States,
with far greater breadth above than below, and was in territory, as in
everything else, equally at least an accession to the Northern States.
It is mere delusion and prejudice, therefore, to speak of Louisiana as
acquisition in the special interest of the South.

The patriotic and just men who participated in that act were influenced
by motives far above all sectional jealousies. It was in truth the great
event which, by completing for us the possession of the Valley of the
Mississippi, with commercial access to the Gulf of Mexico, imparted
unity and strength to the whole Confederation and attached together by
indissoluble ties the East and the West, as well as the North and the
South.

As to Florida, that was but the transfer by Spain to the United States
of territory on the east side of the river Mississippi in exchange for
large territory which the United States transferred to Spain on the west
side of that river, as the entire diplomatic history of the transaction
serves to demonstrate. Moreover, it was an acquisition demanded by the
commercial interests and the security of the whole Union.

In the meantime the people of the United States had grown up to a proper
consciousness of their strength, and in a brief contest with France and
in a second serious war with Great Britain they had shaken off all which
remained of undue reverence for Europe, and emerged from the atmosphere
of those transatlantic influences which surrounded the infant Republic,
and had begun to turn their attention to the full and systematic
development of the internal resources of the Union.

Among the evanescent controversies of that period the most conspicuous
was the question of regulation by Congress of the social condition of
the future States to be founded in the territory of Louisiana.

The ordinance for the government of the territory northwest of the river
Ohio had contained a provision which prohibited the use of servile labor
therein, subject to the condition of the extraditions of fugitives from
service due in any other part of the United States. Subsequently to the
adoption of the Constitution this provision ceased to remain as a law,
for its operation as such was absolutely superseded by the Constitution.
But the recollection of the fact excited the zeal of social propagandism
in some sections of the Confederation, and when a second State, that of
Missouri, came to be formed in the territory of Louisiana proposition
was