raised the people against them. To
injure him, most of them had been ready to conspire with a tainted
adventurer like Burr. They were now ready for the same object to tear up
the Union and all their principles with it. One of their ablest
spokesmen, Josiah Quincey, made a speech against the purchase, in which
he anticipated the most extreme pronouncements of the Nullifiers of 1832
and the Secessionists of 1860, declared that his country was not America
but Massachusetts, that to her alone his ultimate allegiance was due,
and that if her interests were violated by the addition of new Southern
territory in defiance of the Constitution, she would repudiate the Union
and take her stand upon her rights as an independent Sovereign State.

By such an attitude the Federalists destroyed only themselves. Some of
the wiser among them left the party on this issue, notably John Quincey
Adams, son of the second President of the United States, and himself to
be raised later, under somewhat disastrous circumstances, to the same
position. The rump that remained true, not to their principles but
rather to their vendetta, could make no headway against a virtually
unanimous nation. They merely completed and endorsed the general
judgment on their party by an act of suicide.

But the chief historical importance of the Louisiana purchase lies in
the fact that it gave a new and for long years an unlimited scope to
that irresistible movement of expansion westward which is the key to all
that age in American history. In the new lands a new kind of American
was growing up. Within a generation he was to come by his own; and a
Westerner in the chair of Washington was to revolutionize the
Commonwealth.

Of the governing conditions of the West, two stand out as of especial
importance to history.

One was the presence of unsubdued and hostile Indian tribes. Ever since
that extraordinary man, Daniel Boon (whose strange career would make an
epic for which there is no room in this book), crossed the Alleghanies a
decade before the beginning of the Revolution and made an opening for
the white race into the rich valleys of Kentucky, the history of the
western frontier of European culture had been a cycle of Indian wars.
The native race had not yet been either tamed or corrupted by
civilization. Powerful chiefs still ruled great territories as
independent potentates, and made peace and war with the white men on
equal terms. From such a condition it fol