Jefferson and his Colleagues [25]
Within that time Laussat bestirred himself to gallicize the colony, so far as forms could do so. He replaced the cabildo or hereditary council by a municipal council; he restored the civil code; he appointed French officers to civil and military posts. And all this he did in the full consciousness that American commissioners were already on their way to receive from him in turn the province which his wayward master had sold. On December 20, 1803, young William Claiborne, Governor of the Mississippi Territory, and General James Wilkinson, with a few companies of soldiers, entered and received from Laussat the keys of the city and the formal surrender of Lower Louisiana. On the Place d'Armes, promptly at noon, the tricolor was hauled down and the American Stars and Stripes took its place. Louisiana had been transferred for the sixth and last time. But what were the metes and bounds of this province which had been so often bought and sold? What had Laussat been instructed to take and give? What, in short, was Louisiana? The elation which Livingston and Monroe felt at acquiring unexpectedly a vast territory beyond the Mississippi soon gave way to a disquieting reflection. They had been instructed to offer ten million dollars for New Orleans and the Floridas: they had pledged fifteen millions for Louisiana without the Floridas. And they knew that it was precisely West Florida, with the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Gulf littoral, that was most ardently desired by their countrymen of the West. But might not Louisiana include West Florida? Had Talleyrand not professed ignorance of the eastern boundary? And had he not intimated that the Americans would make the most of their bargain? Within a month Livingston had convinced himself that the United States could rightfully claim West Florida to the Perdido River, and he soon won over Monroe to his way of thinking. They then reported to Madison that "on a thorough examination of the subject" they were persuaded that they had purchased West Florida as a part of Louisiana. By what process of reasoning had Livingston and Monroe reached this satisfying conclusion? Their argument proceeded from carefully chosen premises. France, it was said, had once held Louisiana and the Floridas together as part of her colonial empire in America; in 1763 she had ceded New Orleans and the territory west of the Mississippi to Spain, and at the same time she had transferred the Floridas to Great Britain; in 1783 Great Britain had returned the Floridas to Spain which were then reunited to Louisiana as under French rule. Ergo, when Louisiana was retro-ceded "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it," it must have included West Florida. That Livingston was able to convince himself by this logic, does not speak well for his candor or intelligence. He was well aware that Bonaparte had failed to persuade Don Carlos to include the Floridas in the retrocession; he had tried to insert in the treaty an article pledging the First Consul to use his good offices to obtain the Floridas for the United States; and in his midnight dispatch to Madison, with the prospect of acquiring Louisiana before him, he had urged the advisability of exchanging this province for the more desirable Floridas. Livingston therefore could not, and did not, say that Spain intended to cede the Floridas as a part of Louisiana, but that she had inadvertently done so and that Bonaparte might have claimed West Florida, if he had been shrewd enough to see his opportunity. The United States was in no way prevented from pressing this claim because the First Consul had not done so. The fact that France had in 1763 actually dismembered her colonial empire and that Louisiana as ceded to Spain extended only to the Iberville, was given no weight in Livingston's deductions. Having the will to believe, Jefferson and Madison became converts to Livingston's faith. Madison wrote at once that in view of these developments no proposal to exchange Louisiana for the Floridas should be entertained;