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 362 Boundary dispute with Spain. [i803~]9 therefore came to be, whether slavery should be extended to the Louisiana Purchase, or not During the session of Congress (1819) the struggle went on fiercely, till each side yielded something, and the famous Missouri Compromise was effected (1820). Missouri, it was then agreed, should be admitted as a slave-holding State. But in all the territory west of the Mississippi river bought from France and known as the Louisiana Purchase, and lying north of the parallel 36 30' (except in the State of Missouri), slavery was prohibited for ever. Maine, mean- time, had applied for admission as a Free State. This was granted as part of the compromise. This made up the number of States in the Union to twenty-four, of which twelve were slave-holding and twelve free ; and the balance in the Senate was thus preserved. When Louisiana Territory, thus parted into slave-soil and free, was acquired from France in 1803, no boundaries of any sort were fixed. The United States took up the position that, when La Salle, following up the discovery of the Mississippi by Marquette and Joliet, floated down the great river to its mouth and, standing on the shore of the gulf, named the country Louisiana and claimed it for France, he applied that name to the drainage basin of the Mississippi ; that when a year later he landed his band of settlers on the Texan coast and built Fort St Louis of Texas, he extended the authority of France half way to the nearest Spanish settlement, or to the Rio Grande; that later settlements at Biloxi and Mobile carried the authority of France east of the Mississippi as far at least as the Perdido river ; and that, therefore, the Louisiana Purchase included much of West Florida, and all the country west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande. Spain, on the other hand, denied that West Florida and Texas were included in the purchase. During twelve years no progress towards a settlement was made. On the overthrow of Napoleon, the return of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain, and the end of the war with Great Britain, negotiations were renewed; and, after four years of diplomatic bickering, a treaty was signed in 1819. The United States abandoned all claim to Texas, agreed to pay the claims of her citizens against Spain to the amount of $4,500,000, and received the two Floridas, East and West. Spain, on her part, accepted as a boundary for her Mexican possessions a line which started from the Gulf of Mexico west of the Mississippi and passed northward and westward across the country to the shores of the Pacific. While these negotiations with Spain were dragging on, difficulties of a serious nature had arisen between Great Britain and the United States. When the British Peace Commission at Ghent presented, in 1814, the list of topics for discussion, they surprised the Americans by stating that the liberty, so long enjoyed by American citizens, of fishing within British waters and drying and curing their catch on British soil was to be withdrawn. As defined in the third article of the Treaty of