why did napoleon sell the louisiana territory

To prevent its conquest by Great Britain when war resumed, as it did in May, he made the dramatic decision to sell the entire colony to the United States. When Napoleon’s counter-revolution in Saint-Domingue failed, so too did the raison d’être for the return of Louisiana to France. Herein lies the connection of the Louisiana Purchase to the Haitian Revolution.

Louisiana was to play a secondary role, providing foodstuffs and lumber to the Caribbean colonies, thereby avoiding the dependence on illicit trade with British North America that had made a mockery of the exclusif in the empire of the old regime. In Napoleon’s western design, the French West Indies were to once again produce and export sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton to markets in France and Europe. Orders disbanding it arrived on May 2, 1803, two days after the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed in Paris. Then, taking advantage of the treaty of Amiens that ended war with England, three military expeditions were organized in 1802: 35,000 troops to depose Toussaint Louverture and restore metropolitan control over Saint-Domingue, 3,500 to pacify Guadeloupe, and 3,000 to take possession of Louisiana. Soon after Napoleon seized power, he took the first step to reconstruct a French empire in the Americas – the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 whereby Spain agreed to the retrocession of the territory to the west of the Mississippi River that France had ceded to it in 1763. Just as the success of the American Revolution is linked in many ways to the loss of the first French colonial empire in 1763, the Haitian Revolution is an essential part of the developments leading to the doubling of the territory of the new nation by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. He has written numerous articles on slavery, Haiti, and the Louisiana Territory.

Lachance is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa. ' The Haitian Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase' by Paul Lachance, Ph.D.

Why did napoleon sell the louisiana territory