Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/310

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 * "It was hardly possible that the government of the United States should have made a worse beginning, and that it should have sent two men (Messrs. Claiborne, governor, and Wilkinson, general) less fit to attract affection. The first, with estimable private qualities, has little capacity and much awkwardness, and is extremely beneath his place; the second, already long known here in a bad way, is a flighty, rattle-headed fellow, often drunk, who has committed a hundred impertinent follies. Neither the one nor the other understands a word of French or Spanish. They have on all occasions, and without delicacy, shocked the habits, the prejudices, the character of the population."

Claiborne began his sway, assuming that the Creoles were a kindly but ignorant and degraded people, who must be taught the blessings of American society. The Creoles, who considered themselves to be more refined and civilized than the Americans who descended upon them from Kentucky and Tennessee, were not pleased that their language, blood, and customs should be systematically degraded, in defiance of the spirit in which the treaty of cession had been made. Their anger was not without an element of danger. England and France could safely defy public opinion and trample on prostrate races. Their empire rested on force, but that of Jefferson rested on consent; and if the people of New Orleans should rebel, they could not be conquered without trouble and expense, or without violating the free principles which Jefferson was supposed to represent.

The colonists in Louisiana had been for a century