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the United States to explain his intentions." France, Great Britain, and Russia all counseled Spain to ratify the treaty, while they urged the United States to pursue a conciliatory course. It was under these circumstances that President Monroe, in his annual message to Congress of Dec. 7, 1819, recommended that the operation of the proposed law to carry the treaty into effect be made contingent, so as to afford "an opportunity for such friendly explanations as may be desired during the present session of Congress."

In January, 1820, the Spanish Government sent out as its plenipotentiary Gen. Don Francisco Dionisio Vives. He arrived in Washington early in April. His instructions were to temporize and delay. Besides repeating the objection to the proposed declaration as to grants, he declared it to be indispensable that the United States should suppress the "scandalous system of piracy" carried on from its ports, put an end to "unlawful armaments," and otherwise cause its territory to be respected, and agree not to form any relations with the revolutionary governments in the Spanish provinces in America." It was soon learned, however, that a revolution had taken place in Spain, and that, the liberal constitution having been restored, the Government had decided to submit the question of the treaty to the Cortes. The United States rejected the conditions proposed by Gen. Vives, and insisted upon the annulment of the grants, but, in view of the change that had taken place in Spain, President Monroe, in a message to the House of May 9, 1820, advised forbearance, and Congress adjourned without authorizing the taking possession of the territory. October 5, 1820, the Cortes in secret session advised the cession of the Floridas, and declared the controverted grants null and void. The Senate reaffirmed the treaty by all but four votes, and on Feb. 22, 1821, the ratifications were exchanged.

The formal act of cession or certificate of transfer of East Florida to the United States was signed July 10, 1821, by Gov. Don José Coppinger, on the part of Spain, and Mr. Robert Butler, commis

a Don Manuel Gonzales Salmon to Mr. Forsyth, Aug. 10, 1819, Am. State Papers, IV. 655-656. See as to the causes of Spain's delay, Mr. Adams, Sec. of State, to Mr. Lowndes, Dec. 21, 1819, Am. State Papers, For. Rel. IV. 674.

Am. State Papers, For. Rel. IV. 627, 676.

C Am. State Papers, For. Rel. IV. 677-678.
Am. Stat. Papers, For. Rel. IV. 676-680.
Am. State Papers, For. Rel. IV. 676.

Int. Arbitrations, V. 4497; Am. State Papers, For. Rel. IV. 612, 626, 650, 701; V. 127-133; Morse, Life of J. Q. Adams, 125; Schurz, Life of Clay, I. 165. For the purpose of settling land titles under Art. VIII., Congress established a board of three commissioners. For legislation on the subject, see acts of May 8, 1822, 3 Stats. 709; Feb. 28, 1824, 4 Stats. 6; March 3, 1825, id. 102; April 22, 1826, id. 156; Feb. 8, 1827, id. 202; May 22, 1828; id. 284; May 26, 1830, id. 405; Jan. 23, 1832, id. 496. For further correspondence sent to the House Feb. 2, 1824, as to the treaty, see Am. State Papers, For. Rel. V. 263. Correspondence as to the execution of the treaty will be found in the same volume, at page 368.

sioner, on the part of the United States." Aug. 8, 1821, Mr. Butler sent to Gov. Andrew Jackson an inventory of the public property, including fortifications and public edifices, transferred to him, accompanied with plans and charts. Two letters, dated Sept. 1 and Oct. 4, 1821, and relating, respectively, to the "archives of East Florida” and "maps, charts, etc., of the two Floridas," were addressed by Gov. Jackson to the Department of State, and were received by it, though they seem, with their enclosures, to have been mislaid. Many documents relating to the cession of the Floridas were sent to Congress by President Monroe with his annual message of Dec. 5, 1821. In this message President Monroe mentioned the failure of the Cuban authorities to deliver over archives in their possession relating to the Floridas. In 1832 Mr. Jeremy Robinson, who was sent as commissioner to Havana for the purpose, obtained and sent to the United States a number of such documents, while others, which were in his possession at the time of his death, in 1834, were transmitted to the Department of State by Mr. N. P. Trist, consul at Havana. Among the latter is a list of the "Fincas" which belonged to H. C. M. at St. Augustine at the time of the evacuation.

"It is the settled doctrine of the judicial department [following that of the executive and legislative departments] of this Government, that the treaty of 1819 ceded no territory west of the river Perdido, but only that east of it: and therefore all grants made by Spain after the United States acquired the country from France, in 1803, are void, if the lands granted lay west of that river; because made on the territory acquired by the treaty of 1803; which extended to the Perdido east. It was thus held in Foster and Elam v. Neilson, 2 Peters, 254, and again in Garcia v. Lee, 12 Peters, 515, and is not now open to controversy in this court. . . . The Spanish Government [however] continued to exercise jurisdiction over the country, including the city of Mobile, for some nine years; the United States not seeing proper to take possession, and Spain refusing to surrender it. . . . The right necessarily incident to the exercise of jurisdiction rendered it proper that permits to settle and improve by cultivation, or to authorize the erection of establishments for mechanical purposes, should be granted. . . . Although the United States disavowed that any right to the soil passed by such concessions, still they were not disregarded as giving no equity to the claimant; on the contrary," they were to a certain extent confirmed by the United States.

Pollard's Lessee v. Files (1844), 2 How. 591, 602, 603. S. P., Pollard's Lessee v.
Hagan, 3 Pet. 212.

For an elaborate discussion of Spanish titles in West Florida, see report of Mr.
Livingston, Sec. of State, to President Jackson, June 12, 1832, MS. Report
Book, Dept. of State.

a Mr. Butler to the Secretary of State, July 13, 1821, MSS, Dept. of State. Am. State Papers, For. Rel., IV. 740-808.

Mr. Hunter, 2nd Asst. Sec. of State, to Mr. Dockray, Dec. 6, 1871, 91 MS. Dom. Let. 499.

Treaty of 1819.

4. TEXAS.

§ 103.

By the treaty signed at Washington, Feb. 22, 1819, by Mr. John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, on the part of the United States, and Señor Don Luis de Onis, Spanish minister, on the part of His Catholic Majesty, the territory called Texas, lying between the Rio Grande del Norte, or Rio Bravo, and the river Sabine, a territory long in dispute between France and Spain, and after 1803 between Spain and the United States, was acknowledged to belong to Spain. Subsequently, on the independence of Mexico, it became a part of that country."

"It is now well known that Mr. Adams maintained that the Rio Grande was the true southwestern boundary of the United States, and that he was overruled by a majority of the Cabinet, who concurred with Mr. Crawford in holding that Florida was so essential to the Southeastern States that the movement to obtain it should not be clogged by debatable demands for territory to the southwest. But even then there were statesmen, among whom was Mr. Clay, who, with the interests of the Mississippi Valley at heart, held that Texas was not only far more valuable and important to the United States than Florida, but that Texas already rightfully belonged to the United States. Whether General Jackson, who was appealed to by Mr. Adams for support on this issue, agreed with Mr. Adams as to making the Rio Grande the boundary, has been much disputed. Many years afterwards, when the annexation of Texas was opposed by Mr. Adams as an undue extension of slave territory, he produced his diary to show that General Jackson had advised its surrender by President Monroe. This was emphatically denied by General Jackson. The manuscript correspondence on file in the Department of State leads us to an intermediate position. General Jackson, when the Florida treaty was under consideration, approved of it as affording a settlement greatly to be preferred to a continuance of the border and Indian warfare which then existed on the Florida lines, or to a war with Spain which might be of indefinite duration and cost; and in view of what appeared to him the overwhelming importance of this issue he overlooked that of the southwestern boundary. There is nothing to show that the nature of our title to Texas, surrendered by the Florida treaty, was at that time brought to his notice. To President Monroe, however, the strength of this title was well known, and his voluminous unpublished correspondence shows with what conscientious and patient care it was considered by him. The ultimate annexation of Texas to the United States he seemed to consider as inevitable, and he declared over and

aThat Texas was properly a part of Louisiana, see Adams, History of the United States, II. 7, 256, 294-300; III, 33-34, 40, 69, 80, 78, 139, 310.

over again that he would not permit it to be held by any European power but Spain. But the Missouri question was then looming portentously before his anxious eyes. He saw a great party in the North which was opposed to any extension of slave territory; he himself was no enthusiastic defender of slavery. If Texas had then been won, it could only have been brought into productive occupancy by slavery, affording a new stimulus to a surreptitious slave trade. In the course of time the dominant race of the North would flow down into it and take possession of it and occupy it, but that time had not yet come. It was better not to press a claim now for a territory for which we were not quite ready, when the effect might be to impede our acquisition of a territory which we needed at once. It is remarkable that this view of the acquisition of Texas was not shared by Mr. Adams, in whose mind the dangers of the extension of slavery had not yet become such as to influence his political course. He not only urged the assertion of our title to Texas, necessarily then a slave State, but he assented to the Missouri compromise, which gave the Southwest to slavery. The issue, in fact, was fraught with consequences which Mr. Monroe was the only leading statesman of his day to foresee. Texas, which would have then made six States of the size of Pennsylvania, would have been brought into the Union, and with the population which would soon have poured into its fertile plains, might have rivaled the Northwest as a field for pioneer settlement. Whatever might have been the effect of this on the future, in the final struggle with slavery, there is no question that the introduction of such an element of contention at that time would have been to expose the work of maintenance of the Union, which Mr. Monroe considered to be his especial charge, to perils he was unwilling to encounter."

Note of Mr. Wharton, Int. Law Dig., 1st ed., II. 284–285, §161a.
See also Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, I. 162-165;
Morse, Life of John Quincy Adams, 110 et. seq.

Question of limits and annexation.

In the instructions given to Mr. Poinsett, as United States minister to Mexico in 1825, it was suggested with reference to the limits between the two countries, under Art. III. of the treaty between the United States and Spain of Feb. 22, 1819, that "if the line were so altered as to throw altogether on one side Red River and Arkansas, and their respective tributary streams, and the line on the Sabine were removed further west," the United States would as an equivalent for the proposed cession stipulate to restrain, as far as practicable, the wild Indians inhabiting the territory from committing hostilities and depredations. on the Mexican territories and people."

a Mr. Clay, Sec. of State, to Mr. Poinsett, March 26, 1825, H. Ex. Doc. 42, 25 Cong. 1 sess.; Br. and For. State Papers, XXVI. 830.

In 1829 Mr. Poinsett was directed to open negotiations for the purchase of "all that part of the province of Texas which lies east of a line beginning at the Gulf of Mexico, in the centre of the desert, or Grand Prairie, which lies west of the Rio Nueces, and is represented to be nearly two hundred miles in width, and to extend north to the mountains, the proposed line following the course of the centre of that desert or prairie north to the mountains, dividing the waters of the Rio Grande del Norte from those that run eastward to the Gulf; and until it strikes our present boundary at 42° north latitude." Various substitutionary lines were suggested with a view to meet any objections on the part of Mexico. The boundary then assumed by Mexico was "deemed objectionable, as well on the ground of its alleged uncertainty as for reasons of a different character," among which were the difficulties to which it gave rise in the repression of smugglers and outlaws, and the prevention of Indian depredations."

In 1835 Colonel Anthony Butler, who bore to Mr. Poinsett the instructions of 1829, and who, later in the same year, succeeded Mr. Poinsett as the diplomatic representative of the United States in Mexico, was directed to offer half a million dollars for the bay of San Francisco and certain adjacent territory, the port of San Francisco being considered especially desirable as a place of resort for the numerous American whaling vessels operating in the Pacific. Mr. Butler was also to continue his efforts to obtain the cession of Texas.' The independence of Texas was declared by a convention of delegates of the people on March 2, 1836. In the following year the Government of the United States repelled an overture of annexation.d

Texan independ

ence.

"The Government of the United States sees with pain a prospect of the immediate resumption of active military operations between Texas and the Mexican Republic. While it claims no right to interfere in the controversy between those countries, it can not, under existing circumstances, be indifferent to a renewal of hostilities between them. Nearly seven years have now elapsed since Texas has maintained its independence, unmolested by invading troops. In that

a Mr. Van Buren, Sec. of State, to Mr. Poinsett, Aug. 25, 1829, H. Ex. Doc. 42, 25 Cong. 1 sess.; Br. and For. State Papers, XXVI. 850. A treaty confirming the limits under the Spanish treaty was signed by Mr. Poinsett, Jan. 12, 1828 (Am. State Papers, For. Rel. VI. 946), but the ratifications were not exchanged till April 5, 1832. See, as to delays in its execution, Br. and For. State Papers, XXVI. 870–872, 880 et seq.; treaty between the United States and Mexico of April 3, 1835; and Int. Arbitrations, II. 1213, touching the incident of the Gorostiza pamphlet.

Mr. Forsyth, Sec. of State, Aug. 6, 1835, MS. Inst. Mex.; H. Ex. Doc. 42, 25 Cong. 1 sess.; Br. and For. State Papers, XXVI. 887; Mr. Forsyth, Sec. of State, to Mr. Butler, Nov. 9, 1835, MS. Inst. Mex.

CS. Ex. Doc. 415, 24 Cong. 1 sess.; Br. and For. State Papers, XXIV. 1269.

d H. Ex. Doc. 40, 25 Cong. 1 sess.; Br. and For. State Papers, XXV. 1404.

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