Louisiana Purchase

In America’s history there have been many events or times that have in a way changed and shaped how we live today. The Louisiana Purchase could be recognized as one of the best and most impressive real estate purchases of Thomas Jefferson’s past. Also, this purchase could be looked at as one of the most important events in America’s past. Many historians would agree on this, but many opinions would be different on the fact if this purchase was actually worth the buy or not. Even Jefferson himself would have some doubts about the purchase.

As Jefferson tried to decide on actually making this purchase happen, many questions came to mind beforehand. Some of these may have consisted as the following: What to do about Native Americans in the new

While this was a plus of the purchase, allowing the country to grow so big would also bring along some cons too. As a country grows to be the size America did, this made governing for all of that land difficult. Also, considering that this took place in the very early 1800’s which means that they didn’t have the same technology, transportation, or transmission that we have today. This means as settlers started to move out west, many would start to not completely follow all the laws because there wasn’t as much government power in the west back then. As stated above, another concept that Jefferson and America had to take into thought was this purchase would put America into a huge amount of debt. Having the land come at about four cents an acre wasn’t too bad, but because the vast size of the land that America was acquiring, it was not the best situation for the debt of America. Just this outcome alone will become one of the few reasons why the Louisiana Purchase could be viewed as one of the poor decisions made back in the

Now on the pro side of this historical event, this would mean we would get full access of the Mississippi River which meant several things during this time period. Before Jefferson made this purchase, the New Orleans port and the southern part of the Mississippi River was owned by the French. The French were never to friendly about these ports and rumors had it that the French were going to heavily tax any goods or shipments that went through their ports, if not completely shut them down. This would make transporting merchandise from merchants on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains very hard to get to Europe. If the ports really would close, the shipping route would have to become over the Appalachians. Which was a very hard and money costing route to take just to ship goods. So, when we bought the Louisiana Purchase, that meant free access to routing western goods down the Mississippi River, through the New Orleans Port and then sailing either too an American east coast port, or going across the Atlantic to Europe