en
during the concluding years of the war the Spanish soldiers on the
upper Mississippi were regarded by the Americans in Illinois as a
menace no less serious than the British troops at Detroit.

In the opening years of our national life the Western backwoodsman
found the Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi even more
hurtful and irksome than the retention by the British king of the
posts on the Great Lakes. After years of tedious public negotiations,
under and through which ran a dark woof of private intrigue, the
sinewy western hands so loosened the Spanish grip that in despair
Spain surrendered to France the mouth of the river and the vast
territories stretching thence into the dim Northwest. She hoped
thereby to establish a strong barrier between her remaining provinces
and her most dreaded foe. But France in her turn grew to understand
that America's position as regards Louisiana, thanks to the steady
westward movement of the backwoodsman, was such as to render it on the
one hand certain that the retention of the province by France would
mean an armed clash with the United States, and on the other hand no
less certain that in the long run such a conflict would result to
France's disadvantage. Louisiana thus passed from the hands of Spain,
after a brief interval, into those of the young Republic. There
remained to Spain, Mexico and Florida; and forthwith the pressure of
the stark forest riflemen began to be felt on the outskirts of these
two provinces. Florida was the first to fall. After a portion of it
had been forcibly annexed, after Andrew Jackson had marched at will
through part of the remainder, and after the increasing difficulty of
repressing the American filibustering efforts had shown the imminence
of some serious catastrophe, Spain ceded the peninsula to the United
States. Texas, New Mexico, and California did not fall into American
hands until they had passed from the Spaniard to his half-Indian sons.

Many decades went by after Spain had lost her foothold on the American
continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She misgoverned
the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in the islands,
as once upon the continent, her own children became her deadliest
foes. But generation succeeded generation, and the prophecies of those
far-seeing statesmen who foretold that she would lose to the northern
Republic her West Indian possessions remained unfulfilled. At last, at
the clo