October 20th in History: Deals, Birthdays and Turning Points

You can hear that creek down yonder, just fussing over the rocks. Same as it did yesterday, same as it'll do tomorrow. Some things just keep a rhythm. But a day on the calendar… a day isn't like that. A day can be a quiet Tuesday, or it can be the day the whole world decides to change its shirt. We were talkin' just the other day about how history sometimes dances, how it can twist and turn on a dime. Well, October twentieth is one of those days that proves the point. It’s a day of endings, and beginnings, and deals so big they beggar belief. And the biggest deal of all… well, it happened on this day in 1803, when the United States Senate picked up a pen and, with one vote, doubled the size of the country.

Now, I know how that sounds. Like something out of a tall tale. But they did it. They bought a whole empire from Napoleon Bonaparte for pennies on the dollar, and most of 'em had never even seen the land they were buying. Looking back, we see it as the moment America became a continent-sized nation. But at the time… oh, at the time, it was a wild, desperate gamble that broke all the rules and could have gone wrong a hundred different ways. It’s a story about a port, a revolution on a sugar island, and a decision made in a Paris drawing room that changed the world forever.

Let’s set the scene. It’s the turn of the nineteenth century. The United States is this young, gangly country, mostly stuck east of the Appalachian Mountains. The big superhighway for all the farmers and trappers out west wasn't a road, friend, it was the Mississippi River. Everything they grew, everything they traded, had to float down that river to the port of New Orleans to get shipped out to the world. And whoever controlled New Orleans held a knife to the throat of the American economy. For a while, Spain had it. And that was… okay. They were a known quantity, a little sleepy.

But then, in a secret deal, Spain gives the whole territory of Louisiana back to France. And France is run by Napoleon. Whoo, boy. Napoleon wasn't sleepy. He was ambitious, and he had ideas. Big ideas. President Thomas Jefferson, sitting in Washington, saw the danger right away. A French empire on his western border, controlling his country's main artery? Unacceptable. So Jefferson does what a president does. He sends a team to negotiate. He dispatches James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris. Their instructions were plain. They had a budget of ten million dollars.

Their job was to try and buy the city of New Orleans, and maybe a little slice of Florida if they could swing it. Just the port. That was the whole mission. Get control of the mouth of the Mississippi and secure America's future. They weren't shopping for an empire. They were just trying to buy a loading dock. But while they were sailing across the Atlantic, the whole world was changing under their feet. Napoleon’s grand plan was to re-establish a French empire in the Americas. Louisiana was supposed to be the breadbasket, the food source, for his prize jewel: the sugar-producing colony of Saint-Domingue, what we now call Haiti.

But the enslaved people of Haiti had other ideas. Under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint Louverture, they rose up. They fought a brutal, bloody war for their freedom. And they won. They beat Napoleon’s armies. It was a staggering defeat for France. It cost thousands of soldiers and a mountain of money. So by the time our boys, Monroe and Livingston, show up in Paris, Napoleon is in a tight spot. His Caribbean dream is dead. He's fixing to start another war with Great Britain, and he needs cash, fast. And that vast territory of Louisiana, which he can't defend from the British Navy anyway… it’s suddenly not an asset.

It's a liability. So the French foreign minister, a slick fella named Talleyrand, sits down with the Americans. Livingston starts in on the negotiation for New Orleans. And Talleyrand, cool as you please, interrupts him. He asks a question that must have made their heads spin. He says, essentially, "Forget the city. What would you give me for the whole thing?" The whole thing. All 828,000 square miles of it. From the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Livingston and Monroe were floored. They had no instructions for this. No authority. There's no telephone, no telegraph.

They can't just send a quick message back to Jefferson and ask, "Hey, is it cool if we spend fifteen million dollars to buy a third of the continent?" They were on their own. They had to make a choice, right then and there. They huddled up. They knew this was a once-in-a-history opportunity. So they did what any good horse trader would do. They haggled a bit, settled on a price of fifteen million dollars—about three cents an acre—and they said yes. They signed the treaty in April of 1803. They had just made the biggest real estate deal in the history of the world, and they did it without permission.

Then the treaty gets back to Washington. And now it’s Jefferson’s problem. He’s thrilled, of course. But he's also a man who believed in a strict, literal reading of the Constitution. And the Constitution says absolutely NOTHING about the President or Congress having the power to buy foreign land and make it part of the United States. His political enemies, the Federalists, are screaming bloody murder. They say it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, it's an overreach of executive power. They're worried about all that new territory shifting the balance of power in the country.

Jefferson has to wrestle with his own principles. But in the end, the prize is just too great to pass up. He sends the treaty to the Senate for ratification. The debate is fierce. But on October 20, 1803, the vote is held. And it passes, 24 to 7. With that, the deal was done. The United States had doubled in size. The path for westward expansion was blown wide open. All because of a slave rebellion in the Caribbean and a snap decision by two diplomats in Paris. I tell you what, you can't make this stuff up. Now, you stay with me here. Because the pivot, the moment it all could have gone another way, is what makes this story so powerful.

What if Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolutionaries had failed? What if Napoleon had successfully crushed the rebellion and secured his sugar island? He would have needed Louisiana as his granary. He never would have sold it. The United States would have remained hemmed in, a coastal nation with a French empire looming on its border. The history of North America would be completely different. There might not have been a Lewis and Clark expedition as we know it, no Manifest Destiny, no California Gold Rush. The whole shape of the country would be something we wouldn't even recognize.

And what looks so obvious now—that this was a genius move—was a huge risk then. Jefferson had to stretch the Constitution to its breaking point to make it happen. He justified it by saying the power to make treaties included the power to acquire territory. It was a gamble that paid off, but it set a precedent for presidential power that people argue about to this day. And we have to be honest about the other side of the coin. The purchase wasn't just a simple, happy land deal. That land wasn't empty. It was home to dozens of Native American nations. The purchase treaty transferred the "sovereignty" from France to the U.S., but it ignored the people who actually lived there.

For them, this wasn't a beginning; it was the beginning of the end. It kicked off a century of broken treaties, forced removals, and war. And the purchase also poured gasoline on the fire of slavery. Every time a new piece of that territory was ready to become a state, the fight erupted all over again: would it be free, or would it be slave? That question, born from the Louisiana Purchase, led directly down the line to the Civil War. So that fifteen-million-dollar bargain came with a cost that we were paying for generations. October twentieth is a day for redrawing maps, that’s for sure.

On that same day in 1883, way down in South America, Peru and Chile signed the Treaty of Ancón. It ended Peru's part in the War of the Pacific. And just like the Louisiana Purchase, it involved a huge transfer of land. Peru had to give up its Tarapacá province to Chile. A border changed not with a checkbook, but with blood. And sometimes the change is not on a map, but in the heart. On October 20, 2011, the Basque separatist group ETA, in Spain, made an announcement. After 43 years of fighting for an independent state, a campaign that involved some three thousand attacks and cost nearly nine hundred lives… they declared a permanent end to their armed activity.

Just like that, one of Europe's longest-running conflicts went quiet. An entire generation had grown up under that shadow, and then, on this day, it was lifted. Now, it didn't solve all the political problems, but it ended the violence. That’s an ending worth marking. And history keeps happening. More recently, on this day in 2020, Azerbaijan announced it had retaken the city of Zangilan during the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. For them, it was the liberation of a city that had been under Armenian control for 27 years. They even declared October twentieth "Zangilan City Day." Of course, for the Armenians who had been living there, it was a day of loss and displacement.

It just goes to show you, one day on the calendar can mean victory for one person and tragedy for another. History is rarely simple. But it’s not all treaties and territory. October twentieth is also a day for recognizing the folks who change the world not with armies, but with ideas. On this day in 1971, the Nobel Peace Prize went to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. He won it for his Ostpolitik, his policy of reaching out and trying to normalize relations with East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc. During the iciest days of the Cold War, he was trying to build bridges.

A lesson in courage. And then there's John Bardeen. Now there's a fella. On October 20, he became the first person—and still the only person—to win the Nobel Prize in Physics TWICE. The first time was for helping invent the transistor, the little switch that is the bedrock of every single piece of modern electronics. Your phone, your computer, the whole digital world. The second time was for a theory of superconductivity. The man fundamentally changed our world two different times. Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth. It's a day for personal histories, too.

On October 20, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman the world knew as the wife of a beloved slain president, married a Greek shipping tycoon named Aristotle Onassis. It was a move that surprised everybody, a new chapter in a life lived under an intense public spotlight. And it's a day for remembering tragedy and the lessons that come from it. On this day in 1991, a small grass fire in the hills above Oakland, California, whipped by fierce winds, exploded into a firestorm. It burned with such intensity it created its own weather. In the end, 25 people were gone, and nearly three-and-a-half thousand homes were turned to ash.

It was a terrible wake-up call about the danger of building our towns right up against the wildlands, a lesson we are still trying to learn as the climate gets hotter and drier. But I want to end on a story about hope. Because October twentieth has that, too. It’s 2004. The American League Championship Series in baseball. The Boston Red Sox are playing their bitter rivals, the New York Yankees. It’s a best-of-seven series. The Yankees win the first game. Then the second. Then the third. They're up three games to none. No team in the entire history of baseball had EVER come back from that.

It was over. Done. But then the Red Sox won game four. Then game five. Then game six. And on October 20, 2004, they played game seven. And they won. They did the impossible. It’s a story sports fans tell their kids, a reminder that no matter how bad it looks, it ain't over 'til it's over. Well. That is about the size of it. A single date on the calendar. A day that holds a real estate deal that made a nation, the end of a 43-year war, a Nobel prize for peace, another for changing physics twice, and a baseball game that taught us to never, ever give up. It tells you that history isn't just something in a book.

It’s happening all the time, in big ways and small, and every day has a story to tell if you're willing to listen.