History shows that empires acquire territories in various ways.  Dynasties link arms through marriage, as the Habsburgs were famous for doing.  Territories are pinched by means of arms or stolen through sham contracts and undertakings.  They might also be purchased.  

The United States made much of the vast property sale in acquiring an empire.  The Louisiana purchase of 1803 for a mere $15 million was daring, opportunistic and extra-legal.  It was also initiated by a US president who had romantically insisted that the fledgling republic confine itself to the agricultural good deeds of a model yeomanry.  But Thomas Jefferson could be cunningly devilish, and France, then under the firm rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, worried him.  “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”  

Boney, his interests more focused on Europe, was open to giving up the land for a fee.  The natives, naturally, were not consulted.  Jefferson, having previously advocated the need to observe the Constitution with pious dedication, ignored it on the issue of purchasing territory, there being no allowance for it in the document.  And so the first signs of the imperial presidency showed.

In 1868, the hungry eye of US officialdom showed that conquering and controlling the continent was not merely a matter of westward expansion that would eventually see, in the lofty observation of Frederick Jackson Turner, its closing.  Acquisitive desires pointed to Iceland and Greenland as possible eastward options. 

A 1868 publication for the US State Department compiled........

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