1. Jefferson initially believed the government could not purchase the Louisiana Territory because ...

2. However, he modified his position and eventually authorized the purchase because ...

As a strict constitutionalist, Jefferson fretted that the deal he had been handed was unconstitutional. He worried that the treaty powers granted to the president in the Constitution did not allow the executive branch to attain land through treaty. Napoleon offered Jefferson the Louisiana Purchase because his armies had tried and failed to recapture the colony of Santo Domingo (Haiti) from the armies of former slaves which had wrested it away from France in the 1790s.