The Winning of the West, Volume One | Page 4

for a long period our
chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our
antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during
the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the
sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and
dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace
negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to restrict
our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while even during the
concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the upper
Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a menace no
less serious than the British troops at Detroit.
In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman
found the Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi even
more hurtful and irksome than the retention by the British king of the
posts on the Great Lakes. After years of tedious public negotiations,
under and through which ran a dark woof of private intrigue, the
sinewy western hands so loosened the Spanish grip that in despair
Spain surrendered to France the mouth of the river and the vast
territories stretching thence into the dim Northwest. She hoped thereby
to establish a strong barrier between her remaining provinces and her
most dreaded foe. But France in her turn grew to understand that
America's position as regards Louisiana, thanks to the steady westward
movement of the backwoodsman, was such as to render it on the one
hand certain that the retention of the province by France would mean
an armed clash with the United States, and on the other hand no less
certain that in the long run such a conflict would result to France's
disadvantage. Louisiana thus passed from the hands of Spain, after a
brief interval, into those of the young Republic. There remained to
Spain, Mexico and Florida; and forthwith the pressure of the stark
forest riflemen began to be felt on the outskirts of these two provinces.

Florida was the first to fall. After a portion of it had been forcibly
annexed, after Andrew Jackson had marched at will through part of the
remainder, and after the increasing difficulty of repressing the
American filibustering efforts had shown the imminence of some
serious catastrophe, Spain ceded the peninsula to the United States.
Texas, New Mexico, and California did not fall into American hands
until they had passed from the Spaniard to his half-Indian sons.
Many decades went by after Spain had lost her foothold on the
American continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She
misgoverned the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in
the islands, as once upon the continent, her own children became her
deadliest foes. But generation succeeded generation, and the prophecies
of those far-seeing statesmen who foretold that she would lose to the
northern Republic her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At
last, at the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even
Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened,
and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the
mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the
remote East.
We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our
fathers and of our fathers' fathers. It is moreover a matter for just pride
that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess shown by
our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in the spirit
with which the deed was done. The backwoodsmen had pushed the
Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding republic in
Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in the sheer
masterful exercise of might. It is true that they won great triumphs for
civilization no less than for their own people; yet they won them
unwittingly, for they were merely doing as countless other strong
young races had done in the long contest carried on for so many
thousands of years between the fit and the unfit. But in 1898 the United
States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had likewise
been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility. Our conquest
of the Southwest has been justified by the result. The Latin peoples in
the lands we won and settled have prospered like our own stock. The
sons and grandsons of those who had been our foes in Louisiana and
New Mexico came eagerly forward to serve in the army that was to

invade Cuba. Our people as a whole went into the war, primarily, it is
true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from America; but with the
fixed determination to replace his