Louisiana and Aaron Burr 309 



American foreign policy would have been determined 

 by the one consideration of ousting the French from 

 the mouth of the Mississippi. To the United States, 

 France was by no means as formidable as Great 

 Britain, because of her inferiority as a naval power. 

 Even if unsupported by any outside alliance the 

 Americans would doubtless in the end have driven 

 a French army from New Orleans, though very 

 probably at the cost of one or two preliminary re- 

 buffs. The West was stanch in support of Jef- 

 ferson and Madison; but in time of stress it was 

 sure to develop leaders of more congenial temper, 

 exactly as it actually did develop Andrew Jackson 

 a few years later. At this very time the French 

 failed to conquer the negro republic which Toussaint 

 L'Ouverture had founded in Hayti. What they thus 

 failed to accomplish in one island, against insurgent 

 negroes, it was folly to think they could accomplish 

 on the American continent, against the power of the 

 American people. This struggle with the revolu- 

 tionary slaves in Hayti hindered Napoleon from im- 

 mediately throwing an army into Louisiana; but it 

 did more, for it helped to teach him the folly of 

 trying to carry out such a plan at all. 



A very able and faithful French agent in the 

 meanwhile sent a report to Napoleon plainly point- 

 ing out the impossibility of permanently holding 

 Louisiana against the Americans. He showed that 

 on the western waters alone it would be possible 

 to gather armies amounting in the aggregate to 

 twenty or thirty thousand men, all of them inflamed 



