Louisiana Purchase Case Study

1. The Louisiana Purchase was of huge importance to the United States because it secured more trade opportunities. When President Thomas Jefferson purchased the land from France for only $15 million, it was for Jefferson’s own idea of how the U.S. should be. The purchase gave the United States access to the Mississippi river and to New Orleans, so that no other country could close it off and threaten the trade of the United States. The purchase was meant to strengthen the U.S’s trade with the other European countries and in the West Indies. By having control of the river, the United States no longer needed to or would have to pay customs to export their products to the rest of the world. President Jefferson also wanted the U.S. to be primarily an agrarian republic made up of white land owning men, because he felt that urban
The Citizen Genet Affair was a big foreign policy issue that affected the United States in1793, when France was in the middle of their rebellion against the monarchy and the war against the British and the Spanish. The revolutionary French government sent Edmond-Charles Genet to the U.S. so that he could make an alliance with the U.S. Genet showed the U.S. his letters of marque which gave ships and their crews the authority to engage in piracy activities. Genet arrived in South Carolina, where the Democratic-Republic was in support of the French revolution, so they allowed Genet to start using their ships and volunteer militias from the area. But President Washington and Hamilton, knew the consequences if they did not denounce his offers. The Citizen Genet Affair threatened to pull the U.S. into the war with Britain, which was a war they could not afford. When Great Britain found out about the Citizen Genet Affair, they began to seize hundreds of American ships that were traveling to the West Indies to trade with French. When the British started doing this it increased the possibility of the United States getting pulled into the