offered to invade Spanish Florida and destroy the centers of danger on his own responsibility, if given a hint that such action would be welcome to President James Monroe.

With the dispute between Monroe and Jackson as to whether this hint was given, the western historian need have no concern. Jackson believed he received it, was in any event ordered to the junction of the Chattahoochee and Flint by the War Department, and went the rest of the way himself. Early in 1818 he carried out his offer, and went so far as to execute abruptly "two unprincipled villians," British subjects both, whom he found among the Indians under suspicious circumstances. England was annoyed by his summary procedure, and Spain was warned. The negotiation of the Spanish boundary was now several years old, due chiefly to the Spanish genius for delay. A fear of losing Florida by force brought it to a conclusion in 1819.

The Spanish minister in Washington, de Onis, resumed his relations with the American Government in 1815, after the restoration of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne. There had been a break in relations between the two countries after the attempt of Napoleon to seat his brother, Joseph, there. The United States had not recognized the government of Joseph as being in accordance with the "consent of the governed," and had withheld the recognition that American policy was already prone to extend upon the slightest provocation. It seized part of West Florida instead, and established temporary occupation over both Pensacola, and Amelia Island on the east coast. It met the demand of de Onis for the restoration of these by a suggestion for the transfer of Florida, and an establishment of a Louisiana boundary. Spain was not ready in 1815 to do either and played for time. The negotiation was shifted back and forth between Madrid and Washington, and dragged out as did the earlier one that concerned the Yazoo strip.

Adams became Secretary of State when Monroe formed his government in 1817, and Henry Clay, who had hoped to receive the post, resumed his station as Speaker of the House of Representatives. The great task of Adams was to prevent Spain from receiving European aid in an attempt to recover her lost colonies. He was not averse to the independence of the colonies, but was in no hurry to recognize them. Indeed he wanted to defer this until he had brought about a settlement of the boundary matters pending; and Spain was showing a disposition to seek

an American promise not to recognize their independence as a condition of the settlement of the boundary dispute.

Clay became the great congressional advocate of South American independence and recognition and thundered in their behalf for the next five years. His enthusiasm was a part of the normal American disposition to encourage self-government and republicanism. It was intensified by a willingness to embarrass Adams; and it did embarrass him.

The elements in the Spanish settlement were Florida, the southwest boundary, and the claims owing to American citizens for damage done by Spain during the wars in Europe. As for Florida, Spain had come to realize the precarious nature of her tenure and was disposed to sell out for the best price. By the second article of the treaty of 1819 "His Catholic Majesty" ceded to the United States "all the territories which belong to him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida." The phrasing of the cession left undetermined the vexed fact whether he owned any or all of West Florida. However acquired, whether from France or Spain, the whole of Florida was now attached to the United States. It was speedily made a territory, bounded as at present by Georgia and Alabama and received as its territorial governor, Andrew Jackson, who had done so much to insure its transfer.

In consideration for the cession of Florida, Spain received an indirect payment in cash and a definite boundary for Texas. In article nine of the Treaty there was enumerated a long list of causes out of which had arisen claims by Americans against Spain, and by Spaniards against the United States. These were reciprocally renounced, except those of individual Spanish officers and inhabitants who might be able to prove that they had suffered injuries "by the late operations of the American Army in Florida." The United States agreed to reimburse these and to pay the lawful claims of Americans against Spain to the amount of five million dollars. It was agreed that the United States should set up a claims commission, and that Spain should furnish all evidence as required. To the extent that Spain was hereby relieved of the necessity of paying the American claimants, she was compensated for Florida in cash.

It is improbable that the clauses relating to the southwest boundary of the United States would have been agreed to if Adams and the Government of which he was a part had known

all that his grandson, Henry Adams, knew when he wrote his History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. There was nothing in the treaty of cession by France, or the treaty of retrocession by Spain to France, or in the original treaty of cession by France to Spain, to indicate a certain boundary between Louisiana and the Spanish dominions. If Napoleon had been able to occupy Louisiana, he would doubtless have shown by his conduct what he believed himself to have received from Spain in 1800. But this never took place, and the historian has for his guidance only the secret instructions prepared for the prospective Captain General of Louisiana, which Napoleon approved November 26, 1802, before he decided to sell Louisiana to the United States. In this document Louisiana was described as "bounded on the west by the river called Rio Bravo [Rio Grande del Norte] from its mouth to about the thirtieth degree parallel." Beyond this point, even Napoleon was uncertain; but if the United States had been aware that he had included Texas in his Louisiana there could have been no willingness to give it up as compensation for Florida in 1819. The American Secretary of State was reluctant to surrender Texas, unaware though he was of Napoleon's intention to occupy it. But the Government and the people still failed to see its importance in the territorial scheme of the United States. Florida was close-to, and imperative, if the Government was to have peace with the Southern States. Texas lay far to the West. Migration thither was not yet under way, and the line of the Sabine River, established in Wilkinson's modus vivendi with the Spanish military forces, still appeared to mark a point of easy equilibrium. What little was known of the country beyond the Mississippi River was discouraging. Along its immediate course lay many miles of inundated swamps. There was a narrow strip of habitable land, wide enough for a tier of new States, but beyond the lower Missouri and lower Arkansas were vast desert plains. Every traveler who had visited the buffalo range and the country of the wild Indians had reported adversely upon its suitability for white occupation. There was growing the myth of the American Desert that was to hold the United States contentedly within its boundaries for another generation. Deliberate expansion was never a part of American policy, and in 1819 it was easy to balance an immediate Florida against a remote Texas.

Before Adams and de Onis devised the boundary formula that

was finally inserted in their treaty, they discussed the possibility of reaching a compromise at nearly every stream emptying into the Gulf of Mexico between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. De Onis demanded at first a line following the precise watershed of the Mississippi, which would have left much of present Louisiana in Texas. Both negotiators yielded reluctantly to persuasion and the inclusion of other desirable matters in the treaty, until at last the boundary was written upon a basis of the de facto military boundary, with deviation northward to keep the line away from the Spanish settlements on the upper Rio Grande in New Mexico. Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Sabine River, the line followed the western bank of that stream to its intersection with the thirty-second parallel of north latitude; thence it ran due north to the Red River, and up the south bank to the one hundredth meridian of west longitude. Here it crossed the Red River and ran north along the meridian to the Arkansas River, thus making the desired detour around Santa Fé. It continued up the Arkansas to its source and north to the forty-second parallel of latitude and thence west to the Pacific. The two countries renounced forever their respective claims to lands lying beyond the boundary thus described.

The Spanish treaty was signed on February 22, 1819, some four months after the agreement with England upon a northern boundary for Louisiana. It was a frank compromise, concluded with difficulty amid a political din raised by Henry Clay, whose demand for immediate recognition of the Latin republics exasperated Spain and whose attack upon Adams for the surrender of Texas somewhat obscured the general nature of the settlement. It was, however, ratified in due time. For the moment it appeared as if the United States had reached its territorial growth. The military events of the early part of the decade had cleared the way for a wave of migration and settlement on either side of the Ohio, and along the Mississippi. Diplomacy had now stabilized the foreign boundaries, except the unimportant line along the Rockies between Louisiana and Oregon. No enemy, Indian or foreign, was able to stop the full development of so much of the area of the United States as was fit for settlement; and beyond this area, along its western edge, the arid uplands of the Rocky Mountains were believed to constitute both a barrier to too spacious expansion, and an insulator between the United States and its neighbors on the continent.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GREAT MIGRATION

THIS westward flow of population has been characteristic of American growth since the period of the earliest settlements. In an intermittent way it has been characteristic of British growth since the accession of King James I. It has been kept in motion by two forces, one of which is ever-present in society; the other has been peculiar to the British and American empires. The constant force is the necessity upon society to take care of the new adults, arriving each year at manhood, and requiring opportunity for livelihood. In a stagnant society these new arrivals find their niches arranged by the generation ahead of them and must take what they can get. Birth tends to determine station, and the rare individual who dies in a social position more elevated than his father held becomes a hero around whom legends accumulate as inevitably as those that make Dick Whittington a model for the nursery. If we could know for any society, at any age, the full story of the placement of each new generation, we should understand much of its history. In the United States youth rose to manhood as certainly as elsewhere, and boundless opportunity lay concealed beneath the stumps and sod of the frontier farms.

The peculiar force that directed the newer generation towards the West, as they sought their jobs, was the supply of unclaimed land that could be had in unlimited amounts. The American, who has ever thought of it as something to be bought when needed and scrapped when used-up, has difficulty in understanding the magnetic call of free land for those who have retained the European tradition of its scarcity. Throughout the time of American settlement, the lands of western Europe have been in private ownership. Values have not been fixed by productivity, but have been enhanced by the social prestige that has been associated with the freehold. In the United States the Government has been the primal owner but without a desire to maintain 'crown estate" or to retard its sale. To be able to acquire land at all was enough to turn the eyes of millions of Europeans towards the United States in the last century. To get it cheaply

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