Purchase of Louisiana 241 Orleans free of duty, which had been secured by the treaty of 1795 (§ 147). Plainly, he meant to turn over the province to France with the river blocked to American trade. Hence it was that Jefferson wrote to Robert R. Livingston, our minister in France: "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans from that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation." A party in Congress wanted to take New Orleans by military force; and an act was passed authorizing 80,000 volunteers. Jefferson was cooler. He instructed Livingston to attempt the purchase of the Island of Orleans and the strip to the eastward, between the southern boundary of the United States and the Gulf. In January, 1803, he designated his friend James Monroe as a special envoy to France to aid Livingston. Fortunately for America, Napoleon was already tired of his own plan, for war with Great Britain was about to break out again, and it would be impossible for him to protect the sea route to Louisiana. Meanwhile he failed to reconquer the necessary halfway station of Haiti, where Toussaint L'Ouverture, a negro general, aided by fever, had the impertinence to destroy 10,000 of his best troops. 159. PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA (1803) Therefore, while Livingston was trying to buy West Florida and New Orleans, suddenly the French foreign office asked him what he would give for the whole of Louisiana. One day later Monroe arrived, and the two ministers did not hesitate to go beyond their instructions by accepting the offer, but for some weeks haggled over the price. The treaty was completed April 30, 1803; the United States was to pay $11,250,000 in cash and $3,750,000 to American claimants against the French government, a total of $15,000,000; in return Napoleon ceded all Louisiana, including the Island of Orleans and the whole Purchase of Louisiana 243 western part of the valley of the Mississippi, with an area of 885,000 square miles. Livingston, Monroe, and Jefferson each thought that he was responsible for this splendid addition to the territory of the United States. In reality, Louisiana came like a plum dropping from the tree; but Jefferson is fairly entitled to the credit of seeing more clearly than any other man of his time the danger of France becoming a neighbor, and the possibilities of the West. Since there was nothing in the Constitution on the question of annexing territory, Jefferson asked for a constitutional amendment; but his friends found authority in the old Federalist doctrine of implied powers, and the treaty was promptly ratified. Notwithstanding protests by some of the New England Federalists, the next step was to take possession of the new country; New Orleans was turned over by the Spanish commander to a French officer (November 30, 1803), and twenty days thereafter was formally ceded by the Frenchman to the United States; though the distant Spanish post of St. Louis was not transferred till March, 1804. The population of the new acquisition was about 40,000, almost entirely settled along the water fronts of the Mississippi and Red rivers. Congress speedily passed an act organizing the lower part of Louisiana as the Territory of Orleans, with an appointed legislature. The people of New Orleans were in an uproar. They did not like the new laws, the new language, or the new governor, and Congress good-naturedly gave them a territorial government with an elective legislature (March, 1805). Seven years later an act was passed for the admission of this small part of the old province of Louisiana as "Louisiana," an equal state in the Union (18th). The annexation of Louisiana soon led to serious boundary controversies with Spain. The treaty of 1803 contained no description of Louisiana except the phrase of the treaty of San Ildefonso: "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it"; HART'S NEW AMER. HIST. - 16 but "in the hands of Spain" Louisiana did not include West Florida; while "as France possessed it" Louisiana extended to the Perdido. The Spanish government insisted that their cession of Louisiana in 1800 was not intended to include West Florida, and the French supported that contention. Yet Livingston, who had started out to purchase West Florida, could not give up the idea that he had secured it as part of Louisiana, and Jefferson soon took up that belief, which was held for many years. Spain was in possession of the disputed strip, and refused to give it up. In 1810 the United States annexed part of the region, and in 1811 Congress passed a secret act authorizing the President to take East Florida also; but it was not till 1813 that the whole even of the West Florida claim was occupied. 160. REACHING OUT FOR OREGON (1792-1811) Jefferson was the first man to see the possibilities on the northwestern Pacific coast, where in 1792 Captain Gray, in the ship Columbia of Boston, had found the mouth of a great river, and named it for his ship. As soon as Jefferson became President, he induced Congress to provide for an overland expedition to this Oregon country, under the command of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson's private secretary. By the time this expedition left St. Louis (May 14, 1804), the whole Missouri valley had become part of the United States, by the annexation of Louisiana. In the course of six months, the party of 45 men ascended the Missouri 1600 miles. They camped all winter, and in the spring of 1805, 31 of them started northwest, under the guidance of the Indian "Bird Woman," who carried her child on her back. In August, 1805, they reached a point on the Missouri River where a man could bestride it; and then they struck across the mountains on horseback and found a westward-flowing river; following down, they reached the mouth of the Columbia River (November 15, 1805), 4000 miles from St. Louis. Burr Insurrection 245 This expedition through a country absolutely unknown to white men, opened up half a continent; and it was the second link (following Gray's discovery) in the chain that bound Oregon to the United States. Eventually it gave the United States a Pacific sea front, and opened a broad window toward the Pacific islands and Asia. In 1811 John Jacob Astor forged EXPLORATIONS OF LEWIS AND CLARK, AND PIKE. the third link of our possession by establishing a fur-trading post at Astoria, on the south side of the Columbia. Meanwhile, in 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, with a command of United States troops, approached the northern boundary of Louisiana in an exploration up the Mississippi River to find its source. On another expedition he made his way westward overland, discovered Pikes Peak, and came out beyond our boundaries in New Mexico. 161. BURR INSURRECTION (1806) Another difficulty arose in Louisiana in 1806 through the ambition of Aaron Burr. His willingness to accept the presidency in 1801 (§ 154) was never forgiven by Jefferson; and in the presidential election of 1804 George Clinton of New York was put in his place for Vice President. Jefferson and Clinton swept the country; the Federalist candidates got only 14 |