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comprises about 1,250,000 square miles, nearly half of the continental United States.
    The Mississippi is America’s mightiest river — and its most important, a fact keenly realized by President Thomas Jefferson and his secretary of state, James Madison, who purposed to gain the free navigation of the river and acquire for the United States the city that commanded the river’s outlet to the sea. “There is on the globe,” Jefferson wrote in 1802, “one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half our whole produce and more than half our inhabitants.” 3
    “The navigation of the Mississippi,” President Jefferson declared, “we must have.” 4
Control of the Mississippi and access to the Gulf of Mexico were, together, a highly inflammatory issue in 1802. France had lost much of its valued New World territory as the price of peace in the French and Indian War, which ended in 1763, but it still had aspirations of empire in America. France had undergone a revolution beginning in 1789, which had deposed Louis XVI and swept away most of the old order, and in late 1799 General Napoleon Bonaparte in a fraudulent popular election had been voted first consul of the newborn French republic and had taken over the French government. On March 21, 1801, he had re-acquired from Spain the vast Louisiana territory as a first step in his plan for French expansion. But in the spring of 1803 he changed his mind, his thoughts shifting away from the New World and settling instead on the nearby hated nation that stood as the major obstacle to his achievement of world domination. The conflict he sought and the conquest he desired were not in America, he decided, but rather in England. Louisiana became disposable.
After several tough bargaining sessions, Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, representing the United States, bought Louisiana, including New Orleans, for about twenty million American dollars. They signed the purchase agreement on May 2, 1803, in Paris.
All concerned were delighted. “The negotiations leave me nothing to wish for,” Napoleon remarked. Monroe grandly called the negotiations the “extraordinary movements of the epoch in which we live.” Perhaps seeing much farther than the others, Livingston exultantly declared, “This is the noblest work of our whole lives.”
By a vote of twenty-four to seven, the United States Senate on Monday, October 17, 1803, ratified the treaty of purchase, the final action needed to seal the deal. By its extraordinary purchase the United States acquired an View of New Orleans in 1839. The United States acquired the city in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Its importance was emphasized by President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. Through New Orleans, he wrote, “the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.” New Orleans controlled navigation on the Mississippi, and, “The navigation of the Mississippi,” Jefferson declared, “we must have” (Library of Congress).
    additional 827,987 square miles, or 529,9 11,681 acres, more than 22 percent of the present-day United States, everything from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, including all or parts of the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado as well as the state of Louisiana.
    Not only the Mississippi River but all the land that it drained, from the east and from the west, would now forever belong to the United States and its people. A whole new era of American agriculture, industry, commerce and transportation had dawned, brilliant with opportunity and promise. All that was needed then was a suitable vessel to travel the big river, bearing settlers and developers into the mid-continent’s rugged vastness and