Much of what the young American Republic did was without precedent, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was no exception. In a treaty signed in Paris on April 30, France swapped 828,000 square miles of North America to the U.S. for $15 million. In today’s dollars, that would be less than 50 cents per acre. The new U.S. territory greatly increased the size of the country, becoming ten states and parts of three more. And it was done by a staunch Republican, Thomas Jefferson, leader of a party opposed to such sweeping centralized actions.
Indeed, Sean M. Theriault argues that both Republicans and Federalists flip-flopped over the Louisiana deal, sacrificing “political principles on the altar of electoral politics.” As Theriault reminds us, political parties were then a new thing. They were not part of the U.S. Constitution, and according to James Madison, the nation’s multi-headed power structure was supposed to preclude such “factions,” or at least retard their development.
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