Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/122

1803. A week afterward, Nov. 2, 1803, the Senate took up the subject. After several speeches had been made without touching deeply the constitutional difficulty, Senator Pickering of Massachusetts took the floor, and in a few words stated the extreme New England doctrine. Like Griswold and Gouverneur Morris, he affirmed the right of conquest or of purchase, and the right to govern the territory so acquired as a dependent province; but neither the President nor Congress could incorporate this territory in the Union, nor could the incorporation lawfully be effected even by an ordinary amendment to the Constitution. "I believe the assent of each individual State to be necessary for the admission of a foreign country as an associate in the Union, in like manner as in a commercial house the consent of each member would be necessary to admit a new partner into the company." With his usual skill in saying what was calculated to annoy,—a skill in which he had no superior,—he struck one truth which no other eyes would see. "I believe that this whole transaction has been purposely wrapped in obscurity by the French government. The boundary of Louisiana, for instance, on the side of Florida is in the treaty really unintelligible; and yet nothing was more easy to define."

Pickering was followed by Dayton of New Jersey, and he by the celebrated John Taylor of Caroline, the senator from Virginia, whose Resolutions of 1798, with echoes which were to ring louder and louder for