Meanwhile events in America, if not so picturesque and majestic, were equally tempestuous. The peace policy of Jefferson was rapidly going to pieces in the face of a westward menace, the Federalists were jubilant, and in the Senate James Ross, of Pennsylvania, called for war. When the intendant of Spain at New Orleans denied Americans the storage rights they had enjoyed in that city since 1795, the French politics of the President fell into general disrepute and contempt, for men reasoned _a fortiori_, if such things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? It mattered not that Spain's highest official, the governor, disavowed the act, the fire was in the stubble. The intendant was stubborn and the fighting temper waxed hot. Both the governor and the Spanish envoy at Washington disavowed the act again and rebuked the subordinate. Congress was soothed, but not so the people of the West and South. They were fully aware, as have been all our frontiersmen and pioneers from the beginning, that the Mississippi and all the lands it waters are the organic structure of unity and successful settlement on this continent. The Pacific and Atlantic coast strips, even the great but bleak valley of the St. Lawrence, are mere incidents of territorial unity and political control when compared with the great alluvion of the Mississippi. This was unknown, utterly unknown, and worse yet, entirely indifferent to our statesmen. Madison certainly, and possibly Jefferson, believed that western immigration would pause and end on the east bank of the Father of Waters.
Yet party government was a necessity under the American system, and Jefferson's ladder, the Republican party, would be knocked into its component parts should the West and South, noisy, exacting, and turbulent, desert and go over to the expiring faction of the Federalists; nay, worse, it might be forced into almost complete negation of its own existence by a forced adoption of the Federalist policy, alliance with Great Britain--monarchic and aristocratic--rather than with radical and democratic France. What could a distracted partizan do? Jefferson was adroit and inventive. He sent James Monroe to negotiate with Bonaparte for the purchase of New Orleans and both Floridas at the price of two millions, or upward to ten, for all or part, whatever he could get; he was not even to disdain the deposit or storage right, if nothing else could be had, and if he could get nothing, he was to await instructions. With such credentials he sailed on March eighth, 1803. A peace-lover must sometimes speak low and small, even as cowards sometimes do. Three weeks later appeared in New Orleans Laussat, the advance agent of French occupation; Victor and his troops were to follow. It is not possible to conceive that a foreign policy could be more perplexing, confused, or uncertain than that of the philosophic theorist who is the hero of the strict-constructionist party in these United States.