Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/788

758 doctrine for an entirely different purpose,—the suppression of the black labourer's wages.

166. When Jefferson took office in 1801 he succeeded to a task larger than he imagined. His party, ignoring the natural forces which tied the States together even against their wills, insisted that the legal basis of the bond was in the power of any State to withdraw at will. This was no nationality; and foreign nations naturally refused to take the American national coin at any higher valuation than that at which it was current in its own country. The urgent necessity was for a reconciliation between democracy and nationality; and this was the work of this period. An underlying sense of all this has led Democratic leaders to call the war of 1812-15 the “second war for independence”; but the result was as much independence of past ideas as of Great Britain.

167. The first force in the new direction was the acquisition of Louisiana (§ 32) in 1803. Napoleon had acquired it from Spain, and, fearing an attack upon it by Great Britain, offered it to the United States for $15,000,000. Jefferson and his party were eager to accept the offer; but the constitution gave the Federal Government no power to buy and hold territory, and the party was based on a strict construction of the constitution. Possession of power forced the strict-construction party to broaden its ideas, and Louisiana was bought, though Jefferson quieted his conscience by talking for a time of a futile proposal to amend the constitution so as to grant the necessary power. The acquisition of the western Mississippi basin more than doubled the area of the United States, and gave them control of all the great river-systems of central North America. The difficulties of using these rivers were removed almost immediately by Fulton's utilization of steam in navigation (1807). Within four years steamboats were at work on Western waters; and thereafter the increase of steam navigation and that of population stimulated one another. Population crossed the Mississippi; constantly increasing eddies filled up the vacant places to the east of the great river; and all sections of the country advanced as they had never advanced before. The “centre of population” has been carefully ascertained by the census authorities for each decade, and it represents the westward movement of population very closely. During this period it advanced from about the middle of the State of Maryland to its extreme western limit; that is, the centre of population was in 1830 nearly at the place which had been the western limit of population in 1770.

168. Jefferson also laid the basis for a further acquisition in the future by sending an expedition under Lewis and Clarke to explore the territory north of the then Spanish territory of California and west of the Rocky Mountains—the “Oregon country” as it was afterwards called (§§ 221, 224). The explorations of this party (1804), with Captain Gray's discovery of the Columbia river (1792), made the best part of the claims of the United States to the country forty years later.

169. Jefferson was re-elected in 1804, serving until 1809; his party now controlled almost all the States outside of New England, and could elect almost any one whom it chose to the presidency. Imitating Washington in refusing a third term of office, Jefferson established the precedent, which has not since been violated, restricting a president to two terms, though the constitution contains no such restriction. The great success of his presidency had been the acquisition of Louisiana, which was a violation of his party principles; but all his minor successes were, like this, recognitions of the national sovereignty

which he disliked so much. After a short and brilliant naval war the Barbary pirates were reduced to submission (1805). And the authority of the nation was asserted for the first time in internal affairs. The long-continued control of New Orleans by Spain, and the persistent intrigues of the Spanish authorities, looking towards a separation of the whole western country from the United States, had been ended by the annexation of Louisiana, and they will probably remain for ever hidden in the secret history of the early West. They had left behind a dangerous ignorance of Federal power and control, of which Burr took advantage (1807). Organizing an expedition in Kentucky and Tennessee, probably for the conquest of the Spanish colony of Mexico, he was arrested on the lower Mississippi and brought back to Virginia. He was acquitted; but the incident opened up a vaster view of the national authority than democracy had yet been able to take. It had been said, forty years before, that Great Britain had long arms, but that 3000 miles was too far to extend them; it was something to know now that the arms of the Federal Government were long enough to reach from Washington city to the Mississippi.

170. All the success of Jefferson was confined to his first four years; all his heavy failures were in his second term, in which he and his party as persistently refused to recognize or assert the inherent power of the nation in international affairs. The Jay treaty expired in 1804 by limitation, and American commerce was thereafter left to the course of events, without any restriction of treaty obligations, since Jefferson refused to accept the only treaty which the British Government was willing to make. All the difficulties which followed may be summed up in a few words: the British Government was then the representative of the ancient system of restriction of commerce, and had a powerful navy to enforce its ideas; the American Government was endeavouring to force into international recognition the present system of neutral rights and unrestricted commerce, but its suspicious democracy refused to give it a navy sufficient to command respect for its ideas. Indeed, the American Government did not want the navy; it apparently expected to gain its objects with out the exhibition of anything but moral force.

171. Great Britain was now at war, from time to time, with almost every other nation of Europe. In time of peace European nations followed generally the old restrictive principle of allowing another nation, like the United States, no commercial access to their colonies; but, when they were at war with Great Britain, whose navy controlled the ocean, they were very willing to allow the neutral American merchantmen to carry away their surplus colonial produce. Great Britain had insisted for fifty years that the neutral nation, in such cases, was really intervening in the war as an ally of her enemy; but she had so far modified her claim as to admit that “transhipment,” or breaking bulk, in the United States was enough to qualify the commerce for recognition, no matter whither it was directed after transhipment. The neutral nation thus gained a double freight, and grew rich in the traffic; the belligerent nations no longer had commerce afloat for British vessels to capture; and the “frauds of the neutral flags” became a standing subject of complaint among British merchants and naval officers. About 1805 British prize courts began to disregard transhipment and to condemn American vessels which had made the voyage from a European colony to the mother country by way of the United States. This was really a restriction of American commerce to purely American productions, or to commerce with Great Britain direct, with the payment of duties in British ports.

172. The question of expatriation, too, furnished a good