223 years ago, two American diplomats in Paris signed a treaty that doubled the size of the United States — without authorization, without instructions, and without any idea whether their president would approve. They had been sent to buy a city. They came home with a continent.
The date was April 30, 1803. The two Americans were Robert Livingston and James Monroe. The man who had sent them was Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had sent them to Paris with one mission — buy New Orleans. The city sat at the mouth of the Mississippi River and controlled access to every farm and trading post in the American interior. Whoever owned New Orleans owned the commerce of half a continent. France had just acquired it from Spain and Jefferson was terrified. He wrote: There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.
He authorized them to spend up to ten million dollars for the city alone.
Then Napoleon changed everything.
His army in Haiti had been destroyed by yellow fever and a slave rebellion. A new war with Britain was coming. He needed money. He needed it immediately. On April 11 his treasury minister walked into Livingston's dining room and offered him not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory — eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains — for fifteen million dollars.
Livingston and Monroe looked at each other.
They had no authority to buy the whole territory. Their instructions said New Orleans only. Jefferson was six weeks away by ship — there was no way to ask him. The offer might vanish tomorrow.
For fifteen million dollars — roughly four cents an acre — the United States acquired the land that would become fifteen states. Missouri. Arkansas. Iowa. Kansas. Nebraska. Oklahoma. The Dakotas. Montana. Wyoming. Colorado. Everything between the Mississippi and the Rockies.
When Jefferson heard the news he was simultaneously overjoyed and terrified. The Constitution said nothing about a president's power to purchase territory. He had always been a strict constructionist. He briefly considered a constitutional amendment to legalize the deal.
His cabinet talked him out of it. The Senate ratified it in October by a vote of twenty-four to seven.
Livingston stood in the Paris room after he signed and said: We have lived long — but this is the noblest work of our whole lives.
Four cents an acre. A continent.
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