Thomas Jefferson was another of the Founding Fathers who were instrumental in the creation of the Declaration of Independence and who was later elected president. Prior to his own presidency, he had been John Adams’ vice president even though they were from different parties.
Jefferson had always been an advocate of republican ideals, and once in office, he continued to resist British influence in the Americas. This principle was the backbone of his presidency, but he couldn’t entirely escape the politics of the ‘old world’. Napoleon was on the rise, and as France had helped America to independence and was battling their mutual enemy of England, relations between the Republican-leaning president and the Emperor of France were surprisingly beneficial for both.
The relationship culminated in the ‘Louisiana Purchase’, misleadingly named because the area of land bought from the French was substantially larger than what later became the state of Louisiana. Indeed, it was this one real estate deal that primed the colonies of the east coast towards becoming a continental power.
These mid-continental lands stretched from the fringes of Canada, through the Dakotas, the whole of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, down to Louisiana, including New Orleans. This tract of land encompassed the entire flood plain of the Mississippi, more than a million square miles of land, purchased at a price of $15 million, less than two cents per acre. This was a ridiculously cheap price even by early 19th century standards.
Quite why Napoleon sold it at such a knockdown price is still a matter of conjecture, but as he had only gained the area a few years earlier from the Spanish, and as his ongoing wars while successful were expensive, it could well have been a case of selling what he couldn’t control. Better to dispose of land on another continent than to spend money trying to hold onto it, especially while the fighting in Europe continued.
As always in politics, there was some resistance to Jefferson’s acquisition, with a few objectors claiming it to be ‘unconstitutional’, but in the end, he managed to secure Congressional approval. Jefferson understood the need to explore the vast new territory, and he sponsored a number of mapping expeditions to see what they had acquired for their money. The most famous of these was the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
For most of his presidency, Jefferson expressed no public views on the issues of slavery or emancipation, but in 1806, he proposed making the international slave trade illegal. Congress passed the bill a year later.
Over the course of his presidency, by restructuring government financial institutions, Jefferson lowered the national debt from $83 million to $57 million. He is regarded as a practical man of immense political foresight, and his legacy meant that the nation was not only substantially bigger but that its debt obligations were lower as well. All this and not a shot fired in the war.
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