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The Louisiana Purchase In the last part of the eighteenth century the Louisiana Territory was owned by Spain. This meant that the Spanish government controlled access to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi. Farmers on the Western frontier needed the Mississippi River to get their goods to markets on the East Coast. The problem here being that American goods had to go through Louisiana to get to the East Coast by ship. With Pinckney’s treaty of 1795 Spain granted American farmers the right to ship their goods on the Mississippi wi