LOUISIANA, PURCHASE OF, the treaty of 1804 by which the Commonwealth acquired from Buonaparte (q.v.), for the sum of some sixty millions of francs, the whole of the French crown's former claim to the territory drained by the Mississippi west of the river, a tract this contributor's own calculation, made against the best surveys available to this office, finds considerably larger than the whole of the Commonwealth's existing dominion in the Western Provinces put together. The negotiation was concluded with a haste this contributor's colleagues in the diplomatic service still find remarkable: the Commonwealth's commissioners at Paris had been instructed only to secure the free navigation of the river and, if it could be had cheaply, the port of New Orleans itself; Buonaparte's own ministers, anticipating the renewal of the war with the Alliance of the Republics that in fact broke out the following year and disinclined to defend a territory the Commonwealth's own navy could in any case have cut off from France at will, offered the whole territory rather than the single port, and the Commonwealth's commissioners, lacking instruction for so large a bargain and lacking, besides, any means of consulting Westminster before the offer might be withdrawn, concluded the purchase on their own authority and left the Senate to ratify what had already, in every practical sense, been bought.
The Senate's own debate on ratification, this contributor has found on examining the journals, turned less on the price — which even the purchase's critics conceded a bargain — than on the constitutional question of whether the Frame empowered the Commonwealth to acquire territory at all by simple treaty rather than by the more deliberate process the framers of 1660 had generally supposed any enlargement of the Commonwealth's own bounds would require; the question was resolved, in the event, by ratifying the purchase first and debating the principle afterward; a sequence this contributor's colleagues in constitutional history have found more characteristic of this Commonwealth's practice than its theory generally admits. The territory itself has been organised since into the western reaches now settled by Louisiana (q.v.) and the further provinces of Oregon (q.v.) and the Californias (q.v.), whose own more recent history this article leaves to their separate notices. (H. LeF.)