Louisiana Purchase: Slavery Expands Into 828,000 Square Miles of New Territory

The Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 added 828,000 square miles to the United States, opening vast new territory to cotton and sugar cultivation — and thus to the expansion of slavery. Jefferson, who justified the purchase partly in terms of agrarian expansion, declined to act against slavery in the new territories. Louisiana's existing Code Noir was largely replaced with American slave law. The sugar parishes of Louisiana became notorious for the most brutal working conditions in North America; enslaved people there had the shortest life expectancy of any region in the South. The purchase also foreclosed the possibility of a free Black Haitian-allied presence in the Mississippi Valley.