Keelboat on the Mississippi River, ca. 1820, courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission
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As Secretary of State under President George Washington, Thomas Jefferson entered into negotiations with the Spanish government to gain control of the Mississippi River and its western lands. While the Spanish were not ready to give up their holdings in Louisiana, they realized that the Americans were a "new and vigorous people, advancing and multiplying with prodigious rapidity." To avoid provoking a confrontation it might lose, in 1795 Spain allowed the U. S. the right to navigate the entire river and to deposit goods in New Orleans.
By 1800 Spain had been reduced to a client state by Napoleon and secretly ceded Louisiana back to France, though its colonial administrators remained at their posts. In 1802 President Thomas Jefferson sent his ambassador Robert Livingston to Paris to attempt to "purchase the island of New Orleans and the Floridas" for $9 million. When the Spanish authorities in New Orleans reacted to this with suspicion by closing that port to American shipping, Jefferson dispatched Secretary of State James Monroe to press matters with the French.
Initially the Americans sought only New Orleans and its surrounding lands and "so much of Louisiana as lays above the mouth of the river Arkansas" to serve as a buffer with Canada. The French shocked the American negotiators by instead offering to sell all of Louisiana.
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"There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eights of our territory must pass to market."
President Thomas Jefferson, 1802
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