will be eight hundred and sixty-six of them. Place the wagons in a line, giving two rods to each and they will cover a distance of five and one-third miles. Hire a laborer to shovel it into the carts, and, though he load sixteen each day, he will not finish the work in two months. Stack it up dollar on dollar, and, supposing nine to make an inch, the pile will be more than three miles high.. All the gold and all the silver coin in the United States would, if collected, fall vastly short of such a sum. We must, therefore, create a stock, and for fifteen years to come pay two thousand four hundred and sixty-five dollars interest each day. Invest the principal as a school fund, and the interest will support, forever, eighteen hundred free schools, allowing fifty scholars and five hundred dollars to each school. For whose benefit is the purchase made? The South and West. Will they pay a share of the debt? No, for the tax on whiskey has been removed.

Statistics, most happily, were of no avail. The mass of the people pronounced the purchase a bargain. The Senate, on October nineteenth, ratified the and conventions; the ratification of Napoleon was already in the hands of the French charge, and on October twenty-first Jefferson informed Congress that ratifications had that day been exchanged. On November tenth the act creating the eleven millions two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of stock called for by the first convention was passed. On December twentieth, 1803, Louisiana was peaceably taken possession of by the United States.

The Province of Louisiana, as the region came to be called, was to Americans of that day an unknown land. Not a boundary was defined. Not a scrap of trust-worthy information concerning the region was to be obtained. Meagre accounts of what travellers had seen on the Missouri, of what hunters and trappers knew of the upper Mississippi, of what the Indians said were the features of the great plains that stretched away towards the setting sun, had indeed reached the officials, and out of these was constructed the most remarkable document any President has every transmitted to Congress. It told of a tribe of Indians of gigantic stature; of tall bluffs faced with stone and carved by the had of Nature into what seemed a multitude of antique towers; of land so fertile as to yield the necessaries of life almost spontaneously; of an immense prairie covered with buffalo, and producing nothing but grass because the soil was far too rich for the growth of trees; and how, a thousand miles up the Missouri, was a vast mountain of Salt! The length was one hundred and eighty miles; the breadth was forty-five; not a tree, not so much as a shrub, was on it; but, all glittering white, it rose from the earth a solid mountain of rock salt, with streams of saline water flowing from the fissures and cavities at its base! The story, the account admitted, might well seem incredible; but, unhappily for the doubters, bushels of the salt had been shown by traders to the people at St. Louis and Marietta.