Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 | Page 7

was in some
sense a party. One of the most striking results of these treaties on this

side of the Atlantic was the cession of Florida to Great Britain by Spain
in exchange for the release of Cuba, which the English and colonial
forces under Lord Albemarle had wrested from Spanish authority the
preceding year. England held Florida for twenty years, when among the
disasters brought upon her by our Revolution was its retrocession to
Spain in 1783,--a result which was accounted by our forefathers a great
gain to the new Republic. Still more striking were the losses of France.
Fifty years before, by the Treaty of Utrecht, France had surrendered to
England the island of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia (then including New
Brunswick), and the Hudson-bay Territory. She now gave up Canada
and Cape Breton, acknowledged the sovereignty of Great Britain in the
original thirteen Colonies as extending to the Mississippi, and, by a
separate treaty, surrendered Louisiana on the west side of the
Mississippi, with New Orleans on the east side, to Spain. Thus, in 1763,
French power disappeared from North American. The last square mile
of the most valuable colonial territory ever possessed by a European
sovereign was lost under the weak and effeminate rule of Louis XV., a
reign not fitted for successful war, but distinguished only, as one of its
historians says, for "easy-mannered joyance, and the brilliant charm of
fashionable and philosophical society."
The country which France surrendered to Spain was of vast but
indefinite extent. Added to her other North-American colonies, it gave
to Spain control of more than half the continent. She continued in
possession of Louisiana until the year 1800, when, during some
European negotiations, Bonaparte concluded a treaty at San Ildefonso
with Charles IV., by which the entire territory was retroceded to France.
When the First Consul acquired Louisiana, he appeared to look forward
to a career of peace,--an impression greatly strengthened by the
conclusion of the treaty of Amiens the ensuing year. He added to his
prestige as a ruler when he regained from Spain the American empire
which the Bourbons had weakly surrendered thirty- seven years before,
and he expected a large and valuable addition to the trade and resources
of France from the vast colonial possession. The formal transfer of so
great a territory on a distant continent was necessarily delayed; and,
before the Captain- general of France reached New Orleans in 1803,
the Spanish authorities, still in possession, had become so odious to the

inhabitants of the western section of the Union by their suspension of
the right of deposit at New Orleans, that there was constant danger of
an armed collision. Mr. Ross of Pennsylvania, an able and conservative
statesman, moved in the Senate of the United States that the
government be instructed to seize New Orleans. Gouverneur Morris, a
statesman of the Revolutionary period, then a senator from New York,
seconded Mr. Ross. So intense was the feeling among the people that a
large army of volunteers could have been easily raised in the
Mississippi valley to march against New Orleans; but the prudence of
Mr. Jefferson restrained every movement that might involve us in a war
with Spain, from which nothing was to be gained, and by which every
thing would be risked.
THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA.
Meanwhile Mr. Robert R. Livingston, our minister at Paris, was
pressing the French Government for concessions touching the free
navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans,
and was speaking to the First Consul, as a French historian observes, in
a tone which "arrested his attention, and aroused him to a sense of the
new power that was growing beyond the sea." Mr. Livingston was
re-enforced by Mr. Monroe, sent out by President Jefferson as a special
envoy in the spring of 1803, in order to effect some adjustment of the
irritating questions which were seriously endangering the relations
between France and the United States. The instructions of Mr. Madison,
then secretary of State, to Mr. Monroe, show that the utmost he
expected was to acquire from France the city of New Orleans and the
Floridas, of which he believed France either then was, or was about to
become, the actual owner. Indeed, the treaty by which France had
acquired Louisiana was but imperfectly understood; and, in the
slowness and difficulty of communication, Mr. Madison could not
accurately know the full extent of the cession made at San Ildefonso.
But Mr. Jefferson did not wait to learn the exact provisions of that
treaty. He knew instinctively that they deeply concerned the United
States. He saw with clear vision that by the commercial disability upon
the western section of the Union its progress would be obstructed, its
already attained prosperity checked; and that possibly its population,

drawn