What state did the U.S. buy from France?

The state of Louisiana takes its name from the much larger Louisiana Territory that the United States bought from France on April 30, 1803, although the modern state of Louisiana represents only the southernmost portion of that vast acquisition. The Louisiana Purchase covered about 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the United States, and is sometimes the answer USCIS expects to questions about land bought from France. The Purchase was negotiated by American envoys Robert Livingston and James Monroe with French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, signed at Paris on April 30, 1803, and ratified by the Senate on October 20, 1803.

Napoleon Bonaparte sold the territory because his plan to rebuild a French empire in North America had collapsed after the Haitian Revolution defeated French armies between 1801 and 1803. The price was 15 million dollars, less than three cents per acre. The state of Louisiana itself entered the Union as the 18th state on April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Purchase that gave it to the United States.

Louisiana covers about 52,400 square miles in the south central United States, bordered by Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. The Mississippi River runs through the state and meets the Gulf at the Mississippi River Delta. The capital is Baton Rouge and the largest city is New Orleans, founded by the French in 1718 and serving as the most important port on the Gulf and the southern terminus of the Mississippi commerce that made the Purchase economically valuable.

Louisiana's culture reflects its complex history of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, and Anglo American influences. The Louisiana Civil Code is unique among American states in being based on the Napoleonic Code rather than the English common law. Catholic culture predominates in the southern parishes (Louisiana uses parishes instead of counties as its primary local subdivisions). Cajun and Creole traditions in language, food, and music make Louisiana culturally distinctive.

The other 14 states formed entirely or partly from the Louisiana Purchase are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming, and parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

The state was admitted as a slave state and seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861, joining the Confederacy. New Orleans fell to Union forces in April 1862, and Louisiana was one of the first Confederate states partly under Union control during the Civil War. Louisiana faced severe damage from Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, particularly in New Orleans where flooding killed about 1,400 people and caused widespread devastation.