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§ 464]

WEST FLORIDA AND TEXAS

391

463. Livingston had been instructed to get West Florida if possible. Now, taking advantage of the vague wording of his purchase treaty, he set up the claim that he had done so. Indeed he urged the government to use "the favorable moment" to take possession, "even though a little force should be necessary." Jefferson seems to have approved the idea. John Randolph, the spokesman for the administration in Congress, declared we had bought the mouth of "the Mobile with its widely extended branches; and there is not now a single stream of note rising within the United States and falling into the Gulf. . . which is not entirely our own, the Appalachicola excepted."

But when Napoleon sent his lieutenant, Laussat, to America in 1803, to take formal possession of Louisiana from Spain, in order to transfer it to the United States, he told that officer plainly that the eastern boundary was the Mississippi and the Iberville. Laussat so told Jefferson; and we received Louisiana with this understanding, and without protest. None the less, a few weeks later, Congress created West Florida into a United States revenue district, and annexed it to the Territory of Mississippi. This "Mobile Act," however, was never put in force. Spain's protest was so unanswerable that Jefferson was driven into discreditable evasions in trying to explain his position.

464. Thus the matter slumbered six years. In 1808 Napoleon seized Spain, and soon the Spanish colonies in America, one by one, became independent states.' In West Florida this movement was managed by Americans who had migrated across the Iberville and formed settlements between that river and the Perdido. In July, 1810, they demanded from the Spanish governor a remodeling of the government. For a while they acted in harmony with him; but soon they issued a declaration of independence, and applied to the United States for annexation. October 27, President Madison ordered the American governor at New Orleans to take military possession as far as to the Perdido,

1 Modern Progress, p. 340, or Modern World, § 638.

and Congress then annexed the district to the Territory of New Orleans (§ 461).

Madison tried to justify this robbery of a friendly power by pretending to fear that England might seize the territory if we did not (a convenient pretext used by our government more than once since to cover land grabs); but, unhappily, recent research proves beyond dispute that the whole rising had been inspired from New Orleans in accordance with instructions from Washington (American Historical Association Reports for 1911).

As settlement poured into the Mississippi Territory, West Florida certainly became worth far more to us than it was to Spain. It lay, a narrow strip, between us and our natural coast line. It held the mouths of our rivers and the harbors of our commerce, while to Spain it meant nothing except the chance to limit our power. If the two countries had been individuals, Spain would have been morally bound to sell at a fair price; but any court would have defended her title, if, immorally, she insisted upon annoying her neighbor by keeping possession. Between two nations, as matters went in that day, it was inevitable that we should get the district, if not by fair bargaining, then by open force. The unfortunate thing is that the actual procedure was such a needless and inex tricable mixture of violence and deceit.

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465. The boundary between Louisiana and Mexico had never been defined. Napoleon's instructions to Laussat placed the dividing line at the Rio Grande. If that was correct, we had bought Texas. But Spain protested that the proper boundary was the Sabine. The question was complicated; we cared little about it at the time; the territory was a wilderness, without White inhabitants except at a few Spanish missions; and in 1819 we surrendered all claim to Texas as part of the price we paid for East Florida, which we were then buying from Spain.

III. WESTERN EXPLORATION

466. Jefferson had long manifested a scientific interest in "delineating the arteries of the continent." In 1783 he had urged George Rogers Clark to explore the West to the Pacific; and three years later, while in France, he had persuaded Led

$468]

LEWIS AND CLARK

393

yard, an American traveler, to attempt to reach the Pacific coast of America by way of Siberia and the ocean. There must be a great river, he argued, flowing from the western mountains into the Pacific, rising near

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the head waters of the Missouri. The explorer could ascend this stream and descend the Missouri to St. Louis.

467. Ledyard was turned back by suspicious Russian officials. But in 1792 Captain Gray of Boston, in his ship Columbia, discovered the mouth of the prophesied river, and named it for his vessel. This was our first basis for future claim to the Oregon country. As soon as Jefferson became President, he secured from Congress an appropriation for an exploring expedition to that country, to be led by Meriwether Lewis (Jefferson's private secretary) and Captain William Clark (a brother of George Rogers Clark). Before the expedition was ready, the purchase of Louisiana made much of the territory to be explored our own, and gave us possessions contiguous to the unoccupied and almost unclaimed Oregon district.

MERIWETHER LEWIS, in hunting costume. From Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, after a contemporary drawing among the possessions of Lewis' companion, Captain Clark,the only known likeness of the explorer.

468. Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis with thirty-five men, in the spring of 1804. Sixteen hundred miles up the

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