130 Singing Valleys 



could afford to discredit himself with the country's sound 

 business interests? American business couldn't carry the burden 

 he put on it. ... 



So stormed the Philadelphia merchants who traded down 

 the Delaware, and the Baltimore wheat-flour dealers. So pro- 

 tested the New York bankers, and the Bostonians who were 

 more interested in whale-oil than in lard, or in markets for 

 hogs and hominy. There was no use telling these grumblers 

 that the President's orders to his commissioners in Paris were 

 to offer thirty-four millions of francs for New Orleans alone, 

 or fifty millions for New Orleans and the two Floridas, but 

 Napoleon had forced the entire Mississippi watershed upon 

 them. Livingston had been left no alternative but to purchase 

 the corn belt. 



The protestors summoned their forces to defeat the Presi- 

 dent, who was, himself, troubled in his Constitutional con- 

 science. How was he going to reconcile the Purchase with his 

 literal reading of the Constitution? Thomas Jefferson had no 

 bitterer enemy than John Marshall, the Chief Justice. Marshall 

 might have lent his power, prestige and decision to those who 

 opposed the Purchase. But the Chief Justice was born a back- 

 woodsman. He had stood on a ridge in the Alleghenies and 

 looked away to the west. He believed, apparently, that a coun- 

 try as big as this would have to stretch its hide once in a while. 



When the United States flag was run up over New Orleans 

 just before Christmas, 1803, it waved simultaneously over some 

 828,000 square miles of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkan- 

 sas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, 

 North Dakota and Wyoming that were now, for the first time, 

 American soil. 



"How," the undergraduates at Williams College demanded 

 indignantly, "did the President think this country was going 

 to wag such a tail as that?" 



Before the frost was out of the ground the following spring, 

 a tide of settlers was rolling into that vast new terrain as twenty 



