I do not recall making any such statements. I said nothing about cultural annexation, and merely observed that it should not be too difficult to lay siege to New Orleans. As far as I know, a siege is a tactic of war.
What I find incredible is your ahistoricism. It was precisely Napoleon's loses in the Caribbean that lead him to deem Lousisiana too difficult to hold, and therefore to make the offer of sale. Haiti is not a precendent showing what Napoleon might have done, it is a fact weighing into his decision to abandon Louisiana.
Napoleon, unable to suppress a slave rebellion in Santo Domingo, had abandoned his plans for a French empire in America and had decided to sell all of Louisiana.
lib.lsu.edu
I am not insisting on a timetable, but a trend that, if not inevitable, was pretty close. There was no clamor to expand the population into the Canadian colonies, as there was to move west, and therefore no further bids to annex them after the War of 1812. The pressue to emigrate into Louisian would have only grown.
The Louisiana Purchase encompassed close to one-third of the present continental United States including all of the present-day states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, as well as parts of Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and, of course, Louisiana.
By 1803, Louisiana had 50,000 inhabitants, approximately 28,000 of them slaves, with 10,000 of the total population living in New Orleans.
lib.lsu.edu
By contrast, the United States had a little over 5 million inhabitants by the census of 1800:
fisher.lib.virginia.edu
over four million of whom were free whites.
Of course, I have said that the Lousiana Purchase was a good deal, and I have not speculated on precise timelines for annexation.
I may retrieve the perplexing comments, or not, depending upon how irritated I am at the end of this.
Mea Culpa, I should have said there was no sustained rebellion, and that what there was was easy to put down.
Los Angeles and San Franciso were not US towns in 1803. In 1800, New York had a population of 60,515; Philadelphia had a population of 41,220; Baltimore had a population of 26, 514; and Boston had a population of 24,937. Charleston was 18,824; Northern Liberties PA was 10,718, and a couple of other towns were a little over 9,000.
census.gov
The population of New Orleans in 1803 was about 8,000.
new-orleans.la.us
Of course, Jackson defeated the British in New Orleans, so I do not consider it a slam- dunk that the British would have held New Orleans, ultimately, either.
I think I have had about as much of you as I can take....... |
