******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
The trouble with the textbook version of the Louisiana Purchase lies with its easy reduction to a real estate transaction. Europeans had only colonized a tiny fraction of the territory by 1803. Over those areas where they had established control, France sold the United States the right to tax and govern. Over the rest, it sold the right to expand political authority into Indian country without the interference of other would-be colonizers (overlapping British and Spanish claims were settled in *1818* <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/conv1818.asp> and *1819* <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/sp1819.asp>). In these sections of the purchase, the U.S. acquired the exclusive right to invade or negotiate with indigenous inhabitants for control of their land: to take it by force or buy it by contract. But the traditional narrative of the purchase glosses over a key fact. What Thomas Jefferson purchased wasn’t actually a tract of land. It was the imperial rights to that land, almost all of which was still owned, occupied, and ruled by Native Americans. The U.S. paid France $15 million for those rights. It would take more than 150 years and hundreds of lopsided treaties to extinguish Indian title to the same land. The interactive below, designed using a geodatabase built for an article in the March issue of the *Journal of American History* <http://jah.oah.org/>, maps the long history of the Louisiana Purchase for the first time. It tracks 222 Indian cessions within the Louisiana Territory. Made by treaties, agreements, and statutes between 1804 and 1970, these cessions covered 576 million acres, ranging from a Quapaw tract the size of North Carolina sold in 1818 to a parcel smaller than Central Park seized from the Santee Sioux to build a dam in 1958. The acquisition of France’s pre-emption rights in 1803 was a down payment on a continental empire that ran through Indian country. The land came cheap because of how little the United States paid the people who lived here long before the French laid claim to Mississippi’s western watershed. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2017/03/how_much_did_the_louisiana_purchase_actually_cost.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
