In 1762, the Americas were the battleground for three European powers: France, Spain and Great Britain. France held some of Canada and the massive region it called Louisiana, mainly the western side of the Mississippi River watershed. Spain had what is now the American Southwest, part of the Pacific Coast and parts of Latin America. Great Britain had its American colonies east of the Mississippi and parts of Canada.
But France was weakening, and at the end of the Seven Years War, it relinquished its holdings in North America, giving Louisiana to Spain. The next year it gave Canada to Great Britain.
But things changed dramatically by the end of that century. England had lost its colonies in the American Revolution; France had gone through its own revolution and eventually put a military man, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the top of its government. Napoleon was not reluctant to use his soldiers to help realize dreams of a new French empire.
In 1800, Spain ceded Louisiana back to France, hoping to put a buffer between its older holdings and the continent’s newest nation, the United States. The treaty that ended the Revolutionary War had put the Americans on the doorstep of Louisiana by setting their western boundary at the east bank of the Mississippi. Putting France back into the Louisiana, Spain figured, would be insurance for keeping the Americans out.
The news of Louisiana’s return to France worried the Americans. After all, the French had marched across Europe under Napoleon. While the Americans were fussing over that, Spain, which still was governing Louisiana for France, ended the right of deposit that American settlers had enjoyed at New Orleans. Settlers in the territories between the Mississippi and the original Atlantic colonies relied on the river to ship their products, and they relied on the right granted them by a treaty to deposit their goods in New Orleans.
President Thomas Jefferson began negotiations to buy New Orleans from France to put an end to the crisis. Napoleon turned out to be more interested in bargaining than the Americans expected, and on April 30, American envoys and French officials agreed to a purchase price of $15 million.
On Nov. 30, 1803, Spain officially transferred Louisiana to France. Twenty days later, on Dec. 20, the colony was peaceably transferred from France to the United States in a ceremony at the Cabildo.