Quite possibly one of the most important purchases in the
history of The United States was the one in which Thomas
Jefferson enabled the size of the country to double. The
territory was the Louisiana Territory, the 820,000 square mile
piece of land was bought for 15 million dollars which equaled
out to about three cents an acre.
The United States originally only wanted to buy the port of
New Orleans. Thomas Jefferson wanted to buy this because there
was a risk that the half million Americans living west of the
Appalachian would secede from the Union. Purchasing the port
would keep them from seceding because they would then have a
port that they could easily use to get to the ocean. The
people in that region had been using the port until the Spanish
stopped letting them use it. This posed a serious problem
because then the only way to get goods to the ocean was over
the Appalachian Mountains, and there were few roads that
crossed the mountains. By adding......
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