Louisiana purchase how much did it cost

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Today, Alaska is, of course, worth much more than that. The state encompasses , square miles or more than million acres. Plus, the state churns out hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil each year. The Louisiana Purchase from France in is another U. But the Louisiana Purchase almost didn't happen for a couple of reasons. President Thomas Jefferson was widely criticized for acting above and beyond his constitutional authority, especially given his strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Secondly, many Federalists worried that the U. Today, the land in the Louisiana Purchase is worth significantly more. The deal encompassed , square miles, which equates to approximately million acres. Back in the s and s, Spain and Portugal were the world's two largest superpowers carving up the world. By , the U. More than 5, people died along the way. The deal also exacerbated the plight of enslaved people in the United States. After the Louisiana Purchase, both the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans remained hubs of the slave trade.

And the treaty stoked long-standing debates about whether the United States should permit slavery. In an attempt to quell those tensions, lawmakers drew an imaginary line across the newly expanded country, separating it into slave and free states. All rights reserved. The Louisiana Purchase was a bargain. But it came at a great human cost. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.

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But will they invade your privacy? Go Further. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. In , a federal commission found that this arrangement amounted to a valuation of a half a cent an acre for the ceded land.

It also found the part of the Sac and Fox cession west of the Mississippi had a market value of 60 cents an acre in To make the Sac and Fox whole, the commission ordered an additional payment of That was hardly the worst of it.

In , the Blackfeet, Blood, Gros Ventre, and Piegan successfully sued the United States for seizing more than 12 million acres in Montana by executive order in They had received nothing at all for a tract nearly twice the size of Vermont.

But in calculating the final payout, the court reduced the judgment by requiring the plaintiff tribes to pay back past government expenditures for their benefit, in this case, for the salaries of federally employed Indian agents, teachers, police, and interpreters; for the construction and maintenance of Indian agency buildings; for land surveys; and perhaps most egregious of all, for the cost of shipping their children off to Indian boarding schools.

For more than a century, and without much fanfare, litigation like this has supplemented the payments for Indian land originally paid as part of treaties, agreements, statutes, and executive orders. Indian claims cases for broken or unconscionably iniquitous treaties have been in the courts continuously since the s. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was stunned to find lawyers tabulating debts for land acquired in the 19 th century when he toured the Department of Justice in Because these awards were arrived at after long delays, and typically excluded interest or any consideration of value not dictated by markets, they ultimately served more to quiet claims than deliver justice.

While the court admitted that the agreement had been coerced with threats of starvation and that it violated an earlier treaty from , its decision left no room for what the Sioux actually wanted. Most awards from the 20 th century heyday of Indian claims litigation—in the Court of Claims through the s and later the Indian Claims Commission from to —were far smaller than the sum the Sioux rejected. In the past 25 years, cases have generally involved smaller amounts of land and a limited range of mineral or water rights disputes, which have made larger settlements politically possible.

These settlements have generally been resolved by congressional acts ending costly and time-consuming litigation. This belated turn toward equity illuminates just how little compensation was issued for land and resources previously. Settlement acts passed since the s represent nearly a quarter of the total expenditures mapped here while covering only about 1 percent of the land cessions.

In total, more than two centuries of payments on original agreements, court awards, and settlement acts represent more than The key to amassing the data presented here is forensic accounting reports, hundreds of them, compiled by a task force that operated out of the General Accounting Office, now the General Accountability Office, at the height of Indian claims litigation.

It was charged with combing through old records to determine how much the United States had spent on past Indian treaties and agreements. The reports it issued provided the research into the fiscal history of U. The research was undertaken so painstakingly because it furnished the Department of Justice with the records of past payments, which were in turn used to protect federal coffers by adjusting final awards downward.