to the Ohio. The Indians to the west and south of that line were to be free and under the protection of Spain: those to the east to be free and under the protection of the United States, or the United States to make such arrangements with them as it might see fit. The Indian trade was to be free to both parties. North of the Ohio it was agreed that Spain had no pretensions; the fate of this territory was to be regulated by the Court of London. "As to the course and navigation of the Mississippi," read the Rayneval memoir, "they follow with the property, and they will belong, therefore, to the nation to which the two banks belong. If then, by the future treaty of peace, Spain preserves West Florida, she alone will be the proprietor of the course of the Mississippi from the thirty-first degree of latitude to the mouth of this river. Whatever may be the case with that part which is beyond this point to the north, the United States of America can have no pretentions to it, not being masters of either border of this river."50 As is well known, or at least ought to be well known to every American schoolboy, the commissioners of the 50 Wharton, VI, 27. The map accompanying the above text illustrates the several lines. The Vergennes line and Aranda's compromise line were drawn north of the Ohio only. Jay's line for the northern boundary of East Florida follows a line drawn on a copy of Mitchell's Map in the New York Historical Society's collection, on which the St. Mary's River has been drawn in. Mitchell's Map of 1755 did not have the St. Mary's River on it. Note also that Mitchell's Map places the junction of the Flint and Apalachicola north of 31°, whereas it really is south United States refused to listen to such a curtailment of the territory claimed by their sovereign. It was a device erected at the instance of Spain for the purpose of shutting the new republic off from any contact with the Mississippi. We must take pains to point out, in this instance, that Vergennes never put this forth as the official proposal of France. He was not disappointed when the American commissioners, in their own negotiations with Great Britain obtained from that country the western and southern boundary which Congress had instructed them to secure. The treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States stipulated further: "The navigation of the Mississippi, from its source to the ocean, shall for ever remain free and open to the subjects of Great Britain and the citizens of the United States." The same day on which the treaty was finally signed as definitive, September 3, 1783, Spain and Great Britain also made peace, by the terms of which the two Floridas, conquered by Spanish troops, were ceded to Spain, without any mention of their boundaries. The peace settlement of 1783 thus closed without a Spanish recognition of the independence of the United States, without a settlement of the Mississippi Question, and without an agreement on the Spanish-American boundary in the southwest. It will be the purpose of the following chapters to trace the history of these principal issues between the two countries, and of other issues subordinate to them. 51 The policy of France in regard to Spain and the United States during the war and the peace settlement has been made the subject of a great deal of careful investigation. On that subject particularly the monographs of P. C. Phillips, The West in the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1913), and E. S. Corwin, French Policy and the American Alliance (1916). Both of these are based upon careful perusal of Doniol's documentary Histoire de la participation de la France dans l'établissement des EtatsUnis, and other European and American archival collections. The recent Spanish publication if J. F. Yela Utrilla, España ante la independencia de los Estados Unidos, (2d Ed., 1925), completely supersedes the less adequate study of Manuel Conrotte, da intervencion de España en la independencia de los Estados Unidos de la América del Norte (Madrid, 1920). Yela throws much new light on the details of Franco-Spanish and Spanish-American relations, after a study of Spanish archives, acting in this respect as a sort of Spanish documentary supplement to Doniol and Wharton, but he does not, in my opinion, require us to alter the conclusions of Corwin and Phillips, which might be summarized as follows: At the beginning of the Franco-American alliance, Vergennes did not dispute, but on the contrary supported, the United States' claim to the Mississippi boundary and to the free navigation of that river to the sea. The exigencies of European diplomacy, however, arising from the desirability, (1) of getting Spain into the war as France's ally and if possible as also the ally of the United States, (2) of keeping Spain in the war after she went in, (3) of holding the two French allies together against Great Britain during the peace negotiations, caused Vergennes to intercede openly with the United States on behalf of Spain's claims in the American West and for the Newfoundland fisheries. At no time did he push these claims to the extent of insisting on them; in fact, during the peace negotiations, he never put forward the Spanish claims as a formal French proposal. His problem was that of reconciling two French allies whose interests were in opposition. The idea that Rayneval's secret mission to London in September, 1782, was to induce Shelburne to oppose the western claims of the United States evaporates upon a careful perusal of the full text of Rayneval's report to Vergennes on the affair, a transcript of which exists in the Stevens Transcripts Relating to the Peace Negotiations of 1782-1783, in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. CHAPTER II THE MISSISSIPPI QUESTION AND OTHER ISSUES WITH SPAIN Spain had entered the war against England for the sake of safely humbling her ancient heretic enemy at a time when she felt sure of winning certain incidental and valuable advantages for herself: the recovery of Gibraltar and Minorca, which would make the Mediterranean a Bourbon lake; and Florida, to round out the coastline of His Catholic Majesty in the Americas and keep the Gulf of Mexico a Spanish sea, sealed to foreign settlers, log-cutters and traders. The principal design of the Bourbon allies, the abasement of England, seemed accomplished to a great degree by the peace treaties, even though Gibraltar was not retaken. This mammoth rock and the British navy, redeemed by Rodney's victory over De Grasse in the Caribbean, continued to threaten French and Spanish ascendancy in the Mediterranean. But Spain secured her one great conquest, the Floridas. She also succeeded in so limiting the Campeche log-cutting concession-a menace to her colonial domains in América-as to place it apparently in a fair way of extinction. Her victory in the war of the American Revolution shed on her some of the effulgence of old-time greatness. The continental coast line of Spanish America now stretched unbroken1 and for the most part unchallenged from the southern boundary of Georgia around Florida and along the Gulf and Isthmus to circumscribe South America and reach up the Pacific Coast of the northern continent until it met the vaguely bounded claims of Russia on the foggy shores of chill Alaska. With the British Empire split apart and British forces apparently spent, Jamaica and the islands saved to that power in the Caribbean had lost some of their immediate menace for future wars. A new menace, greater than any that ever came from Great Britain, to the security of this great colonial dominion, had lifted its head beyond the agitated Atlantic the American idea of independence and of republican government. The diplomatists of His Catholic Majesty were haunted by the vision of material power which an independent American republic might develop, a new power conscious of its own strength and of its possibilities for expansion at the expense of Spanish dominions. A premonition of this had caused the Spanish Court to be consistently unfriendly to American independence during the war and steadily zealous for the limitation of American territorial expansion, a zeal abundantly displayed in the peace negotiations of 1782-1783. Spain, ally of France and associate of the United States in the contest against Great The Anglo-Spanish treaty of peace had carefully and narrowly restricted the boundaries of British wood-cutting settlements in Honduras and placed them under Spanish sovereignty. |