The United States paid France $15 million for the Louisiana Purchase, remembered in America250 history.
The agreement was signed in Paris on April 30, 1803, by Robert Livingston, James Monroe, and François Barbé-Marbois. President Thomas Jefferson had originally instructed American negotiators to seek New Orleans and nearby land, because control of the port was vital to farmers and merchants west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s government unexpectedly offered the much larger Louisiana territory. The purchase transferred a vast region west of the Mississippi River, although its boundaries were disputed and not precisely defined in the agreement. The deal nearly doubled the size of the United States.
The treaty required borrowing because the young nation did not have the full amount available in its treasury. The Senate approved it on October 20, 1803. The purchase price is often described as a bargain, but the territory’s final extent, Indigenous dispossession, slavery, and constitutional questions made its consequences far more complicated than the headline figure suggests.