in its demands upon the new States. A few of the later States made constitutions without enabling acts, but Congress always held such conduct against them.

Under the Enabling Act, the convention sat at Chillicothe in the month of November, 1802. Its meeting rang the knell of St. Clair's power. The convention was in the hands of his party enemies and proceeded to its work without any recognition of his existence. He resented this, demanded a hearing before the body, and indulged himself in a partisan attack upon the Enabling Act and the President of the United States. Upon receipt of a copy of the speech, Jefferson dismissed him from office, not as a Federalist but as a disloyal subordinate, and St. Clair lost the satisfaction of carrying to fulfillment the colonial venture over which he had presided from the start. The Virginia democracy finished what New England soldiers began.

The constitution of Ohio reflected in its articles not only the common experience of the men of the frontier, but the special hatred of autocratic power that had been created in the Northwest during the territorial period. Its outstanding spirit is that of distrust of executive government. There was as yet no recognition of the view that Andrew Jackson was later to acclimate in the West, that the executive could be strengthened if only he could be depended upon. Perhaps the greatest single difference between the democracy of Jefferson and that of Jackson was to turn on this; Jefferson revolted at government itself, while Jackson revolted at government by those whom he believed to be unfaithful and aristocratic. In 1802 the dislike of St. Clair was still too powerful for democrats to admit that any governor could be trusted. Accordingly the convention sheared away his power. The Ohio governor was given no veto, and no appointing power. He was merely an executive subordinate to the legislature, with a salary that the constitution limited, for the present, to a maximum of one thousand dollars a year.

The courts of the new State included justices of the peace, courts of common pleas, a supreme court, and such other courts as the legislature might desire to create. The supreme justices, like the governor, give a measure to the distance that the Ohio frontier had traveled from colonial precedents. They were to be appointed not by the executive for life, which was and remains the practice of English law, but by joint ballot of the two houses of the legislature, to "hold their office for the term of seven years, if so

long they behave well." Like other civil officers they were removable by impeachment and conviction.

In the legislature, the supreme power of the democratic people found its expression. The apportionment was based on the white male population over twenty-one, which of itself gave an advantage to the newer regions where young men predominated, and women and children were less numerous than in the older settlements. The franchise was granted to the same group, if only they "have paid, or are charged with, a State or county tax." Those of them who were of military age and so subject to duty, constituted the militia of the State; and their officers, including the grade of brigadier-general, were elected by the men whom they commanded. The statement of the "general, great, and essential principles of liberty and free government," that takes up nearly a third of the length of the constitution, begins with the harmonious note that "all men are born equally free and independent."

In less than a month the convention at Chillicothe reduced to writing a statement of basic principles and rules of government that lasted until 1851 without revision. When the draft was finished, the men who made it proclaimed it the constitution, to be effective when the laws of the territory should cease. They not only felt free to perform the final act of ratification themselves, but they begged the assent of Congress to a boundary more generous than the Enabling Act authorized, and in violation of the Ordinance of 1787.

The boundaries of Ohio, as fixed in the Enabling Act, were those of the Ordinance, with a western line drawn through the mouth of the Great Miami, and a northern line through the southern tip of Lake Michigan. In the Ohio convention objection was made to this because of the topographic uncertainty as to the location of the south shore of Lake Erie. Men who had hunted in the north suggested that the northern line of the Enabling Act might easily run south of Lake Erie, and so separate Ohio from a lake frontage. It was accordingly provided that if the Enabling Act line should strike Lake Erie east of the Maumee River, or should miss it entirely, the northern boundary should, "with the assent of the Congress" be a line drawn from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to the "most northerly cape" of the bay at the mouth of the Maumee where Toledo now stands.

Congress failed to give the desired assent for a matter of thirtyfive years, but it recognized Ohio as a State in the Union by act of

February 19, 1803, in which it paid no attention to the suggested boundary change. The new State maintained that silence gave assent and eventually carried its point, after a vigorous controversy with its northern neighbor, Michigan, that struggled against the nibbling process at its southeast corner.

First of the public domain States and first to be nursed by Congress through all the stages of development, Ohio received from the United States the first of the land endowments that have since characterized the American colonial policy. The Ordinance of 1787 contained generous words for the encouragement of education. In the Enabling Act, section sixteen of every township of the public lands was granted "to the inhabitants of such township, for the use of schools." It was, in addition, provided that certain salt springs should be given to the State, and that five per cent of net proceeds of the sale of lands in Ohio should "be applied to the laying out and making public roads" in Ohio, and thence to the "navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic." In return for these grants the State agreed to leave tax-free for five years every parcel of land sold within its limits by the United States.

The new State government took hold in Ohio in March, 1803, with Edward Tiffin as the first governor. Among the earliest acts of its legislature was one incorporating the Miami Exporting Company, which became the first Ohio bank, and was expected to provide a paper money and advance the trade of the people with New Orleans and the outside world. At the moment of the act there was still uncertainty whether this outlet down the great river was to remain in hostile hands or to become American. It had just become known beyond doubt that Napoleon Bonaparte had acquired it, and that the local authorities had abolished the American right of deposit in New Orleans. Jefferson had just sent James Monroe as special envoy to France to try to buy a part of Louisiana, and he knew as well as did the men of the West that if the free use of the Mississippi should cease the Union would fall apart. That the first public land State should not be the last, depended in great measure upon his success in procuring an enlargement of the United States.

CHAPTER XV

THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA

THE leader of a rising opposition party nearly always finds a dilemma before him when the turn of the tide places him in the position of power and responsibility. In opposition it is safe to attack whatever the administration may do, and there is no means of testing the soundness of the criticism. In office, affairs look different. The theorist must test his capacity for the practical. Thomas Jefferson had no more than taken his oath of office in 1801 than there arose to haunt him his beloved France in the guise of a barrier to American unity and peace, and his own teachings upon the meaning of the Constitution as an inspiration to frontier self-determination.

The background of this new crisis was one of rosy hope for peace and growth. The new land act, and the final stages in the development of Ohio, were promises of sympathetic rule of the frontier regions. The surplus crops of the West were finding their way to a market. From the farm where they were grown, which was often on a stream navigable to light craft in early spring, the cargoes of wheat and corn, meal and flour, pork, bacon, and whiskey, found their way to the broad waters of the Ohio and Mississippi. In flatboats and barges, manned by local talent at the sweeps, they were floated south. In the long trip, drifting by day, and tied to some convenient shore at night, the farmer boatmen had time to gossip over the trade in which they ventured. The Mississippi dominated not their whole lives but their balance of profit. Before 1795, when Pinckney signed his Spanish treaty, the cruise to Natchez or New Orleans had been full of risk. The temper of Spanish officers was mercurial. It was always possible that they would enforce the law, which meant confiscation of cargo, and perhaps imprisonment. Whether they would succumb to bribery, and permit the speculator to share his profits with them, was uncertain until it was too late to give up the voyage. But after 1795 the right of deposit at New Orleans made the trade safe, and tempted its increase. The privilege was for three years, but at its expiration in 1798 the authorities took no step to reëstablish the former order; and the wars in Europe made a strong market that welcomed at

New Orleans the up-river crops. Natchez had meanwhile become the chief named place in Mississippi Territory, and the southwest corner of American power.

There was peace with France when Jefferson took office. The vexatious war of 1798 was over. The breach occasioned by the rapacity of the Directorate was healed by the overture of Napoleon, who invited John Adams to send him new commissioners. In a convention signed September 30, 1800, peace was established and indemnity was promised to those who had suffered at French hands. No foreign situation was more repugnant to Jefferson than hostility with France, save possibly an alliance with England which such hostility might engender. But he had been in office only a few months when the rumor leaked out, and would not down, that on the day after the convention with the United States was signed Napoleon had signed another with Spain that made it useless. To formal inquiry as to the existence of this other treaty, Napoleon blandly lied. But it was true that at San Ildefonso, on October 1, Spain had retroceded to France the Province of Louisiana that she had received from Louis XV in 1763. Napoleon had pledged himself here, never to alienate Louisiana to another power, and was forming visions of a rebuilt colonial empire with which to rival England.

The repeated denials of official France that such a transfer was contemplated were matched by specific news that it had taken place. In October, 1802, the Spanish agents at New Orleans confirmed the rumor by closing the Mississippi, under secret orders from the Spanish king. The privilege that Spain had tolerated since 1798, when the right of deposit expired, came to an end at the moment when Spain ceased to be a Mississippi Valley power. The bad news rushed up the trail from Natchez, and reaching Washington apprised the President that either the West would act, or he; and that his action must be prompt or not at all. He knew his West. The independence that made it ready for lawless ventures, and that had shown itself in a willingness to intrigue either with Spain or against her, had been part of his arsenal to be used against the Federalists. The slack bond that held it to the Union, with the Appalachian barrier to keep it remote and the Mississippi to turn its eyes southwest, had made the western leaders receptive when in 1798 he preached a doctrine of limited government and suggested a right to nullify. He knew the real importance of the Mississippi and the passionate regard in