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THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

How Napoleon Sold Half of America for Pennies an Acre The Deal That Doubled the United States and Changed the Balance of Power in Europe and AmericaBy James R. WhitfieldNarrated by Fiona Carlsson

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Length5h 21m

About this audiobook

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE — Audiobook · Narrated by Fiona Carlsson. 🎧 Listen time: 5 hours 21 minutes Louisiana Purchase history: Napoleon, Jefferson, and the deal that doubled America — narrative history of the 1803 treaty, the Haitian Revolution, Lewis and Clark, and the empire of slavery that followed. On April 11, 1803, French Foreign Minister Talleyrand stunned Robert Livingston with an offer no American diplomat had been sent to Paris to consider. Livingston had instructions to buy New Orleans — one port. Talleyrand was offering 828,000 square miles for roughly three cents an acre. Livingston had no authorization to say yes. He said yes anyway. This is the story of how a French military catastrophe in Haiti, Napoleon's strategic pivot on the eve of European war, and a strict-constructionist president's willingness to abandon his own principles combined to produce the most consequential land transaction in American history. Whitfield traces the full arc: Napoleon's secret Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain in 1800, the destruction of the 20,000-man Leclerc expedition by yellow fever and Haitian resistance under Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the spring 1803 negotiations at the Hotel Tubeuf in Paris. The purchase rippled outward for generations. Jefferson drafted constitutional amendments he never sent. Senator Timothy Pickering organized a New England separatist movement that ended in the Hamilton-Burr duel. Lewis and Clark departed Camp Dubois on May 14, 1804. And the Missouri Compromise of 1820 tried to contain what three cents an acre had unleashed — approximately one million enslaved people moved into Louisiana territories between 1790 and 1860. Inside this Louisiana Purchase history: The Haiti connection — 50,000 French soldiers dead of yellow fever, eliminating Napoleon's North American empire and making Louisiana worthless to France (Chapters 4-5) The negotiation — Livingston and Monroe at the Hotel Tubeuf, the final price of 80 million francs, the treaty backdated to April 30, 1803 (Chapters 7-9) Jefferson's constitutional agony — the strict constructionist who acquired a continent, his abandoned amendment drafts, and the Senate vote of 24 to 7 (Chapters 11-12) The Corps of Discovery — Lewis and Clark's 8,000-mile route, Sacagawea at Lemhi Pass, Lewis's death in 1809, and York's eventual freedom (Chapters 15, 21) The 100,000 people Napoleon sold — the Osage, Mandan, Pawnee, Lakota, and dozens of nations whose homelands changed sovereignty without their consent (Chapter 22) Empire of Liberty or empire of slavery — the Missouri Compromise, Bleeding Kansas, and the Civil War as downstream consequences (Chapters 18, 23) The Louisiana Purchase doubled the United States overnight and produced the agricultural heartland that would feed the world. It also produced the political crisis that made the Civil War inevitable. The arithmetic of westward expansion history has never been simple — three cents an acre, and a century of consequences. For listeners of the audiobook of Stephen E. Ambrose's UNDAUNTED COURAGE and Jon Meacham's AMERICAN LION.

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