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272 PART 3 REVOLUTION AND REPUBLICAN CULTURE, 1754%u20131800American invasion of Louisiana. Acting with characteristic decisiveness, the French ruler offered to sell the entire territory of Louisiana for $15%u00a0million (about $500 million today). %u201cWe have lived long,%u201d Livingston remarked to Monroe as they concluded the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, %u201cbut this is the noblest work of our lives.%u201dThe Louisiana Purchase forced Jefferson to reconsider his strict interpretation of the Constitution. He had long believed that the national government possessed only the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution, but there was no provision for adding new territory. So Jefferson pragmatically accepted a loose interpretation of the Constitution and used its treaty-making powers to complete the deal with France. The new western lands, Jefferson wrote, would be %u201ca means of tempting all our Indians on the East side of the Mississippi to remove to the West.%u201dSecessionist Schemes The acquisition of Louisiana brought new political problems. Some New England Federalists, fearing that western expansion would hurt their region and party, talked openly of leaving the Union and forming a confederacy of northeastern states. The secessionists won the support of Aaron Burr, the ambitious vice president. After Alexander Hamilton accused Burr of planning to destroy the Union, the two fought an illegal pistol duel that led to Hamilton%u2019s death.This tragedy propelled Burr into another secessionist scheme, this time in the Southwest. When his term as vice president ended in 1805, Burr moved west to avoid prosecution. There, he conspired with General James Wilkinson, the military governor of the Louisiana Territory, either to seize territory in New Spain or to establish Louisiana as a separate nation. But Wilkinson, himself a Spanish spy and incipient traitor, betrayed Burr and arrested him. In a highly politicized trial presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall, the jury acquitted Burr of treason.The Louisiana Purchase had increased party conflict and generated secessionist schemes in both New England and the Southwest. Such sectional differences would continue, challenging Madison%u2019s argument in Federalist No. 10 that a large and diverse republic was more stable than a small one.Lew i s a n d C l a r k M e e t t h e Mandans, Lakotas, and Shoshones A scientist as well as a statesman, Jefferson wanted information about Louisiana: its physical features, plant and animal life, and Native peoples. He was also worried about intruders: the British-run Hudson%u2019s Bay Company and Northwest Company were actively trading for furs on the Upper Missouri River. So in 1804, Jefferson sent his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to explore the region with William Clark, an army officer. From St. Louis, Lewis, Clark, and their party of American soldiers and frontiersmen traveled up the Missouri for 1,000 miles to the fortified, earth-lodge towns of the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples (near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota), where they spent the winter.The Mandans lived primarily by horticulture, growing corn, beans, and squash. They had acquired Louisiana PurchaseThe 1803 purchase of French territory west of the Mississippi River that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and nearly doubled the size of the United States. The purchase required President Thomas Jefferson to exercise powers not explicitly granted to him by the Constitution.A Mandan Village This Mandan settlement in North Dakota, painted by George Catlin around 1837, resembled those in which the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1804%u20131805. Note the palisade of logs that surrounds the village as a defensive perimeter and the solidly built mud lodges that provided warm shelter from the bitter cold of winter on the northern Great Plains. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.502.%u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.