and fifty thousand acres of land, lying in the bend of the Tennessee river, and embracing the present county of Madison. In that year, also, the Choctaws ceded five millions of acres between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, and stretching from the Tombigbee to the Natchez settlements. It was thus that the fairest of his lands were being acquired from the Indian, and highways constructed through the remainder, which tended surely to further conquest or removal.

When war broke out between England and the United States, in 1812, the continued occupancy of the gulf coast by the Spaniard was considered dangerous to our Government, as Spain was believed to be in secret league with England. Under orders, General Wilkinson, with six hundred men, sailed from New Orleans, in April, 1813, and on the 13th took position in the rear of Fort Charlotte. Captain Perez, the commandant, surrendered the fort, and the Spanish garrison retired to Pensacola. At last the whole territory of what is now Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama was free from foreign dominion, and nothing was left to prevent its entire occupancy by Americans except the continued residence of warlike tribes of Indians, whom the Federal Government, as long ago as 1802, had stipulated with Georgia to remove.

Notwithstanding the non-observance of this stipulation, the country was rapidly settled by a brave and enterprising people. In 1810 the population of Louisiana was 76,556; that of Georgia was 252,438, and that of the Mississippi territory was 40,352. total population of this new region thus embraced more than 369,000 souls. Ten years later, in 1820, just as the Indian agitation, the slavery agitation and the free

The

trade agitation had begun to divide the people of the United States into well defined political parties, we find that the population of these gulf States was as follows: Georgia, 340,975; Mississippi, 75,448; Alabama, 127,901; and Louisiana, 152,923. They had grown in ten years from a population of 369,000 to one of 697,000, notwithstanding the fierce Indian war which had occurred in the meantime.

This population represented a voting power twothirds as great as that of Virginia, more than half as great as that of New York, much greater than that of Massachusetts, and more than one-third as great as that of all New England. If in the short period of one generation this new power in the southwest was able to command a political position so imposing, would not her continued growth in a few years restore to the South and to the agricultural States that preponderance in the government which had already shifted from Virginia to Massachusetts ?

The unjust political plans devised to curb this growing empire were the causes which led to the establishment at Montgomery, in 1831, of the Southern Confederacy.

CHAPTER III.

Growth of the Idea of Secession-Jealousy of the Commercial against the Agricultural States-Navigation of the Mississippi-The Whiskey Rebellion-The Jay Treaty -Views of Distinguished Men-Frequent Threats and Hopes of Disunion-The Louisiana PurchaseThe East Fears the South and West-The Hartford Convention-The Resolutions of '98-Randolph's Reply to Patrick Henry, etc., etc.

"An effort has often since been made to represent it as one of many malicious and entirely ungrounded calumnies, that there was at this time any serious thought of a disruption of the Union. This is only one instance of the white-washing tendencies and decorative coloring characteristic of the greater number of historical works. In the letters of the Federalists we find not only that wishes to this end were expressed, but that formal plans were devised."

VON HOLST'S Constitutional History of the United States.

"The Federal Government, then, appears to be the organ through which the United Republics communicate with foreign nations and with each other. Their submission to its operation is voluntary; its councils, its engagements, its authority, are theirs, modified and united. Its sovereignty is an emanation from theirs, not a flame in which they have been swallowed up. Each is still a perfect State, still sovereign, still independent, and still capable, should the occasion require, to resume the exercise of its functions in the most unlimited extent."

TUCKER'S Blackstone [1803.]

The growth of the southwest was looked upon with disfavor by the political leaders of the Northern States from the very hour when the Constitution recently adopted began to show signs of vitality; and this disfavor was intensified by the acquisition of Louisiana. Washington himself, even as late as 1784, did not regard the possession of the Mississippi river as a matter essential to the confederation, and was accustomed, like the entire body of the Congress, to limit his atten

tion to the thirteen colonies. The outlying lands were regarded simply as a convenience for payment of the public debt. Few if any of the statesmen of that day contemplated the possibility of the expansion of this outlying territory into populous States, whose votes in the Federal Congress might soon decide the balance of power against the North.

The first issue between the South and North was distinctly and positively made when Spain, in 1785, refused to yield the free navigation of the Mississippi, but at the same time offered a treaty, which otherwise would have been favorable to the commercial interests of the Middle and Northern States. The Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Jay, recommended a waiver for thirty years, of all claim to the free navigation of the Mississippi. The seven Northern States voted for this stipulation, and the five Southern States, with the exception of one member, voted against it. Delaware was not then represented. Thus early were geographical lines drawn upon a question in which the South exhibited a comprehensive statesmanship, and in which the North exhibited an unpatriotic jealousy at the expansion of the confederation. Jefferson, writing from Paris, to Madison, in 1787, says: "I have had great "opportunities of knowing the character of the people "who inhabit that country, and I venture to say that "the act which abandons the navigation of the Missis

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sippi is an act of separation between the eastern and "western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts "out of eight of the territory of the United States— "an abandonment of the fairest subject for the pay

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ment of our public debts, and the chaining of those debts upon our own necks, in perpetuation. I have