Pittsburg, with shore lined with shipping, roared all the way to the gulf, "No grain can be sold down the river on account of those piratical Spaniards!"
Appeal after appeal went up to Jefferson, "Let us sweep them into the sea!"
What hope with a foreign nation at our gates? Spain might be got rid of, but France—Monroe was dispatched to France to interview Napoleon.
"The French must not have New Orleans," was the lightning thought of Jefferson. "No one but ourselves must own our own front door."
And Jefferson penned a letter to Livingstone, the American minister at Paris:
"There is on the globe but one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market. France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Not so France. The impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her character, render it impossible that France and the United States can continue friends when they meet in so irritating a position. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans—from that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."
As Jefferson placed that letter in the hands of Monroe he added:
"In Europe nothing but Europe is seen. But this little event, of France's possessing herself of Louisiana,—this speck which now appears an invisible point on the horizon,—is the embryo of a tornado.
"I must secure the port of New Orleans and the mastery of the navigation of the Mississippi.
"We must have peace. The use of the Mississippi is indispensable. We must purchase New Orleans."
"You are aware of the sensibility of our Western citizens," Madison was writing to Madrid. "To them the Mississippi is everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one."
