The interlude helped only to embarrass the true question,—what should be done with West Florida. President Madison’s doctrine, embodied in Giles’s bill, carried out the Livingston-Monroe theory that West Florida belonged to Louisiana. In theory, this arrangement might answer the purpose for which it was invented; but in fact West Florida did not belong to Louisiana, either as a Spanish or as an American province, and could not be treated as though it did. If Mobile Bay and the Gulf coast as far as the Perdido belonged to Louisiana, the territory afterward divided into the States of Alabama and Mississippi had no outlet to the gulf. Georgia would never consent to such treatment, merely to support President Madison in alleging that West Florida was occupied by him as a part of the Orleans territory. Senator Giles’s bill was silently dropped.
The Senate reached this point December 31, but meanwhile the House reached the same standstill from another side. December 17 the Speaker appointed a committee, with Macon at its head, to report on the admission of Orleans territory as a State. The admission of the State of Louisiana into the Union was for many reasons a serious moment in American history; but one of its lesser incidents was the doubt which so much perplexed the Senate, whether Louisiana included West Florida. If this was the case, then by the third article of the treaty of purchase the inhabitants of Mobile and the district between Mobile and Baton Rouge, without division, should be “incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible” to the Union as part of the territory of Orleans. This was the opinion of Macon and his committee, as it had been that of Giles and his committee, and of the President and his Cabinet. December 27 Macon reported a bill admitting Louisiana, with West Florida to the Perdido, as a State; but no sooner did the debates begin, than the Georgians for the first time showed delicacy in regard to the rights of Spain. Troup could not consent to include in any State this territory “yet in dispute and subject to negotiation.” Bibb held the same misgivings: “The President by his proclamation, although he had required its occupation, had declared that the right should be subject to negotiation; now, if it became a State, would not all right of negotiation be taken from the President?” To prevent this danger, Bibb moved that West Florida, from the Iberville to the Perdido, should be annexed to the Mississippi Territory or made a separate government.
On the other hand, Rhea of Tennessee held that no other course was open to Congress than to admit the Orleans territory in its full extent as ceded by France, according to the President’s assertion. The treaty was peremptory, and Congress was bound by it to annex no part of the Orleans purchase to a pre-existing territory. West Florida belonged to Louisiana, and could not lawfully be given to Mississippi.
The House tried as usual to defer or compromise its difficulty. January 9, Macon’s bill was so amended as to withdraw West Florida from its operation; but when on the following day two members in succession asked the House to provide a government for West Florida, the House referred the motions back to the committee, and there the matter rested. No man knew whether West Florida belonged to Louisiana or not. If the President was right, Mobile and all the Gulf shore to a point within ten miles of Pensacola, although still held by the Spaniards, made part of the State of Louisiana, and even an Act of Congress could not affect it; while if this was not the case, the President in ordering the seizure of West Florida had violated the Constitution and made war on Spain.
Hardly had the House admitted its helplessness in the face of this difficulty, when it was obliged to meet the larger issue involved in the Louisiana affair; for Jan. 14, 1811, Josiah Quincy, with extreme deliberation, uttered and committed to writing a sentence which remained long famous:—
“If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.”
The Speaker decided this language to be disorderly; but the House, by a vote of fifty-six to fifty-three, reversed the ruling, and Quincy went on arguing, as Jefferson had argued eight years before, that the introduction of new States, outside the original Union, was no part of the compact, and must end in overwhelming the original partners.
Quincy’s protest wanted only one quality to give it force. He spoke in the name of no party to the original compact. His own State of Massachusetts assented to the admission of Louisiana, and neither the governor nor the legislature countenanced the doctrine of Quincy and Pickering. If the partners themselves made no protest, the act had all the legality it needed, in the absence of appeal to higher authority; but it consummated a change in the nature of the United States government, and its results, however slow, could not fail to create what was in effect a new Constitution.
The House, without further delay, passed the bill by a vote of seventy-seven to thirty-six. After some amendment by the Senate, and dispute between the Houses, the bill was sent to the President, and Feb. 20, 1811, received his signature. The Act fixed the Iberville and the Sabine for the eastern and western boundaries of the new State. Meanwhile West Florida remained, till further legislation, a part of Orleans Territory for all purposes except those of admission into the Union; and, according to the view implied by the action of Executive and Legislature, the President retained power to order the military occupation of Texas under the Act of Oct. 31, 1803, subject to government afterward, like West Florida, by the proconsular authority of the Executive.
As though the Florida affair needed still further complication, the President, January 3, sent to Congress a secret message asking authority to seize East Florida:—