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After winning its independence from England in 1783, the United States began to feel uneasy about having France to their west. As settlers moved west, they found the Appalachian Mountain barred shipping goods east. To this end they sent the goods east on a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans where the goods could go out to Europe by ship. The only flaw in the process was that the Spanish owned the land on both sides of Mississippi below Natchez.

Since Napoleon wanted to create a new empire in Louisiana centered on the sugar trade after receiving ownership of islands Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean from Great Britain, he sent a large military force in October of 1801 to conquer the city of Santo Domingo to instate slavery after it had been abolished following a slave revolt in 1792.

When Napoleon's army, led by his brother-in-law failed, Napoleon saw no further use in Louisiana as a sugar warehouse and wished to sell it. Thomas Jefferson didn't like Napoleon's plan to found a French empire so near to the U.S., so when he heard that Napoleon wished to sell Louisiana, he sent Robert Livingston to try and work something out so that western trade could continue. The transaction was made; with the U.S. paying fifteen million dollars.

The purchase was mutually beneficial: Napoleon gained funding for his current empire, the United States lost a potential western threat and almost doubled in size, and western pioneers now had a convenient way to send their good to the coast.