secretaryship of state. Not even one of the treaties marking the first steps in their eventual settlement was signed. But, nevertheless, Jefferson made valuable contributions in his state papers to the solution of them all.1

With France our relations were naturally friendly when the new government was inaugurated at New York. We had been her ally for more than ten years. Her aid to us in our Revolution, from whatever motive rendered, had been the indispensable condition of the attainment of our independence. Moreover, France had no possessions on the mainland of North America, and no desire for any. She had already made some concessions to our commerce. What further demands we wished to make upon her ministers we readily postponed in 1789, to watch with genuine sympathy the progress of her great Revolution. Serious trouble between America and France began only in the second administration of Washington, with the kindling of a general European war.

It was not thus, however, in our relations with England and Spain. They were both our neighbors on the American mainland and both unfriendly to

1 Jefferson resigned the secretaryship at the close of 1793. The Jay Treaty with England was concluded in 1794–5, the Pinckney Treaty with Spain in 1795, and the convention with Napoleon in 1800. These treaties were the preliminary and partial adjustment of questions that were not finally settled until the close of the war between England and Napoleon (1815) and the elimination of Spain from the Floridas (1819).

the new republic. The British refused to evacuate rich fur-posts on the Great Lakes, which lay within the territory they had abandoned to the United States in the treaty of peace. They carried off negroes, mostly from Virginia, in violation of the treaty stipulations. They refused to open their West Indian ports to our trade, and would not even recognize the new nation by sending us a minister. Washington instructed Gouverneur Morris, our agent in London, to seek satisfaction on these points, but Pitt was obdurate. When at last the British Government condescended to send Mr. Hammond to the United States as minister in 1791, Jefferson took up the negotiations with him over the fur-posts, the negroes, commerce, and the debts due English merchants. In a long note to Hammond, dated May 29, 1792, Jefferson reviewed the whole course of the dispute between Great Britain and the United States since the peace with moderation and "sweet reasonableness," showing by an array of legal and historical proof that Congress had scrupulously fulfilled its treaty obligations in recommending the States to place no impediments in the way of the collection of the British debts, whereas the British, after having agreed by the same treaty to withdraw their garrisons from all the posts in the United States "with all convenient speed," had shown and still showed, after nine years, not the least sign of complying. If laws had been passed

by certain States to relieve debtors by extending the time of payment or issuing paper currency, they were not dictated by any hostility to England, but by the necessity of preserving the business and property of the States from utter bankruptcy and confiscation. The precious metals had been drained out of the country in payment of arms, munitions, and other necessaries from Europe, so that the huge debt could not be paid in coin. "Even if the whole soil of the United States had been offered for sale for ready coin," said Jefferson, "it would not have raised as much as would have satisfied this stipulation." Furthermore, the British, by their illegal retention of the rich fur-posts, were helping to deprive the States of the very money which might enable them to pay the debts. Not arbitrary reprisals, but orderly prosecution through the courts, was the proper way of obtaining redress if there was any unlawful obstruction of justice toward British creditors. The note had no immediate effect on England's behavior, but it remains one of the ablest diplomatic documents in our archives. It set a standard for fairness of spirit, thoroughness of information, and cogency of reasoning that subsequent secretaries of state have felt it an honorable task to emulate.

Jefferson's unbounded confidence in the destiny of the American people to expand and fill the continent made him the most ardent champion in the

cabinet of our rights and interests in the West-a more ardent champion, even, than President Washington himself. He looked with alarm on any movement from within or without the republic that threatened or thwarted this expansion. "I fear from an expression in your letter," he wrote to Archibald Stuart from Paris in January, 1786, "that the people of Kentucke think of separating not only from Virginia (in which they are right), but also from the confederacy. I own I should think that a most calametous event, and such a one as every good citizin on both sides should set himself against. Our present federal limits are not too large for good government, nor will the increase of votes in Congress produce any ill effect. On the contrary, it will drown the little divisions at present existing there. Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled. . The navigation of the Mississippi we

No one in America, now that Franklin was dead, appreciated so fully as Jefferson both how necessary the free navigation of the Mississippi was to the security of the new union, and how difficult it would be to gain the acknowledgment of our right to the free navigation of the river from Spain. It was by far the most important diplomatic problem of Washington's administration, and Jefferson was the only man in the cabinet to fully realize its importance.

He had had ample chance to study the disposition of Spain in his five years' residence at the Court of France. He knew how Spain had entered the Revolutionary War in 1779 in order to recover her lost province of Florida and her lost fortress of Gibraltar from Great Britain; how she had resisted Vergennes's appeals to join in the fight against England until he threatened to dissolve the "Family Compact" of the Bourbon Kings concluded in 1761; how she had hated to give even indirect aid to colonies revolting against their absent monarch, when the southern hemisphere of America was filled with her own distant and ill-governed dependencies; how jealous she was lest a strong nation should grow up on the eastern bank of the Mississippi to confront her dominion on the western bank and to dispute the commerce of the great highway and the possession of New Orleans. Spain had made no alliance with us, as France had, on entering the war, nor had she been a party to our treaty of peace with England. Her minister, Florida Blanca, had declared that there was "a sort of equality of enmity" in the relations of England and America to Spain, which made it "difficult to desire that either side should win." When, therefore, the American commissioners at Paris, departing from the letter of their instructions, concluded peace with Great Britain alone, and France after some righteous protest acquiesced in the general pacification, Spain