Louisiana and Aaron Burr 297 



men themselves put second to this the right to peo- 

 ple the vast continent which lay between the Pacific 

 and the Mississippi. The statesmen at Washington 

 viewed this last proposition with positive alarm, and 

 cared only to acquire New Orleans. The winning 

 of Louisiana was due to no one man, and least of 

 all to any statesman or set of statesmen. It followed 

 inevitably upon the great westward thrust of the set- 

 tler-folk; a thrust which was delivered blindly, but 

 which no rival race could parry, until it was stopped 

 by the ocean itself. 



Louisiana was added to the United States be- 

 cause the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed 

 into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, 

 and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands; and had 

 hardly begun to build their raw hamlets on the banks 

 of the Mississippi, and to cover its waters with their 

 flat-bottomed craft. Restless, adventurous, hardy, 

 they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the 

 fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nomi- 

 nal, and the Indian the real, master; and with a 

 more immediate longing they fiercely coveted the 

 Creole province at the mouth of the river. 



The Mississippi formed no barrier whatsoever 

 to the march of the backwoodsmen. It could be 

 crossed at any point; and the same rapid current 

 which made it a matter of extreme difficulty for any 

 power at the mouth of the stream to send reinforce- 

 ments up against the current would have greatly 

 facilitated the movements of the Ohio, Kentucky, 

 and Tennessee levies down-stream to attack the 



