In reading this articleabout events leading to the Louisiana Purchase when the US agreed to pay France 15 million dollars for the property how was that money paid? All at once in gold, some kind of installments, US printed dollars, checks to the Nation of France cashable on the US Treasury?
How did it happen?
The Wikipedia article says that the US government issued bonds (in addition to $3 million in gold as a down payment) to Francis Baring and Company of London and Hope and Company of Amsterdam. Those two banks then shipped gold to France.
That’s embarrassing. I looked at the wiki article before posting but I must have blew past that section. Thanks for info.
It’s interesting how Wikipedia has become the primary ‘source of truth’ for so many SDMB posts. I’m not saying it’s incorrect in this case, only how dependent we’ve become on Wiki for answers to common questions. Remember that almost anyone can add information to Wiki… I know because I have.
That’s because there is no better general reference available on the 'Net for non-controversial topics. It’s fast, comprehensive, and just as reliable as “respectable” references like EB. Even better, if one is dubious about the facts on Wiki they can be checked via references and the discussion page.
Yeah, in the beginning, I didn’t trust Wikipedia, and was annoyed how people would just cite it instead of actual publications–out of sheer laziness. But by now, it gets so much attention, and generally so many knowledgeable people keep an eye on it, that it suffices for general references.
As for the OP, I wonder what would have happened if the gold somehow got stolen en route?
Actually, there is a better source, our own SDMB. See this thread from 2013 for a thorough discussion of the financing of the Louisiana Purchase; see especially post#16 by that Pig guy. Note that Wikipedia is flat-out wrong in asserting an American down payment.
Well, the Wikipedia article at least provides a source: The Sixth Great Power: Barings 1762–1929 by Philip Ziegler. I don’t have access to it so I can’t verify the accuracy.
Wiki is still the best general-purpose reference available on the 'Net. You can make it even better but correcting it. I love the SDMB but it is nowhere near as comprehensive as Wikipedia.
Do you know how reference links and footnotes work? Wikipedia is a fully open platform, when you say that “anyone can add information to wiki” you say it like there is no way to discern when a crackpot posts information versus someone knowledgeable. But in fact, you can see the history of every edit ever made to an article. Further, if a factual claim has an associated footnote, it will reference a citation that you can evaluate for yourself. It may be a book you have to go to a library to read, but there it is. Not all books are easily available online yet.
If a factual claim has no reference to support it, that’s also something you can decide to on whether you want to trust/distrust it. Wikipedia is thus actually more robust than sources like Encyclopedia Britannica (which has been found to have more factual errors per article than Wikipedia)–lots of EB articles are written by people with professional qualifications in their field but are not rigorously reviewed by thousands of wikipedia mavens. It’s easy for a factual error to get into an EB article, just like it’s easy for one to get into a wikipedia article–but they can be and often are corrected very quickly in Wikipedia.
To nitpick, although I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying:
That 2005 study which is the source of those Britannica having more errors is misreported at best.
Wikipedia is indispensable, and at least as useful as any encyclopedia for most ordinary situations. If you’re writing something that other people might cite, even if it’s online, doublecheck everything, including the references. And it’s amazing how many of them now go to dead links.
Most wiki entries are supported by citations to external sources. That’s what those little footnotes are for. In many cases you may see a reference for citation needed.
It’s essentially a crowdsourced encyclopedia, with the implicit assumption that the correct answers will crowd out the incorrect ones. Which, for the most part is absolutely true, except in a few cases.
One of those cases is recent things where the truth isn’t known, or isn’t agreed on just yet, so the pages tend to fluctuate around for a while before settling down to a pretty good statement of the facts and prevailing opinions.
Second, is when the topics in question are religiously or ideologically charged. Those pages tend to fluctuate fairly frequently until they get locked down or the topic ceases to be controversial.
But for 99% of things that are scientific or historical, Wikipedia is probably more accurate than your average print encyclopedia, because, as a history professor friend of mine commented “Every grad student is going to go out there and edit up the wikipedia pages on his topic of interest and make sure it’s accurate.” So unless there’s some kind of controversy, a lot of the pages just get a lot of eyes to find errors.