The War in the Northwest 59 



This view of the case is amply confirmed by a 

 consideration of what was actually acquired under 

 the treaty of peace which closed the Revolutionary 

 struggle. Map-makers down to the present day 

 have almost invariably misrepresented the territo 

 rial limits we gained by this treaty. They repre 

 sent our limits in the West in 1783 as being the 

 Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the 3ist parallel 

 of latitude from the Mississippi to the Chattahoo- 

 chee; 9 but in reality we did not acquire these limits 

 until a dozen years later, by the treaties of Jay and 

 Pinckney. Two points must be kept in mind : first, 

 that during the war our ally, Spain, had conquered 

 from England that portion of the Gulf coast known 

 as West Florida; and second, that when the treaty 

 was made the United States and Great Britain 

 mutually covenanted to do certain things, some of 



(3) the skill of our diplomats at Paris; failure on any one of 

 these three points would have lost us the West. 



Mr. Hinsdale seems to think that Clark's conquest pre 

 vented the Illinois from being conquered from the British 

 by the Spaniards ; but this is very doubtful. The British at 

 Detroit would have been far more likely to have conquered 

 the Spaniards at St. Louis ; at any rate there is small proba 

 bility that they would have been seriously troubled by the 

 latter. The so-called Spanish conquest of St. Joseph was not 

 a conquest at all, but an unimportant plundering raid. 



The peace negotiations are best discussed in John Jay's 

 chapter thereon, in the seventh volume of Winsor's "Nar 

 rative and Critical History of North America." Sparks' 

 account is fundamentally wrong on several points. Bancroft 

 largely follows him, and therefore repeats and shares his 

 errors. 



8 The map in Mr. Hinsdale's book may be given as a late 

 instance. 



