[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.5A NewNeighborA New Neighbor 41he American Revolution dramatically altered the balance ofTpower in North America.A brand-new player arrived on thescene, a player infused with overwhelming ambition and exud-ing supreme confidence and energy.Great Britain, an establishedimperial force, had sought stability, order, peace, and profit dur-ing its brief period of dominance after the French and IndianWar.After the revolution, it was replaced by an aggressive youngrepublic that was determined to expand its borders and influ-ence.From the very beginning, the new United States of Americacharted a course toward geopolitical supremacy.The fledglingcountry set itself the task of spreading its culture, specifically itsnational ideology, over the entire continent.Americans, in appreciable numbers, began drifting across theAppalachians toward the Mississippi as early as the 1760s and1770s.Most were looking for nothing more than a piece ofarable land to farm, land that would be gained at the expense ofNative Americans.The Proclamation Line of 1763 had to be vio-lated in practice and principle in order to do so, but this impe-rial contrivance was roundly hated and generally ignored byfrontier farmers anyway.The line fenced them in, so these peo-ple felt, and kept them from claiming and utilizing land that thecurrent owners had left criminally fallow.Frontier settlers sawno point in allowing prime tracts to sit idle while Indians greed-ily traded furs and, by their mere presence, helped Britain keepthe peace with Spain.Great Britain, colonists argued, had drawnthe Proclamation Line in order to reconfigure imperial bordersin its own interests.Even before the Revolutionary War began,Americans had set their sights on new lands and new interpreta-tions of what that land meant.Now they were determined tomake the land theirs.The Louisiana Territory s imperial-politi-cal phase was about to end.After years of legislative wrangling and disputes betweenGreat Britain and its grumbling American colonies, mattersfinally turned to arms in 1775.War broke out within one of thethree great empires rather than among them.Initially, theBritish, with their superior military might, gained the upper42 LOUISIANA TERRITORYhand, but as the war dragged on, American victories slowlymounted.The entry of France and Spain on the American sidetilted the balance even further.Here and there, people began toconsider seriously the possibility of British failure and colonialindependence.The territory of an independent American state,everyone agreed, would likely include the area adjoining theOhio River and the trans-Appalachian West.A Mississippi Riverborder for the new nation would necessarily follow, putting itinto direct contact with the Spanish Empire.One of the world syoungest countries would stand face to face with one of the old-est along the eastern edge of Louisiana.The indirect alliancewith the Spanish, through the French, did little to ease the anxi-ety of those who predicted trouble in the future.Devastating defeats at Saratoga (1777) and Yorktown (1781)convinced the British king and parliament that the Americanwar was a failed cause.Two more fruitless years of combatproved it beyond any doubt.In September 1783, British andAmerican representatives signed a peace treaty in Paris.Withtheir signatures, these men brought into the world a sovereignunion of former colonies, the United States.It is important tounderstand that this was no mere assemblage of formerprovinces suddenly on their own.This was a country thatbelieved itself to be ordained by God and by divine destiny.Americans long conceived of themselves as being blessed with the spiritual and physical resources to become a self-reliant,mighty New World  empire.  37 More to the point, the UnitedStates  used the word empire in the sense of a country embrac-ing an extended area, in this case, the totality of NorthAmerica.38As a document, the Paris treaty first and foremost acknowl-edged American independence, but in the process, it establishedthe western boundary of the nation at the Mississippi River.According to the treaty, the new border ran  along the middle ofthe said river Mississippi, but only to  the thirty-first degree ofnorth latitude. From there it cut  due east.[to] the riverApalachicola. 39 Considering that the Spanish still retainedA New Neighbor 43A map of the eastern seaboard of the United States, with details spanning northernFlorida to New Hampshire and to just west of the Mississippi, 1784.Farmers and othersbegan settling the fertile Mississippi River basin as early as the 1760s and 1770s, disre-garding the British-drawn Proclamation Line of 1763.They chose, instead, to brave thefrontier to explore a new land, to better themselves and their families.effective possession of Louisiana and had reacquired Florida, therather vaguely drawn Mississippi border almost immediatelycaused tensions to rise, especially in the area between Georgiaand the great river.Here, both Spain and the United Statesclaimed ownership: the latter citing the treaty with Britain andthe former maintaining that the real boundary lay furthernorth.The Spanish said that the territory was part of Floridaand argued for a physical connection between Florida andLouisiana far above New Orleans; the Americans saw the oldSouthwest as rightfully theirs if, as they presumed, the new bor-der ran logically straight down the middle of the Mississippi.The core of the problem was that the Spanish refused to acceptany definition of a Mississippi boundary other than one that44 LOUISIANA TERRITORYgave them total control over the river for most of its southernlength.The underlying motive for all of this wrangling was thatthe river had served as the political boundary of Spanish inter-ests and influence in North America since 1762, and Spainintended to keep it that way [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]