ned. Spain desired to
maintain her hold by means of the control given through the possession
of the mouth of the river and the Gulf, by her influence upon the Indian
tribes, and by intrigues with the settlers. Her object was primarily to
safeguard the Spanish American monopoly which had made her a great
nation in the world. Instinctively she seemed to surmise that out of
this Valley were the issues of her future; here was the lever which
might break successively, from her empire fragments about the
Gulf--Louisiana, Florida and Texas, Cuba and Porto Rico--the Southwest
and Pacific coast, and even the Philippines and the Isthmian Canal,
while the American republic, building itself on the resources of the
Valley, should become paramount over the independent republics into
which her empire was to disintegrate.

France, seeking to regain her former colonial power, would use the
Mississippi Valley as a means of provisioning her West Indian islands;
of dominating Spanish America, and of subordinating to her purposes the
feeble United States, which her policy assigned to the lands between the
Atlantic and the Alleghanies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy, the
revolutionary republic, and the Napoleonic empire--all contemplated the
acquisition of the whole Valley of the Mississippi from the Alleghanies
to the Rocky Mountains.[186:1]

England holding the Great Lakes, dominating the northern Indian
populations and threatening the Gulf and the mouth of the Mississippi by
her fleet, watched during the Revolution, the Confederation, and the
early republic for the breaking of the fragile bonds of the thirteen
States, ready to extend her protection over the settlers in the
Mississippi Valley.

Alarmed by the prospect of England's taking Louisiana and Florida from
Spain, Jefferson wrote in 1790: "Embraced from St. Croix to St. Mary's
on one side by their possessions, on the other by their fleet, we need
not hesitate to say that they would soon find means to unite to them all
the territory covered by the ramifications of the Mississippi." And
that, he thought, must result in "bloody and eternal war or indissoluble
confederacy" with England.

None of these nations deemed it impossible that American settlers in the
Mississippi Valley might be won to accept another flag than that of the
United States. Gardoqui had the effrontery in 1787 to suggest to Madison
that the Kentuckians would make good Spanish subjects. France enlisted
the support