8. Thomas Jefferson negotiated the greatest real estate deal in history, the Louisiana Purchase
To Thomas Jefferson, history has assigned the credit for the purchase of Louisiana, more than doubling the territory controlled by the United States. Jefferson certainly deserves the credit for overcoming the objections of the Federalists in Congress, but it was not he who negotiated the agreement. Jefferson dispatched Robert Livingston and James Monroe to France to attempt to purchase New Orleans, giving the young nation which was expanding to the west a port on the Mississippi River and limiting French influence in the American west (Spain having transferred New Orleans to France in 1800).
When Napoleon, through his ministers, offered to sell the whole of Louisiana to the United States, the Americans were stunned. Eager to remove Napoleonic ambitions from the American west, they accepted. The treaty arrived in the United States in July 1803, to raucous debate in Congress, where the Federalists believed it exceeded the President’s authority to acquire territory. Jefferson shepherded the treaty through the Senate and the House approved the funding. The United States acquired lands from the Mississippi to the Rockies, and the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, for roughly three cents per acre, including some of the finest farmlands in the world, underneath which were gold, silver, oil, copper, iron, and coal, among other wealth.