1805.

LOUISIANA REMONSTRANCE.

29

vantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States; violated the Declaration of Independence, because grievances which held no mean place in the list that document contained had been inflicted on them;* violated the rights of men, because it stripped them of liberty, self-government, and independence. These charges the petitioners supported by long arguments, and ended with an earnest demand for incorporation into the Union, and for the repeal of so much of the law as cut Louisiana into two parts and forbade the importation of slaves.

A few days after this remonstrance and petition had been laid before the Senate a very similar document reached the House from a convention held at St. Louis. To this convention had come delegates from the districts of New Madrid, and Cape Girardeau, Sainte Geneviève, St. Louis, and St. Charles and its dependencies, all in the District of Louisiana. Having been duly elected by the people, the delegates considered themselves as speaking for the people, and demanded a radical reform. They asked for the repeal of the law providing for the temporary government of Louisiana; for a permanent division of the territory; and sketched a plan for the government of that part in which they lived. The Governor, Secretary, and Judges should be appointed by the President, should speak both French and English, should live in the district, and own property therein to the amount prescribed in the ordinance of 1787. They would have an assembly made up of two men from each county, a delegate on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the right to buy, sell, and import slaves. They would have money appropriated and land set apart for the use of schools. They would have the records of every court kept in French and English, and every contract made or judgment rendered under Spanish law left undisturbed.

* Taxation without representation; obligation to obey laws without a voice in making them; a dependent judiciary, and an undue influence of the Executive on the Legislature.

January 4, 1805.

Governor, one thousand acres; secretary, five hundred acres; each judge, five hundred acres.

The two memorials were sent to the committee on so much of the President's message as related to Louisiana. John Randolph was chairman, and the report made to the House toward the end of January was from his hand. He declared the grievances complained of to be such as were inseparable from change of government. He declared that only under the torture could the Treaty of Paris be made to speak the language ascribed to it by the memorialists. He denied that the Government of the United States had been wanting in good faith, and ended by recommending that the right to self-government be given to the people of Louisiana. Having heard the report, the House bade a committee to bring in a bill, or bills, in accordance with the suggestion. The committee did nothing, for the very day the House gave the order a bill providing a new government for Orleans was read in the Senate.* Ten days later + another bill, extending the right of self-government to the District of Louisiana, was also read in the Senate, and in the last hours of the session both were passed by the House. By the one, the country which had been the District of Louisiana became the Territory of Louisiana, with a Governor, a Secretary, and three Judges of its own. By the other, the people of the Territory of Orleans obtained a government similar to that of Mississippi,‡ and were promised that, when the free inhabitants of the soil numbered sixty thousand, Orleans should be made a State and admitted into the Union.#

In the opinion of the three delegates, Orleans should have been made a State at once. The act, therefore, gave them great offence. From the moment of their arrival to the moment when the fate of the bill was no longer doubtful the three had behaved with great prudence. They were much in the company of the friends of Jefferson, had nothing to do with foreign ministers, and contented themselves with sending long remonstrances to the committee in charge of the bill. But the in

* January 28, 1805.

February 7, 1805.

A General Assembly of twenty-five delegates chosen by the people.

# Each act went into effect on July 4, 1805. The Territory of Louisiana included the whole country north of latitude thirty-three degrees and west of the Mississippi river. The northern and western boundaries were undetermined.

1805.

THE MOBILE ACT.

31

stant the fate of the bill was decided, the instant they became certain it would pass, their conduct changed. They now became the close friends of the British Minister, the French Minister, and of Aaron Burr. They no longer hesitated to declare publicly that the law would not be tolerated; that they would seek redress elsewhere; and that, from what they had seen at Washington, they did not believe the Union could long hold together.* Three days after the passage of the bill the delegates set off for home. The threat of the delegates that they would seek abroad for the redress they could not get at home was not so idle as it now seems. They made it well knowing that the United States was deeply involved in a most serious quarrel with France and Spain over the ownership of West Florida. During the first session of the eighth Congress an act had been passed laying tonnage and import duties in Louisiana, spreading over it the laws relating to the bank, the treasury, the mint, the circulation of foreign coin, the collection of debts, establishing ports of entry and ports of delivery, and marking out the bounds of custom districts. A fortnight later Yrujo, with a copy of the Gazette containing it in his hand, entered the office of the Secretary of State. Storming and boiling with rage, he pointed to the eleventh section of the act and pronounced it an infamous libel and a violation of the sovereignty of Spain. And well he might, for the section gave the President most extreme power. Whenever he saw fit, Jefferson was to erect all the shores, all the waters, inlets, creeks, and bays emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, from the Pascagoula eastward, into a collection district, and provide it with a port of entry and delivery.† No boundary was fixed on the east. But the law applied no farther east than the United States claimed jurisdiction, and the United States claimed no jurisdiction beyond the Perdido river. Of this fact Yrujo was politely informed. The answer of Yrujo was a full refutation of the claims of the

*

Merry to Harrowby, No. 14, March 29, 1805. Adams's Hist. of U. S., p. 401. t "To erect the shores, waters, and inlets of the Bay and River of Mobile, and of the other rivers, creeks, inlets, and bays emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, east of the said River Mobile and west thereof to the Pascagoula, inclusive, into a separate district."-Act of February 24, 1804.

United States to West Florida, a charge that sovereignty of Spain was usurped by the act, and a demand that the law be annulled.* To annul the law was not possible. But the note had its effect, and, a few weeks later, when Jefferson issued his proclamation defining the new district, he wilfully departed from the language of the act. He then declared all the shores, waters, inlets, creeks, and rivers "lying within the boundaries of the United States" to be a collection district, with Fort Stoddert for the port of entry. As not one foot of West Florida lay within "the boundaries of the United States," the President, by the addition of these words, destroyed the force of the act.

To understand the boundary dispute which thus arose it is necessary to recall the history of French dominion in what is now the United States; to recall how Marquette and Joliet discovered the Mississippi; how La Salle explored it to its mouth; how, standing on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, he named the country Louisiana, and took possession of it for France; and how, in 1685, when seeking the Mississippi by sea, he reached the bay of Matagorda and founded Fort St. Louis, of Texas. By the custom of nations, the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi gave to France all the country drained by that river and its branches. The discovery of the Texas coast gave to her the water-shed of that coast, while the establishment of Fort St. Louis carried her claim along the Gulf southward to a point midway between Fort St. Louis and the nearest Spanish post. The nearest Spanish post was in the Province of Paduco. On the rude maps of the closing days of the seventeenth century Louisiana, therefore, extends from the Rio Grande to the Mobile, from the Gulf to the country beyond the source of the Mississippi river, and from the Smoky Mountains to the unknown regions of the West. To the claim of discovery and the claim of exploration was soon added a third, that of settlement; and, before the first quarter of the eighteenth century ended, Biloxi had been founded, and Mobile; the forts Rosalie, Toulouse and Tombigbee, Natchitoches and Assumption, Chartres and Cahokia Proclamation, May 30, 1804.

* Yrujo to Madison, March 7, 1804.

1762.

SPANISH CLAIMS TO WEST FLORIDA.

33

erected, and the streets and ramparts of New Orleans marked out by De la Tour.

Thus firmly in possession of the Mississippi on the south and holding the St. Lawrence and the Lakes on the north, the French began to overrun the country; built Fort Lake Pepin, Fort Vincent, Niagara, Detroit, Toronto, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point; strengthened their settlements on the Mississippi and the Illinois, and, when the second quarter of the century ended, had taken formal possession of the valley of the Ohio; built Presqu' Isle and Le Bœuf, and Venango, and soon after, at the gateway of the Ohio river, came face to face with the English.

The conflict which followed has come down in history as the French and Indian War. It ought to have been called the war for possession. When it was over, French power in America was gone. By the treaty of November third, 1762, France gave to England, Nova Scotia, Acadia, Cape Breton, Canada, all the islands and all the coasts of the Gulf and river St. Lawrence, and divided her possessions in what is now our country into two parts. The line of partition was the Mississippi river from its source to the river Iberville; thence it ran through the Iberville to Lake Maurepas, and along the north shore of Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico. All to the east she gave to England; all to the west she gave to Spain. No sooner did England come into possession of her share than she proceeded to cut it up. From the junction of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers she drew a line due east along a parallel to the Appalachicola and down that river to the Gulf, and named the country thus enclosed West Florida. To what is now the State of Florida east of the Appalachicola she gave the present bounds and the name of Florida East. During twenty years these bounds and names remained undisturbed; then, in 1783, Great Britain made the north boundary of West Florida the parallel of thirty-one from the Mississippi to the Appalachicola, and gave the two Floridas to Spain.

Spain thus received the two Floridas from England and not from France. When therefore in 1800, by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain bound herself to return Lou

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