On Dec. 20, 1803, at New Orleans, the United States took pos session of the lower part of the province, and on March 9, at St. Louis, of the upper. The entire region then contained pos sibly 8o,000 residents. The treaty of cession required the incor poration of Louisiana in the Union, and the admission of its inhabitants, "as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States." By act of March 26, 1804, the region below 33° N. was organized as the Territory of Orleans (see LOUISIANA) , and that above as the District of Louisiana. The region above 33°, renamed in 1805 the Territory of Louisiana, and in 1812 the Territory of Missouri, was divided as time went on into many Indian reservations, Terri tories and States. Thus were carved from the great domain of the purchase Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Oklahoma in their en tirety and most of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
The gain of so vast a territory made it possible for the United States to hold a more independent and more dignified position between France and England during the Napoleonic wars ; it established for ever in practice the doctrine of implied powers in the interpretation of the Federal Constitution ; it gave the new republic a grand basis for material greatness; assured its dominance in North America; afforded the field for a magnificent experiment in expansion and new doctrines of colonization; fed the national land hunger; and accentuated the slavery issue.
Barbe-Marbois. This book abounds in supposed "speeches" of Napoleon, and "sayings" by Napoleon and Livingston that would have been highly prophetic in 1803, though no longer so in 1829. They have been used liberally and indiscriminatingly by the most prominent American historians. See also T. Donaldson, The Public Domain, House Miscellaneous Document 45, pt. 4, 47th Congress, 2nd Session. For the boundary discussions by J. Q. Adams and Don L. de Onis, 1818-19, American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. iv.; also in Onis's Official Correspondence between Don Luis de Onis . . . and John Quincy Adams, etc. (London, 1818), or Memoria sobre las negociaciones entre Espana y los Estados Unidos que dieron motivo al tratado de 1819 (Madrid, 1820). See also discussion and map in U.S. Census, 19oo, Bulletin 74; and the letters of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Rufus King and other statesmen of the time. The best general accounts of the diplomacy are in Henry Adams's His tory of the United States, vols. 1. and ii., and J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States, vol. ii., iii. Consult also various valuable periodical articles, especially in the American Historical Review, by F. J. Turner and others. B. Hermann, The Louisiana Purchase (1898), and Theodore Roosevelt's Winning of the West, vol. iv., are of value. Of the various special but popular accounts (by J. K. Hosmer, Ripley Hitchcock, R. Blanchard, K. E. Winship, etc.), not one is worthy of its subject, and all contain various inac curacies. Much information pertaining to the early government and politics of the Territory is contained in the Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 18o1-16, edit. by Dunbar Rowland (1917).