What made the debates and action of Congress epochal was the Federalist contention that Thomas Jefferson as provisional and interim governor was nothing more or less than an American despot in succession to a Spanish tyrant. Where was the Constitution now; where would it be when in appointing the necessary officials--executive, judicial, and legislative--he would usurp not merely Spanish despotism but the powers of both the other branches of the federal government? The Republicans quibbled, too; to appoint these three classes of officials was not to exercise their powers. But they confirmed in unanswerable logic a distinction thus far only mooted in our political history--that between states and territories. Already presidential appointees were exercising all three powers in Mississippi and Indiana. This clenched the contentions of the Republicans, and the bill for provisional government passed by an overwhelming vote on October thirty-first. Both parties throughout the struggle had tacitly abandoned the position that Congress possessed merely delegated powers and nothing further except the ability to carry them into effect. Both therefore admitted the possible interpretation of the Constitution under stress of necessity, and the Federalists in their quibbling contentions lost hold everywhere except in New England. That section saw its influence eclipsed by the preponderance of Southern and Western power and ere long was ripe for secession.
Volumes have been written and more will be on the romance of the Louisiana purchase; Josiah Quincy threatened the dismemberment of the Union when the present state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812; but for Jefferson's wisdom in exploration it might have remained a wilderness long after settlement began; Great Britain coveted it in 1815 when Jackson saved it; Aaron Burr probably coveted an empire within it; Napoleon III had dreams of its return to the new France he was to found in Mexico. Excluding the Floridas, which Spain would not concede as a part of it, and the Oregon country, the territory thus acquired was greater than that of Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined. Its agricultural and mineral resources were, humanly speaking, inexhaustible. No wonder it excited the cupidity as it stirred the imagination of mankind; no wonder if men avid to retain their power were dismayed at the preponderance it was sure to exert eventually in a federal union of states. At the present moment fourteen of our commonwealths, with a population of about sixteen millions and a taxable wealth of seven billions, occupy its soil. By the time we are fifty years older, at the present rate of settlement, these will contain about a third of the power in the Union as determined by numbers and prosperity. All of them, however, were from the first administrative districts, never states, and by the retroactive influence of this fact state sovereignty has thus been made an empty phrase.
