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It falls into three main periods: (1) the unsuccessful attempt to outrival England as mistress of this region in the struggles of the colonial era; (2) the alliance with the United States in order to disrupt the British empire in our War for Independence; (3) the efforts to render the United States subservient to France and to rebuild French power in the interior of North America, ending with the cession of Louisiana. There is a striking continuity in the efforts of France to unite the fortunes of the region beyond the Allegheny mountains with those of the province of Louisiana and to control the Mississippi valley. This she desired to do, as a bar to the advance of England; as a means of supplying the French West Indies; as a lever by which to compel the United States to serve the interests of France; and as a means of promoting French ascendancy over Spanish America. France recognized that the effective boundary of Louisiana must be the Allegheny mountains, not the Mississippi river. It is desired here to present some of the evidences of this policy, to exhibit the various forms which it took at different periods, and to explain the causes that affected the desire of France to control this important region. As will appear, the problem was a part of the larger problem of successorship to the power of Spain in the 1 This paper makes free use of two articles by the present writer,blished in the Atlantic Monthly for May and June, 1904, under the title, "The Dipl atic Contest for the Mississippi Valley." The principal purpose of this paper is to furnish the necessary citations for some of the assertions made in these articles and to consider more fully the French side of these diplomatic intrigues. New World, but the specific forms that French policy assumed were more immediately dependent upon the Louisiana question. The suggestion made by France in the peace proposals of 1761, that a barrier country, or Indian reservation, should be formed between Louisiana and the Allegheny mountains, exhibits an early form of her desire to prevent the encroachments of English-speaking people into the valley, and the use to be made of the Indians as a means of holding this region open to the purposes of France and Spain, closely allied in the family compact of that year. The refusal of England and the final defeat of the allies led to the readjustment of 1763, by which France yielded her American possessions east of the Mississippi to England. She ceded New Orleans with the province of Louisiana to Spain. The cession of Florida to England by Spain left the Gulf of Mexico divided between these last-named powers. Doubtless France yielded the province without keen reluctance, for it had been an unprofitable possession; but the intimate connection between Spain and France seemed to make the transfer something less than an absolute relinquishment. The English policy with regard to the interior must certainly have been acceptable to her recent enemies, for, by the proclamation of 1763, the king reserved the lands beyond the Alleghenies to the Indians, and declared that until the crown was ready to extinguish the Indian title, lands should not be patented within that area, nor settlers enter it. Although the Indian line was changed by purchases, and the colony of Vandalia was all but organized at the opening of the Revolution,3 yet, when France had to determine her attitude toward the United States at the outbreak of that war, the trans-Allegheny region was still, in the eyes of the English law, almost entirely Indian country. It is impossible here to review the connection of France with the colonies during the Revolution; but some of the essential features of the policy of Vergennes must be stated in order to understand later events, and to perceive the continuity of French policy. There was published in Paris, in 1802, a Mémoire historique et politique sur la Louisiane, par M. de Vergennes. This document I Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, 416. 2 See the important paper, based on Spanish documents, by Dr. William R. Shepherd, in Political Science Quarterly, September, 1904 (XIX, 439–458), "The Cession of Louisiana to Spain." 3G. H. Alden, New Governments West of the Alleghanies, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, Economics, Political Science and History Series, II, 19 ff., 38 ff.; V. Coffin, The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution, ibid., I, 398-431. There are copies in the library of Harvard University, in the Library of Congress, and in the Wisconsin State Historical Library. John Quincy Adams notes in his diary |