a separation-amicably if they can, violently if they must."

Here Mr. Quincy was called to order, but, being suffered to proceed, went on with a statement of the old Federalist argument of 1803-that the Consti

tution did not authorize the admission of foreign territory, but only of States formed from the territory possessed by the Union at the first. "If this bill be admitted," he exclaimed, "the whole space of Louisi

ana, greater, it is said, Josich Quincy

than the entire extent

of the United States, will be a mighty theater in which the Government assumes the right of exercising this unparalleled power; nor will it stop until the very name and nature of the old partners be overwhelmed by newcomers into the confederacy. This is not so much a question concerning the exercise of sovereignty as it is who shall be sovereign. Whether the proprietors of the

good old United States shall manage their own affairs in their own way, or whether they and their Constitution and their political rights shall be trampled under foot by foreigners introduced through a breach of the Constitution. Suppose the population of the whole world beyond the Mississippi were to be brought in to form our laws, control our rights, and decide our destiny. Can it be pretended that the framers of the Constitution would have listened to it? They were not madmen. They had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy. Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be, at no great distance of time, more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the center of the contemplated empire. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into a hotchpotch of the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. The whole extent of Louisiana is to be cut up into independent States to counterbalance

and to paralyze whatever there is of influence in other quarters of the Union. The gentleman from Mississippi spoke the other day of the Mississippi as of a high road betweenGood heavens! between what, Mr. Speaker? Why, the Eastern and Western States. So that all the countries once the extreme western boundary of our Union are hereafter to be denominated Eastern States."

Mr. Quincy concluded with a declaration in which the State was exalted above the Union. "Sir, I confess it, the first public love of my heart is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There is my fireside; there are the tombs of my ancestors. The love of this Union grows out of this attachment to my native soil, and is rooted in it. I cherish it because it affords the best external hope of her peace, her prosperity, her independence. I oppose this bill from the deep conviction that it contains a principle incompatible with the liberties and safety of my country. The bill, if it passes, is a death-blow to the Constitution."

Josiah Quincy's speech may appropriately have a place in the story of the Louisiana

Purchase. As the newcomers into the Union were long looked upon askance by many of their fellow-citizens into whose society they had been forced, so in their own hearts they remained unreconciled until far along in the century. Old soldiers of the civil war recall how often as they marched or sailed among the bayous and plantations, or as hated invaders passed through the streets of New Orleans, the flag of France was displayed from doors and windows, the householders behind making claim to French citizenship. Had the South prevailed, and the Union been split into the "States dissevered, discordant, and divided "—the nightmare which troubled the imagination of Daniel Webster-how natural it would have been for that rejected people to seek once more the bosom that yearned for them though it had twice thrown them off! France stood at hand with its troops in Mexico. Had Fate been a little less kind, New France, after all, might have been established on the Mississippi.

CHAPTER XI

WHAT A CENTURY HAS BROUGHT FORTH

CLAIBORNE, in his speech to the crowd on the 20th of December, had promised the peo ple of Louisiana that they should never be transferred again. If they could have felt sure of that it might have conveyed some comfort; for their country had in its history been transferred, counting its bestowal by Louis XIV on private owners, and the swapping back and forth between Spain and France, and now America, no less than six times. At no one of these exchanges had any human being possessed a definite idea of the boundaries of Louisiana. In 1803 the doubt was as great as ever. In the language of the treaty the cession was to be of the "Province of Louisiana with the same extent it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it." But north,