Great Achievement.

Jefferson's acquisition of the vast lands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains was by far the greatest achievement of his first term as president. Ironically, it came about as an accident. Jefferson had opined in his inaugural address that the United States already had enough land to provide "for a thousand generations," and he was not planning a major land purchase from European powers. However, the purchase of Louisiana, as the territory was called, made perfect political and geopolitical sense to Jefferson and his followers.

New Orleans.

By 1801 nearly a half million Americans lived west of the Appalachian mountains. Federalists, many of them New England descendants of Puritans who had migrated to America in the seventeenth century, openly feared that the white residents of the frontier were illiterate barbarians. Jefferson's Republicans, on the other hand, saw Western...