The
Northern States, having no immediate use for the Mississippi,
were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her monopoly of
the great waterway. But Virginia and North Carolina were
determined that America should not, by congressional enactment,
surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed
legislation as their reason for refusing to ratify the
Constitution. "The act which abandons it [the right of
navigation] is an act of separation between the eastern and
western country," Jefferson realized at last. "An act of
separation"--that point had long been very clear to the Latin
sachems of the Mississippi Valley!
Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and
on the other by the southward flow of the Mississippi and its
tributary, the Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky
and western Tennessee regarded New Orleans as their logical
market, as the wide waters were their natural route. If market
and route were to be closed to them, their commercial advancement
was something less than a dream.
In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning
address, became Governor of Louisiana and fountainhead of the
propaganda. He wrote benign and brotherly epistles to James
Robertson of the Cumberland and to His Excellency of Franklin,
suggesting that to be of service to them was his dearest aim in
life; and at the same time he kept the southern Indians
continually on the warpath.
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