Lateefah Simon: “Let me add that the treaty was signed in Paris in May. In those days you did not find out what had happened for a while.…”

“Let me add that the treaty was signed in Paris in May. In those days you did not find out what had happened for a while. When word got to Washington, DC, in July--and I apologize to my colleague from North Carolina--when word got to Jefferson in July in Washington, DC, he was as startled as anyone else by the Louisiana Purchase. Our Secretary of the Treasury at that point was a man named Albert Gallatin, many States have Gallatin counties named for him. Most people do not know for whom Gallatin is named. Albert Gallatin objected to the Louisiana Purchase, or part of it, because part of the agreement was that the bonds were 5 percent. They could not pay back any of it for the first 15 years. He wanted to pay it off very, very quickly. But the really important point here is that there were two votes in the U.S. Senate on the Louisiana Purchase. There was one vote in the House of Representatives on the Louisiana Purchase. I do know the precise totals. It was something like 26 to 3, or something like that, in the Senate, and all of them were far more than the 60 percent required by this constitutional amendment. So this amendment would not have blocked the Louisiana Purchase, I want to assure my colleague from West Virginia.”