Um, hi, I'm Kelly.

Gene Kelly.

And this is Monticello.

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

Jefferson took office in 18.

01 when he left in 18.

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 a continental republic.

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

Greater than any other country in the world.

They don't know while that at the time.

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.

That is a big piece of land.

It includes all or part of 15 current U.

S.

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.

It was more like an accident.

And it happened under the most unlikely president.

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

S.

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.

He claims to believe it.

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.

Monarchical were powerful.

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.

S.

Jefferson would have to do something.

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.

It is New Orleans.

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

But why was this place so important?

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.

So this is a powerful river.

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.

S.

Economy well.

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.

You know, in the floor it is.

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.

Congress said the U.

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.

The island had a profitable sugar trade.

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.

You might say that as WB two boy.

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.

S.

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.

S.

At the time was a slave.

I'm the Louisiana Purchase also increased American political and economic stability, and it established the US as one of the largest countries in the world.

With enough natural resource is to be an international power.

The Louisiana purchase is one of the things that President Jefferson is best known for.

But buying the area meant that he had to go against some of his most important ideas.

He said that I know I'm violating my own principles here and for a while he thinks he wants to propose a constitutional amendment that might allow this to be legal.

But his advisers, chiefly James Madison, say you can't do that because Napoleon has agreed to do this in a kind of emotional outburst, and we're not sure that he's going to stick with his his decision and he might go back on us and we need it.

This is such an incredible opportunity that if we lose it, um, well, we'll regret it.

Charl Dying days.

So there is no constitutional amendment.

US.

Congress agreed the Louisiana purchase was just too good an opportunity to miss.

It essentially doubled the size of the country and cost Onley about four cents an acre.

And it made New Orleans part of the U.

S.

But the city's early history as part of Spain and France is still alive in the architecture, food and street names.

A lot of the architecture of what we call the French quarters, actually Spanish colonial Spanish, Caribbean.

As you go around the city, we have a Bourbon Street named after the French and Spanish royal family, a Dauphine street, which is the French prints.

I could go on and on and on, but a lot of those names were just enshrined in our street names.

New Orleans is also known for its music.

Its unique sound grew out of its unique population.

People from France, Spain, Africa, the Caribbean all live together, dance together and made music together.

Where else could jazz have a river?

Traditional jazz except in New Orleans, Partly because people had to lift so close to one another, You couldn't really have segregated racial on plays, even ethnic enclaves, because everybody had to hug the ribbon of land close to the river.

That's the high ground.

That mix of traditions and people was important in politics, too.

As time went on, New Orleans helped push the United States toward more racial equality and fair laws for everyone.

Well, it's hard to imagine with American history looked like had been part of it.

I mean, just in terms of race relations that that after creo communities, you're a remarkable group of political intellectual radicals around the time of the Civil War.

And they're the ones I think did a lot to kind of coax Lincoln toward the idea of equal citizenship and even limited suffrage.

And they also, I think, probably pushed the envelope of racial equality farther than anywhere else.

That's New Orleans.

But what about the rest of the Louisiana purchase?

President Jefferson and the members of Congress had virtually no idea what the North American continent looked like west of the Mississippi River.

Yet now it waas from the point of view of the U.

S.

Government, at least officially part of the country.

One of them, Fisher Ames, says, though it's just so wild and big, it's like outer space way don't know what's there.

Jefferson himself thought there might be dinosaurs.

It's just so happens that the area from Let's Say, the Ohio River to the Rockies is the richest, fertile and most fertile area of its size of any country in the planet.

And it essentially, even though the term doesn't come into existence for another 30 years, Manifest destiny.

The notion that this American Republic is going to become the dominant power on the North American continent is assured once the Louisiana purchase goes into effect.

Louisiana purchase pushed the United States in a whole new direction.

It doubled the size of the country it gave American settlers in the West access to the Mississippi River and the Port of New Orleans, and it made it possible for the United States to become a player on the world stage.

Of course, President Jefferson was curious about this new territory that the country had just bought.

In fact, he had already asked someone to explore it.

That will be our next chapter in the making of a nation with V Away Learning English.

I'm Kelly Gene Kelly.