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20 This treaty defined the limits of the territories belonging to Great Britain, and set aside any former grants of English Kings, made when the extent of the continent was not even surmised. Thus, at the close of the Revolutionary War, when the United States became heirs of all the British possessions south of Canada, their western boundary, as before mentioned, was the Mississippi, as far south as the River Iberville and Lake Pontchartrain—New Orleans and the mouths of the Mississippi belonging to Spain.

Florida, during the time it was in the hands of Great Britain, had been divided into two provinces, separated by the AppalachicolaAppalachicola [sic] River, and settled chiefly by emigrants from the south of Europe, to whose numbers, also, a few Carolinians were added. This colony of foreigners was used, in connection with the savage natives of Florida, with great effect against the southern colonies during the War of Independence. However, while they were directing their energies against Georgia, the Spaniards of Louisiana seized the opportunity for making incursions into these nondescript British provinces, and captured their chief towns, thereby rendering them worthless to Great Britain; and in 1783, Florida was retroceded to Spain, in whose hands it was in the beginning of the nineteenth century, then forming the southern boundary of the United States.

In all these transactions the limits of neither Florida nor Louisiana had ever been distinctly defined; the southern boundaries of the latter infringing upon the western boundaries of the former territory. In 1800, when Spain retroceded Louisiana to France, it was described in the treaty as being the "same in extent that it now is in the hands of Spain, and that it had been when France possessed it"—that is, embracing the