With preparations for the journey well under way Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte of France in 1803. Jefferson had Lewis tutored in Philadelphia by experts in these fields to prepare him for the expedition. With agrarian interests in mind Jefferson directed them to make observations and measurements along the exploration route concerning plants, animals, soils, geography, and climate. Lewis, in turn, identified Lieutenant William Clark (1770 –1838), an earlier commander of his, to serve as the expedition's co-leader. Jefferson recruited Meriwether Lewis (1774 –1809), a young army captain serving as Jefferson's personal White House secretary, to lead the expedition. The primary objective of a proposed expedition was, in Jefferson's own words, "to determine the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce."
With water travel essential to commerce, Jefferson favored exploration and development of new water routes. In 1801, however, Britain, Spain, France, and Russia still held vague claims to western North America, though the territory was in the possession of Native Americans. In part, their knowledge was expanded because of the work of Captain James Cook (1728 –1779), who measured the longitude along the Pacific Coast in 1780, and later of American Captain Robert Gray (1755 –1806), who mapped the precise location of the Columbia River's mouth in 1792.
By the time of his administration, Americans had a clearer understanding of the size of the continent they inhabited. In March of 1801 Jefferson became the third president of the United States (1801 –09) and was in a position to further his exploration and land acquisition plans. The lack of sufficient funding and political support, however, hindered such efforts through the 1790s. Not expand westward, Britain or other countries might soon colonize the region.
Although the Mississippi River formed the western boundary of the United States, Jefferson wanted to explore the region beyond, fearing that if the U.S. To find more farming land, Jefferson looked West. With the vast majority of the population engaged in agriculture, Thomas Jefferson (1801 –1809) believed that the health of the republic rested on small independent farms, owned by men he called "Yeoman farmers." Jefferson also favored a strong agrarian economy to counter tendencies of concentrating wealth and power in emerging manufacturing centers of the east. The nation's economy diversified and grew during the first decades of the United States' independence from the British Empire.
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