ouisiana to be admitted into the Union as a State by President and
Senate? Or was it to be governed as a dependency? And how could the
special privileges given to Spanish and French ships in the port of New
Orleans be reconciled with that provision of the Constitution which,
expressly forbade any preference to be given, by any regulation of
commerce or revenue, to the ports of one State over those of another?
The exigencies of politics played havoc with consistency, so that
Republicans supported the ratification of the treaty with erstwhile
Federalist arguments, while Federalists used the old arguments of the
Republicans. Yet the Senate advised the ratification by a decisive vote
and with surprising promptness; and Congress passed a provisional act
authorizing the President to take over and govern the territory of
Louisiana.

The vast province which Napoleon had tossed so carelessly into the lap
of the young Western Republic was, strangely enough, not yet formally in
his possession. The expeditionary force under General Victor which
was to have occupied Louisiana had never left port. M. Pierre Clement
Laussat, however, who was to have accompanied the expedition to assume
the duties of prefect in the province, had sailed alone in January,
1803, to receive the province from the Spanish authorities. If this
lonely Frenchman on mission possessed the imagination of his race,
he must have had some emotional thrills as he reflected that he was
following the sea trail of La Salle and Iberville through the warm
waters of the Gulf of Mexico. He could not have entered the Great River
and breasted its yellow current for a hundred miles, without seeing in
his mind's eye those phantom figures of French and Spanish adventurers
who had voyaged up and down its turbid waters in quest of gold or of
distant Cathay. As his vessel dropped anchor opposite the town which
Bienville had founded, Laussat must have felt that in some degree he was
"heir of all the ages"; yet he was in fact face to face with conditions
which, whatever their historic antecedents, were neither French nor
Spanish. On the water front of New Orleans, he counted "forty-five
Anglo-American ships to ten French." Subsequent experiences deepened
this first impression: it was not Spanish nor French influence which had
made this port important but those "three hundred thousand planters who
in twenty years have swarmed over the eastern plains of the Mississippi
and have cultivat