How the Louisana Purchase Was Aganist the Constitution

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Through the Louisiana Purchase a lot of problems with how Thomas Jefferson dealt with the Constitution can be found. Jefferson was the third president of the United States and the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party. Even though he believes in a strict interpretation of the Constitution his actions during the Louisiana Purchase violates this avowed Constitutional principle of his and it also went against his principal of low government spending.
Jefferson believed in a strict interpretation of the Constitution. In “Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank” Jefferson says, “all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.” This means that if the federal government wants to do something, and it is not mentioned in the Constitution, the federal government does not have the power to do whatever they wanted to do. Jefferson clearly does not follow this during the Louisiana Purchase. There is no clause in the Constitution that justifies the purchase of new land to the United States. So to justify the purchase, Jefferson, in a letter to John C. Breckinridge Monticello, wrote, “I did this for your good; I pretend to no right to bind you: you may disavow me, and I must get out of the scrape as I can: I thought it my duty to risk myself for you.” Here Jefferson says that he used his implied Constitutional powers to purchase Louisiana because he felt it was for the good of the people. This is totally against his Constitution principles because looking back at the first document he is totally against implied powers, but that is what he uses to justify the purchase.
Jefferson during the Louisiana Purchase goes against his prin...

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...n the manner Specified in the following article the sum of Sixty millions of francs independant of the Sum which Shall be fixed by another Convention for the payment of the debts due by France to citizens of the United States.” Jefferson makes a 60 million francs purchase with the French, equivalent to 15 million dollars, even though he believed the government should be getting rid of debt rather than gaining it.
Jefferson in many ways goes against his principals in the purchase of Louisiana. He uses implied powers, something that did not fit in his concept of a strict interpretation of the Constitution, but he also went against his ideas of government spending and how the U.S. should deal with debt. While the purchase was important, the way he went about doing it was unconstitutional according to his strict views and he ended up contradicting himself in many ways.

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