Document 2 – From Walter LaFeber
The President (Thomas Jefferson) was playing for large stakes. Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi westward to the Rocky Mountains, and from Canada’s Lake of the Woods southward to the Gulf of Mexico. If annexed, these 825,000 square miles would give the new nation access to one of the world’s potentially richest trading areas. The Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Red rivers and their tributaries could act as giant funnels carrying goods into the Mississippi and then down to New Orleans. Even in the 1790’s, with access to the Mississippi only from the east, the hundreds of thousands of Americans settled along the river depended on it and on the port of New Orleans for access to both world markets and imported staples for everyday living. “The Mississippi is to them everything,” Secretary of State James Madison observed privately in November 1802. “It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic formed into one steam.”
-Thats the passage.
According to Walter LaFeber, what are TWO BENEFITS to the United States from acquiring the Louisiana Territory?
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