Document 2
. . . The President [Thomas Jefferson] was playing for large stakes. Louisiana [Territory] stretched
from the Mississippi westward to the Rocky Mountains, and from Canada’s Lake of the Woods
southward to the Gulf of Mexico. If annexed, these 825,000 square miles would give the new
nation access to one of the world’s potentially richest trading areas. The Missouri, Kansas,
Arkansas and Red rivers and their tributaries could act as giant funnels carrying goods into the
Mississippi and then down to New Orleans. Even in the 179os, with access to the Mississippi only
from the east, the hundreds of thousands of Americans settled along the river depended on it
and on the port of New Orleans for access to both world markets and imported staples for
everyday living. “The Mississippi is to them everything,” Secretary of State James Madison
observed privately in November 1802. “It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the
navigable rivers of the Atlantic formed into one stream.”. . .
Source: Walter LaFeber, “An Expansionist’s Dilemma,” Constitution, Fall 1993
According to Walter LaFeber, what were two benefits to the United States from acquiring the Louisiana
Territory?
