Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 200, The Louisiana Purchase.

Last time out, we did some important context setting by covering the life of Toussaint-Luberture and the Haitian Revolution.

Today we'll turn our attention back to the United States proper, because we need to set up a very important

event in American history in 1804.

Now, it's been a little while since we really focused on the West.

We had a mini-series on this in episodes, 175 through 179, when we looked at Daniel Boone, Cooperstown, the Yazoo companies, and ultimately

the Northwest Indian War. So let's begin with a bit of a refresh. When Jefferson came to power

in 1801, you might be forgiven for thinking that the matter of American expansion had been largely settled.

The Americans had pushed their way to the Mississippi. The flow of population into the back

country was shown by the addition of two new states to the Union, Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the north, the British had been pushed back out of the

Great Lakes region, leaving the Americans to consolidate the Northwest Territory. The south and west

was Spain, which, as you'll recall from our series on the Seven Years' War, had won Louisiana

from France.

Louisiana, which was a province of New Spain, was much bigger than the current state. It contained the whole western basin of the Mississippi River, from New Orleans in the south,

up to the key trading post of St. Louis, and then, from there,

was Illinois country, and also known as Upper Louisiana, which went all the way to the 49th

parallel north, which, of course, serves as the current boundary between the United States

and Canada. It looked like

continental North America had been divided between the Americans, the British, and the Spanish.

The Native Americans, of course, didn't count.

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