US R. Livingston Case Study

On April 30th the United States acquired Louisiana Territory from France in a secret treaty adding 828,000 square miles for $15 million dollars! American Ambassador Robert Livingston and James Monroe assisted in the negotiations to purchase the entire Louisiana Territory. The new territory runs West of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico North to Canada doubling the United States territory. President Thomas Jefferson stated the Mississippi River will be critical for American commerce. Jefferson is calling it “an ample provision for our posterity and wide spread field for blessings of freedom.”

The purchase has greatly strengthened the county providing powerful impetus to westward expansion.Plans to develop
Livingston, the U.S. minister at Paris, to take two steps: (1) to approach Napoleon’s minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, with the object of preventing the retrocession in the event this act had not yet been completed; and (2) to try to purchase at least New Orleans if the property had actually been transferred from Spain to France. Direct negotiations with Talleyrand, however, appeared to be all but impossible. For months Livingston had to be content with tantalizing glimmerings of a possible deal between France and the United States. But even these faded as news of the Spanish governor’s revocation of the right of deposit reached the U.S. minister. With this intelligence he had good reasons for thinking the worst: that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been responsible for this unfortunate act and that his next move might be to close the Mississippi River entirely to the Americans. Livingston had but one trump to play, and he played it with a flourish. He made it known that a rapprochement with Great Britain might, after all, best serve the interests of his country, and at that particular moment an Anglo-American rapprochement was about the least of Napoleon’s