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Louisiana Purchase Research Paper

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Three treaties were signed in the Louisiana Purchase agreement. The first outlined the transfer of the territory from France to the United States. The other two treaties, called conventions, described how the United States would pay France. The two nations agreed that the United States would pay France $11,250,000 in cash over a period of fifteen years. Furthermore, some American citizens claimed that the French government owed them money for goods that the French navy had seized at sea. For the remainder of the payment for the territory, the United States would take on those citizens’ claims to the $3,750,000 owed them by the French government. In total, the Louisiana Territory, when including interest, cost the United States more than $27,267,622. …show more content…

Ultimately, it was determined that the United States had acquired the land from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains, between Canada in the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south. It took until well into the nineteenth century for the northern and southern borders to be established with Great Britain and Spain. The Floridas had not been included in the purchase. The United States acquired West Florida in 1810 and East Florida in 1821.
Word of the treaty reached Thomas Jefferson on the evening of July 3, and the president announced the historic agreement on the Fourth of July. “The future inhabitants of the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons,” he wrote to a friend. The news of the acquisition was met with excitement. One man described the purchase as “the greatest and most beneficial event that has taken place since the Declaration of Independence.”

Constitutional …show more content…

In January 1803, Jefferson wrote a secret message to Congress detailing his plans for scientific exploration of the West. He asked Congress for $2,500 to be used to fund a transcontinental journey of “an intelligent officer, with ten or twelve chosen men, fit for enterprise” to explore “to the Western Ocean.” He wanted the men to locate the Northwest Passage, if it existed, and to develop trade relations with American Indians in the West. This expedition would come to be called the Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery, or the Corps of

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