Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/266

154 their traffic down to New Orleans at the least possible expense were building up in the great valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers an empire of population. He thought, as everybody else then thought, that the trade of even Pittsburgh, only four hundred miles west of the Atlantic port of Philadelphia, must of necessity float down the Ohio and Mississippi, and go out to the world by way of New Orleans. And also all the traffic west and south of Pittsburgh must go the same way. We of this day cannot comprehend the consternation with which that view struck the president and all of the people of the west. We could understand it if England or Japan should now in our day capture Astoria and the mouth of the Columbia, and proceed to levy import and export taxes on every pound of Oregon produce or goods which goes out or comes in over the Columbia river bar. The steam railroad had not been invented at that day, and no one could then see any future for the great west except through nature's outlet by the great river to the Gulf of Mexico.

Jefferson has been by many rated as a philosopher, a scientist, a dreamer or schemer rather than a practical statesman; but the facts show that when the great occasion came he was always equal to it. He met this secret treaty move between Spain and France with both energy and wisdom. He instructed his minister to Paris, Robert Livingston, to ascertain at the earliest moment what France proposed to do with the island of New Orleans, as the city was then called. And as matters developed, in January following his letter to Livingston, he appointed James Monroe, minister extraordinary to France, with instructions to push the French court to a decision. And in his letter of instructions to Monroe, he reminds him that the French are hard pressed for money to complete the conquest of St. Domingo, and that these circumstances have prevented the French from taking possession of Louisiana. Everything seems to have been considered fair in love or war in those days as well as now, and Thomas Jefferson proposed to make the most of it for his country.

On February 3, 1803, Jefferson writes again to Livingston: "We must know at once whether we can acquire New Orleans or not." The westerners were clamoring for New Orleans and for war. The same sort of people that rallied to the appeal of Andrew Jackson ten years later and gave the British such a terrible thrashing below New Orleans, were now ready to fight the French if they dared to come and take the country they had bought from Spain.

So anxious and so terribly was Jefferson wrought up over the. condition of affairs that he tells Monroe in the letter quoted: "On the event of your mission depends the future destinies of this republic. If we cannot by a purchase of Louisiana insure ourselves a course of perpetual peace, then as war cannot be distant, we must prepare for it." The future destiny and ownership of this Oregon country was dangling in the balance right then and there.

There can be no doubt that Napoleon (then ruling France) purposed to take possession of Louisiana. A military force of twenty thousand men was on the eve of embarking; and Napoleon had decided to plant this force as a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi river; the strategic point to wield at his pleasure the commerce and civilization of the Atlantic ocean. A petty quarrel with England about the Island of Malta in the Mediterranean sea deranged his plans, and he formed another chain-lightning-resolve—he would rival Julius Caesar by the invasion and conquest of England. But to do this he dared not