Name: The Making of a Nation: Louisiana Purchase
Uploaded: 2020-07-03T04:47:50.000Z
Duration: 15 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

we the people way, people, we the people way people way, people.

It is the home of Thomas Jefferson, America's third president.

09 The United States had doubled in size.

This is the story of the Louisiana Purchase.

The Louisiana Purchase was very controversial in its day.

President Jefferson didn't have the formal authority to go ahead with this, but everyone recognized that it was very much in our national interest to proceed.

It makes us the largest Republican world history and the possessor of natural resources.

Greater than any other country in the world.

But they know that they have now stepped across the continent and that they'll never be stopped.

Yeah, Louisiana purchase was basically a real estate deal in 18 03 the US bought about two million square kilometers of land called Louisiana territory from France.

States, not just Louisiana as well as the Mississippi River.

The Louisiana purchase was also an important foreign policy move.

Buying Louisiana territory ended the French presence in North America.

But the Louisiana purchase wasn't a great political maneuver.

And it happened under the most unlikely president.

President Jefferson did not expect to buy so much land for the U.

In fact, he had completely different goals.

As president, he wanted to reduce the debt, and he wanted to reduce the power of the federal government.

The Louisiana purchase did not accomplish either of those goals.

It's a violation of all the political principles.

Um, he not only believes the federal government should be weak, but he believes the executive branch should essentially be invisible.

And he doesn't even want have records in the the executive branch at all.

He doesn't want people to think of the office of President as anything.

So why does a president who doesn't want to be too powerful decide to buy this big piece of land?

In order to understand that we need to look across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe?

The political leader of France at that time was Napoleon Bonaparte.

He was fighting a war with other European powers.

Now, President Jefferson did not really want to get tangled up with Europe's affairs.

But a piece of information made him change his mind.

Jefferson learned that Spain had secretly given Louisiana territory to France.

All of a sudden, Jefferson realized that Napoleon could easily control the area right next to the U.

President Jefferson was most interested in this place New Orleans, he wrote to the American ambassador to France.

There is, on the Globe, one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.

In other words, whoever owned New Orleans was the enemy of the United States.

Let's ask some local experts to find out.

So Jefferson said whoever owned the Port of New Orleans was the sworn enemy of the United States, and I keep wondering, why was it such a big deal?

Well, whoever controlled the Port of New Orleans pretty much controlled the entire trade up and down the Mississippi River valley, and at that point, the United States was growing towards the Mississippi River, and most of the shipping that was done in the country was done up and down.

The thing I remember about the Mississippi River is it drains a huge, a huge, huge basin, a huge swath of the of the American continent all the way from the alligators in western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh over to the Pacific slope in Idaho.

That's a lot of a lot of land, a lot of territory.

Just point all that water into one central conduit.

And, of course, it all flows right past New Orleans.

Jefferson himself noted that over 1/3 of America's goods passed through New Orleans.

He knew that American farmers and trappers needed free and easy access to New Orleans to sell their products.

In other words, that small European city was the key to growing the U.

Back in the days before steam propulsion, they had to load up all of the goods that they could produce, whether they were crops or beaver pelts or lumber.

Whatever they could pull together to sell on, they would load them up on flat boats, all of those Western rivers eventually join up with the Mississippi in the Mississippi comes right by New Orleans.

And that's why the river became so important.

And that's why New Orleans, which had been backwater of empire and began it merely as a listening post onto Spanish America.

Suddenly it's vaulted into this port of major significance.

It became almost overnight, like Cold War Berlin worthies.

Imperial powers were tussling and wrangling over who's going to control it.

So President Jefferson asked an American diplomat to try to buy New Orleans from Napoleon.

Robert Livingston was the American ambassador to France at the time, and later James Monroe, who was the governor of Virginia, then joined him in Paris.

S government could spend $2 million for the city of New Orleans and part of Florida, but Jefferson said the ambassador could offer up to $10 million.

The goal was just to have access to the Mississippi River and a way to get goods to market.

That's all they wanted to buy was New Orleans.

They weren't thinking about this huge territory, just New Orleans.

That's all they wanted this to insure navigation rights and the right of the parts of the right toe warehouse goods temporarily in New Orleans.

But Napoleon Bonaparte had a different idea in mind.

You see, he was having serious problems in a former French colony called San Domingue a a place that today we call Haiti.

Napoleon had wanted to seize control of the island again and used the money to extend the French Empire into North America.

But the people who lived in Sanda, Mingei, refused to return to slavery.

They fought Napoleon's troops and eventually destroyed his arm.

Napoleon had to give up on his dream of a North American empire.

When Monroe and Livingston came calling and say, We want to buy New Orleans, he says.

Well, look, I'll give you all of Louisiana $15 million.

The great African American destroy, its once said, is that Louisiana is Haiti's gift to Thomas Jefferson in the United States, and that's how the Louisiana purchase happened.

Or as they say in France, the sale of Louisiana took place for only a few more $1,000,000 the U.

Got all they were hoping for, and more President Jefferson was shocked but delighted.

He understood the value of Louisiana territory.

The fertile, diverse land was good for farming and trade.

Jefferson believed it was good for America's system of government to, he hoped the U.

S would remain an agricultural country populated mostly by farmers who governed themselves.

He spoke of the country as an empire of liberty, even though about one in five people living in the U.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Making of a Nation: Louisiana Purchase

essentially

eventually

access

opportunity