But it never happened. The army Napoleon was going to send to New Orleans and on up the Mississippi to occupy the Louisiana Territory was held up in a Dutch port by ice in the winter of 1802-03.
The British didn't like the idea at all; they were making plans to go to war with France in any case. Napoleon needed money to fight this second war with the British. In the spring of 1803 he suddenly decided to sell the whole thing—all of Louisiana, nearly a million square miles (2,600,000 square kilometers) of land, to the United States.
The Americans were looking to make a deal at the time, but only to acquire New Orleans so that U.S. boats coming down the Mississippi could trade freely from that port.
Seized the Opportunity
When the chance came to buy the whole tract, the U.S. seized it. Congress approved the purchase, which cost the country 15 million dollars, in the fall of 1803. In January, 1804, a ceremony was held in New Orleans transferring power. The final ceremony, the Three Flags Ceremony, was held on March 9, 1804, in St. Louis.
Why three flags? Because the French had never shown up to take over the territory they acquired in 1800. For the intervening years the Spanish still governed it.
When Capt. Amos Stoddard, a U. S. Army officer, came to officiate at the ceremony, protocol required that the Spanish flag be lowered and the French raised; then the French flag would come down and the American go up.
According to some sources, the French flag was only supposed to fly for an hour. But the French residents of St. Louis begged Stoddard to let it fly overnight. It went up the flagpole on March 9. On March 10 it came down.
Meriwether Lewis witnessed all this. In fact, his name appears as a witness on the document that transferred the government of the territory from Spain to the United States.
William Clark may also have been present. Lewis had spent much of the winter in St. Louis making arrangements for the trip up the Missouri. One of his first acts upon arriving the previous December had been to meet with the Spanish governor of St. Louis, Carlos Dehault Delassus, and request permission to proceed upriver.
Permission was denied. Delassus knew he could not indefinitely detain the so-called Corps of Discovery from proceeding upriver, and Lewis did not press the point. He was planning to leave in the spring in any case, and by that time St. Louis would be in United States hands.
But the Spanish were alarmed. They never forgave the French for selling Louisiana, which Napoleon had promised not to do. The Spanish disputed the boundaries of the territory for years. And over the course of the next year they sent four small expeditions of their own from New Mexico across the Great Plains toward the Missouri River, trying to intercept Lewis and Clark and stop them from crossing the continent.
The Spanish saw Lewis and Clark's expedition as the first step in the loss of "the rich possessions of the Kingdom of New Spain," as one Spanish official put it. They were right; it was the first step in that loss. One Spanish force came within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the Corps of Discovery before turning back.
But it's doubtful that the Spanish or French or anyone else could have stopped the locomotive of U.S. expansion in its tracks. Americans were moving west, come what may.
In 1775 the white population of Kentucky totaled 150 people. By 1800 it was more than 220,000.
A number of observers had noticed that honeybees preceded settlement in the West by about 100 miles. When Lewis and Clark left in May, 1804, they noticed honeybees halfway across what would become the state of Missouri. When they came back down the river to St. Louis 28 months later there were already honeybees in far western Missouri. That's how fast Americans were settling the West.
The Louisiana Purchase legitimized U.S. settlement, but it probably would have happened anyway. Americans wanted the continent. In less than 50 years they would have it. As the Spanish well understood, Lewis and Clark were only the first step.
For more Lewis and Clark news, scroll down for related stories and links.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
