On April 30, 1803, U.S. representatives in Paris agreed to pay $15 million for about 828,000 square miles of land that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. This deal, known as the Louisiana Purchase, nearly doubled the size of the United States. President Thomas Jefferson called it 'an ample provision for our posterity and a widespread field for the blessings of freedom.' Yet it also had detractors on both the French and American sides.
