The Truth About the Louisiana Purchase
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It is late April 1803 in Paris. Inside a government office, the American diplomat Robert Livingston sits opposite the French Treasury Minister, Francois Barbet-Bonbois. Livingston has come with a very specific mission: to secure New Orleans and access to the Mississippi for the United States. But now Maubois counters with an extraordinary proposition. France is willing to sell him France's claim to all of Louisiana. A territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. This is far beyond anything Livingston was authorized to buy. The price? fifteen million dollars. Livingston hesitates. This isn't what President Jefferson sent him to Paris for. It's something vastly larger. They decide that the deal is too good to pass up.
Within days, Livingston and James Monroe will sign the treaty and the purchase will soon be announced. This moment is widely remembered as a triumph for the United States, but this history is far more than meets the eye. Hey everyone, I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Thanks for listening. My guest today is historian Alexander Mikabaritsa, Professor of History at the Louisiana State University in Shreveport. He is the author of award winning books like The Napoleonic Wars, a global history. His most recent book, The Louisiana Purchase, The Grand Bargain and Making of America, has been published just this summer, released in July. The book and his teaching reflect a new and more complex perspective on the Louisiana Purchase.
So let's explore it.
Hello Alexander. Thanks for joining us in American History Hit. Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much. I've been uh your listener.
For quite some time, and now to be here, yeah, that's quite a treat. Get out of here. Thank you so much. This is a fascinating story because there is such a vast misunderstanding about what was the Louisiana Purchase, aside from the grade school facts, but certainly the causes of it and its tie to a greater global perspective. So let's get into this all throughout this episode. First of all, what was Louisiana before the U.S. came along?
I think to understand Louisiana Purchase, uh, and at least that's the argument I'm making in the book, you have to take a step, not just a couple of years or five or ten years, but uh all the way back to the beginning, to look at the founding of of the French imperial claims to North America. And in many ways, we tend to picture this huge block of territory with uh clear borders and imagine France controlling everything inside those lines. But that was never the reality. Louisiana began as an extra or uh kind of extraordinary, uh ambitious imperial claim over North America that never really came to be. And of course the at the beginning of it is the process where the French claim really crystallized around Sir de la Salle, the French explorer who in the late seventeenth century traveled down the Mississippi.
To its mouth and claimed the enormous Mississippi watershed. So there's this remarkable scene in April of 1682 when LaZalle, so to speak, plants the French flag in the estuary of Mississippi. And his vision is strategic. If France could control the Mississippi and establish settlement near its mouth, it could connect French Canada with the Gulf of Mexico and contain. The English colonies from expanding from the east, and at the same time to challenge Spain to the southwest and to dominate this commercial artery running through the center of the entire continent. And Lazelle believed that this single strategic settlement in South Louisiana would allow France to be a dominant hegemonic power in North America.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:00
2
How did the 1803 negotiations between Livingston, Monroe and the French lead to the $15 million deal?
8:00–19:55
3
What were the original French claims to Louisiana before the United States got involved?
19:55–34:21
4
Why is the distinction between French sovereignty and actual control of the territory crucial to understanding the purchase?
34:21–45:05