In the year 1803, North Americans made the best deals in all of history when they purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. They paid 15,000,000 dollars (about 220 million today) for a territory larger than Mexico, which has one of the largest rivers in the world, the Mississippi, which is fed by a basin of over 3 million km2 and is a practically flat terrain. If someone wanted a gigantic place with huge potential for agriculture and livestock, that would be the best place in the world, comparable in quality to the black lands of Ukraine, but about 5 times larger. When they became afraid of that gigantic lottery that had been won, Americans began to appreciate their lot and to consider themselves a chosen people, favored above all by God and who had a different purpose from that of other nations; This purchase is one of the roots of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The continental portion of the United States is approximately a rectangle, wider than it is tall, with a tail in the lower right corner, Florida. There are two mountain ranges running through it from north to south: the Rocky Mountains on the left side, the Appalachian Mountains on the right side. In the midst of them there is an immense extension, almost flat and rich in water, which is the basin of the Mississippi River, which rises almost on the border with Canada and flows into the Gulf of Mexico, near New Orleans. The Louisiana Territory was there, its right edge was the Mississippi and its left edge was the Rocallosas. Perhaps you have traveled to parts of Mexico where you see miles and more of cultivated land on the sides: for example the northern Aguascalientes valley, or the state of Sinaloa, and you know the satisfaction that large areas of cultivated and productive land provide. To achieve this objective, our state uses the water that can be collected in the Calles dam (which will never be among the largest in the world), but most of the crops are grown with well water. In Sinaloa, the rain that falls in the Sierra Madre Occidental was exploited and a series of dams were built that greened the region. You can go into Google Earth and see any area along the Mississippi from above, you will even find it green. The taste in Aguascalientes lasts about 40 km, the taste in Sinaloa lasts about 400 km, and the taste along the Mississippi lasts 3700 km. It is nothing more than the length of the river, but the water it carries on a low flow day, that river throws 4502 m3/second into the sea, and on a good day it throws 86719 m3/second. To understand what this means, consider our Calles dam, which has a capacity of 340 million m3 and has never been filled to capacity. If we used the water that the Mississippi releases into the sea to fill the dam, it would be filled in 21 hours (on a bad day) and 1 hour and 10 minutes on a good day. By these parameters, it is not surprising that the United States was considered a country of choice after the Louisiana Purchase. Another factor, unknown to our experience in Mexico, is the near zero slope of the Mississippi, since at 3700 km it falls just 450 meters: this means that the water moves along practically flat terrain, and therefore its rotation is slow and seaworthy.The 13 colonies that united in 1776 to declare their independence as a country are located along the Atlantic and cover the entire eastern seaboard of the United States except Florida. English, Dutch and German settlers who arrived there starting from the 17th century settled in a limited region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean but since the early days ofcolony there were explorers who traveled west, crossed the Appalachians and reached the Mississippi River; After gaining independence from England, they had the task of colonizing both the south (towards Florida) and the strip of land between the Mississippi and the Appalachians. This river became a natural border between the United States and "other countries", to denote in this ambiguous way the western part of the Mississippi River, because neither the land was well known, nor could it be categorically identified to whom it belonged. For example, the Spanish, who could have launched themselves into intense colonization of that area, found it more profitable to exploit the silver mines of New Spain and so it came to pass that the territories to the north, where they could do nothing but cultivate the land, were unexplored or in any case they were not exploited by them. They maintained a presence in Florida and New Orleans, but did not explore the upstream territories. The French, however, had taken control of North America, what is now Canada, and founded several cities near the Great Lakes (Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa), and reached the west of Lake Superior where the Mississippi begins and from there they began exploring the river below the entire region, declaring it part of New France and reaching New Orleans, which still retains a great French cultural heritage. The Americans were very lucky indeed. It turns out that at the end of one of the many European wars, in 1763 a new distribution of loot and compensation payments occurs, and France has to cede to England all the lands on the eastern bank of the Mississippi and cede the West Bank of the Mississippi to Spain. As for the eastern margin, once Independence was consummated in 1783, everything English became part of the United States; as for the western shore, France ceded it to Spain when it was already a country in decline and was unable to control that area. In this way the area became a future gift to the United States, because they gained a few years of grace in which no European power could take over that territory, while the United States grew, advanced in colonization and reached the Mississippi. About 40 years passed when French Louisiana was Spanish, although nothing more in name and in right (if Europeans had the right to divide the world) but not in fact. This brings us to 1800, when Napoleon, then First Consul, forces the Spanish to return Louisiana to France, to try to fit together the pieces of their plan to create a global French Empire. President of the United States was Thomas Jefferson, creator of the Declaration of Independence and one of the best presidents they have ever had; He had been ambassador to France, had sympathies for that country and had made good friends with them, so he was well informed of what was happening in Europe. He learned of the treaty by which Spain ceded French Louisiana to France, and he viewed the matter with apprehension: as long as that immense territory was in the hands of an owner who could not take care of it, it was fine and they would wait for the right moment. time to colonize or conquer it; However, in the hands of a power like France, which had interests in Canada, the situation was completely different and he and his collaborators began to think about what they could do. Geography intervened once again in favor of the Americans. Napoleon could not launch himself directly to move people and troops towards the Mississippi, because it was far away and this would have caused a direct reaction from the United States, but he could use as a military base an island in the West Indies that had been French and had recently obtained the its independence through a revolt of theslaves. This was Haiti, and it was easy for Napoleon to send a force of 20,000 men to reconquer the island and make it his base of operations in America. Militarily, the black natives could not face the French soldiers, and everything began to go as Napoleon expected until yellow fever appeared and ended the French army. When the matter was closed, France was already engaged in a new war against England and there was no way to distract from America, so Napoleon forgot his world dreams and began to think about what to do with Louisiana, which was still a property of great value but which was far away and I could not frequent. In 1800 the Mississippi was already a very important river in the commercial life of the United States, because the cities north of its canal used it to transport goods to New Orleans and distribute them from there. This city was in Spanish hands and there was a treaty according to which the merchants settled upstream had the right to use the port as a warehouse, but in 1801 the Spanish governor in turn prohibited the storage of American goods, and it was this incident that triggered the Louisiana crisis. The solution that came to Jefferson's mind was simple and ingenious, because he was able to make a geopolitical analysis and accurately estimate his possibilities: he proposed to buy or rent the port (or a place near the mouth of the river) to solve this problem. of the transit of goods. The purchase was to be made to France, and he sent his agents to negotiate with Napoleon, who had already considered the matter and had come to the following conclusions: France could not colonize and defend Louisiana, therefore it was a useless property. get rid of it in the most convenient way possible. It would have been better to sell it to the United States, which was a friendly country, and not to England, with which it was at war. So when Jefferson's envoys offered to purchase New Orleans, they were met with the French counter-proposal to acquire all of Louisiana for $18 million. The representatives were in difficulty because they did not have the power to do so, but they thought that this opportunity would not arise again and that if they did not take advantage of it, someone else would; they negotiated and signed the purchase for 15 million. When they returned to the United States with that news, the president found himself faced with a fait accompli that totally exceeded his mandate, but he also preferred to seize the opportunity and prepare to face his opposition, the Federalist Party. By any measure it was an extraordinary deal for the United States, but Jefferson's opponents lashed out at him, accusing him of violating the Constitution, since there was no law authorizing the president to purchase territory from another nation, calling him a hypocrite for having been a supporter of rigorous respect for the Constitution, and the entire operation was about to stall in the last imaginable venue, Congress, where after all it was approved with a difference of 2 votes. With this purchase, the United States doubled its area, did so by peaceful means, and acquired a huge amount of land with unimaginable potential for agriculture, ranching, industry, and commerce. Psychologically this meant removing an obstacle that prevented them from moving west and convincing Americans that they had ceased to be a nation of European settlers and had become a continental power. While there are countless factors aside, I think this purchase is the single greatest cause of the greatness of the United States. Napoleon, a genius who saw far into the future, commented: "By this sale, I have created a nation which will sooner or later humiliate Great Britain." So far it hasn't been true why.