wilderness which stretched two thousand miles from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. Jefferson was, as we have seen, an enthusiastic advocate of expansion. In 1783 he had suggested to George Rogers Clark, the hero of Vincennes, that he form a party "to explore the country from the Mississippi to California." Now, twenty years later, he asked Congress for an appropriation of $25.00 "to send intelligent officers with ten or twelve men to explore even to the western ocean" and to study the Indian tribes, the botany, geology, and zoölogy of the country. To be sure, the expedition would pass through territory belonging to the king of Spain, but it might be represented as "a literary pursuit" (!) and would give no offense on account of "the expiring state of the Spanish interests there." The appropriation was made, and Jefferson selected his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition, with William Clark, the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, for his lieutenant. Before the expedition started, in the spring of 1804, from the mouth of the Missouri River, Louisiana had become our property; but the land beyond the Rockies still belonged to Spain up to the forty-second parallel of latitude, and north of that was claimed by both England and the United States. The Lewis and Clark expedition, as described in the diaries of several of the men who participated in it, is one of the most fascinating chapters of our early history. The company ascended the Missouri River to its source, then, crossing the "great divide," struck the upper waters of the Columbia River and reached the "roaring ocean" in the summer of 1805. Wintering at the mouth of the Columbia, they returned by practically the same route as they had gone out, and reached St. Louis in September, 1806. The expedition established our best claim to the Oregon region in our later dispute with England.1

1Our earlier claim to the region was based on the discovery of the Columbia River by Captain Gray in 1792. While Lewis and Clark were on their travels Captain Zebulon Pike, seeking the sources of the Mississippi, explored to a point several miles above the Falls of St. Anthony, when he was hindered by deep snows. The following year he explored the Southwest from the Arkansas River to the Spanish settlements on the Rio Grande. Pikes Peak in Colorado is his monument.

Meanwhile Jefferson had been triumphantly reëlected over his Federalist opponent C. C. Pinckney. The irreconcilable Federalists of New England, led by Pickering, Griswold, and Sedgwick, were ready, in their opposition to the "lordlings of the South," to break up the Union. The addition of Louisiana, with the promise of incorporation into the Union, meant the end of New England's aristocratic leadership in Congress and eventual domination by the Southern planters, supported by "creoles and halfbreeds" from the "western Scythia." Burr was sounded with the purpose of bringing New York into a projected Western confederacy, and the unprincipled Vice President, whom Jefferson had refused to honor in the distribution of the patronage, joined the plot and accepted Federalist support in his candidacy for the governorship of New York in the spring of 1804. But Burr was defeated in 1804, as he had been in 1801, by the efforts of Alexander Hamilton. Republican electors were chosen in every state of the Union except Connecticut and Delaware, and the Jeffersonian policies were indorsed by an electoral majority of 162 votes to 14. The only result of the Federalist plot of disunion was the loss of their most distinguished leader, Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr slew in revenge in a duel on Weehawken Heights (July 11, 1804).

The first administration of Thomas Jefferson was successful in every respect. Our foreign commerce grew so rapidly that Gallatin's estimates of customs receipts were far outstripped. Except for what Jefferson called "bickerings with Spain," our relations with foreign countries were satisfactory. The great Louisiana bargain seemed to have cemented a lasting friendship with France. The commissioners under the Jay Treaty satisfied the British merchants by awarding them $2,664,000 in payment of the long-standing debts from American citizens. The English government was so well pleased to see Napoleon's colonial design defeated in the western continent that they allowed Baring Brothers to advance cash on the Louisiana stock voted by Congress. Our Western country was beginning to fill up. Nearly 10,000 emigrants had gone into the new Mississippi Territory established in 1798. Ohio, with a population

of 55,000, was admitted to the Union as the seventeenth state in November, 1802. In January, 1805, the territory of Michigan was set off from the Indian Territory.

By an act of March 10, 1800, Congress had established land offices on the Ohio frontier for the sale of public lands in small parcels to the emigrant at two dollars an acre with liberal credit a sure sign that the small farmer was beginning to replace the hunter, the ranger, and the speculator on our frontier. Emigrants already began to swarm on the main routes to the Western country-across the Massachusetts and Connecticut Berkshires, up the Mohawk valley to the frontier trading-post at Buffalo, through the Wyoming valley of Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and thence down the Ohio, from Baltimore via the Potomac and Braddock's road to the Monongahela, from Virginia and the Carolinas through the Cumberland Gap to the rich lands of Kentucky and Tennessee, or far to the south, past the dwindling hills of the Appalachian range, into the fertile territory finally ceded to the government by the state of Georgia in 1802. Although we had little as yet to boast of in arts and letters, the democratic revolution was preparing the stage for a distinctly American type of genius as compared with the Anglo-American of the colonial days. Newspapers were multiplying rapidly, and, although our people were still so interested in politics and so vociferous in their discussions that Salmagundi called the government of the United States "a logocracy," still the scurrility that disgraced our press in the days of Washington and Adams had largely disappeared. The New York Evening Post and the National Intelligencer of Washington were most respectable substitutes for Freneau's and Fenno's Gazettes. Peace, prosperity, political harmony, and unbounded prospects of expansion in wealth and numbers were the happy auguries for our country when Jefferson took the oath of office for the second time, on March 4, 1805. He could truly congratulate his fellow countrymen that "not a cloud appeared on the horizon."

THE STRUGGLE FOR NEUTRALITY

John Randolph of Roanoke, with his inimitable gift for epigram, once likened the four years of Jefferson's second administration to the seven lean kine in Pharaoh's dream, which rose from the river and devoured their seven fat predecessors. The simile was apt. From the spring day of 1805 when Jefferson delivered his second inaugural address congratulating the country and his party on the blessings of prosperity, troubles began to brew: schism in the ranks of the Republicans, conspiracies in the West, and the massing of new war clouds in Europe, which spread their sinister shadow westward across the ocean until they reached our shores. The President believed in 1805 that the storms which marked his first accession to office were all past. He wrote to General Heath in December in a strain of rejoicing: "The new century opened itself by committing us on a boisterous ocean, but all is now subsiding. Peace is smoothing our path at home and abroad." Four years later he left office, his cherished policy of peaceful coercion defeated, his hold on Congress lost, his party disrupted, and his country on the verge of war, comforting himself with the gloomy solace that "it would rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station [the presidency] with the reputation and favor which bring him into it."

Quarrels among the Republicans of New York and Pennsylvania had begun to appear during Jefferson's first term. The Livingston and Clinton factions were always in rivalry for the control of local offices and policy; and Vice President Burr had become so far alienated from the administration, through having been denied what he considered a proper share of the patronage, that he had lent himself, as we have seen, to the disunion schemes. of the New England Federalists. A veritable epidemic of impeachment of state judges in Pennsylvania, spread by the persecuting zeal of William Duane of the Aurora, threw the great Republican state of the North into a frenzy of factional strife which Jefferson tried in vain to allay. These local quarrels proved but the prelude to schism and intrigue in the national

Congress, which shattered the harmonious relations between the Executive and the Houses and reduced the latter to pitiable weakness at just the moment when union and strength were necessary to meet the encroachments of the European belligerents

on our commerce.

The man who introduced strife into Congress was John Randolph. This highly gifted, but contentious and abusive, son of Virginia, who boasted that the blood of Pocahontas ran in his veins, had been displeased from the beginning of Jefferson's administration with the consideration shown to the Northern states. Conciliation was no part of his political creed. The Republicans, he thought, should conduct the government with as complete regard to the interests of the agricultural South as the Federalists had for the commercial North. There were enough able men from Virginia and the Carolinas to advise the President without his needing to have recourse to the Lincolns and Dearborns and Crowninshields of Massachusetts. Randolph conducted the prosecution in the impeachment of Justice Chase at Jefferson's express request, and when Chase was acquitted by a Senate in which sat 34 Republicans and only 10 Federalists, it was proof enough to Randolph that he had been left in the lurch by the administration. He was through serving Thomas Jefferson.

Randolph's opportunity for revenge came with the opening of Congress in December, 1805. Jefferson had two or three political "hobbies" on which he insisted, in spite of opposition from foes and advice from friends, with a persistence that was strange in a man generally so shrewd in political compromise and patient in the handling of expedients. One of those hobbies was the acquisition of West Florida. He had committed himself to the doctrine that the Perdido River was the eastern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, and for this he labored against the flat refusal of Spain to surrender West Florida and the cynical indifference of Napoleon to his entreaties to make Spain surrender it. There were matters of far more importance to the United States than the possession of a few square miles between the Iberville and the Perdido, yet Jefferson seemed even ready