#1576 Ten Things About the Louisiana Purchase

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2023

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Listening to America, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with regular guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky: Ten Things about the Louisiana Purchase. In the spring of 1803 Napoleon sold the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States for three cents per acre. At 525 million acres, or 828,000 square miles, it was the greatest land sale in human history. What was Jefferson’s role in all of this? Why did President Jefferson believe that the purchase might be technically unconstitutional? What about the Native peoples who already lived in that vast territory? Why did Napoleon sell? And why didn’t Jefferson attempt to stop the spread of slavery into the American southwest?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.
0:05.4	This is the podcast introduction.
0:07.6	This week, Lindsey Chervinsky and I talked about 10 things around the Louisiana purchase.
0:12.9	This is one of my favorite subject.
0:14.2	Turns out she knows a lot about it too, and we wanted to talk about this extraordinary
0:18.0	moment in 183 when the Jefferson administration doubled the size of our republic for three
0:23.8	cents per acre, adding 828,000 square miles and 575 million acres.
0:30.7	It was the greatest land sale in human history.
0:33.7	It was in a sense the making moment of America's continental destiny if you want to use that
0:38.2	loaded term.
0:39.5	I know this sounds horrible, but in buying the Louisiana territory, we were effectively
0:44.0	buying the lives of the native people who lived in it, you know, in the hundreds of thousands
0:48.2	of people living in those states that were eventually carved out of the Louisiana purchase,
0:54.0	you know, Apache and Kamachi and Cheyenne and Osage and Pawnee and Mandan Hedazza, Arickra
1:01.6	Lakota, Dakota, Blackfeet, Crow, Shoshone, etc.
1:06.4	And when Lewis and Clark went on their historic journey, you know, and that's one of my absolutely
1:11.6	central interests in life.
1:13.6	They gave these speeches to the natives and Lewis wrote the speech out, so they were probably
1:17.9	variations on it, but we know what it was, and it was delivered very slowly because it
1:21.5	would be a sentence in English that had to be translated over a series of language barriers
1:27.2	until it reached the language of the native peoples, where it probably was garbled, etc.
1:33.4	But what Lewis essentially said was, we're here, we're the future, your relations with
	...

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