One can of course dispute the morality of the European practice of
claiming North American lands, but by accepted procedure in those days,
France's claimed title to the Mississippi Valley by virtue of La Salle's
1682 "discovery" of the Mouth of the Mississippi. Historians have long
recognized the audacity of that claim, as when I quoted Parkman in my
Wilderness So Immense:
"On April 9, 1682, La Salle claimed the interior of the continent for
Louis XIV and named it in his honor. By this little ceremony, in the
words of historian Francis Parkman, 'the vast basin of the Mississippi .
. . passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles . . . all by
virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.'"

   Based on that claim of discovery, France's "title" to the Mississippi
basin was recognized by other European nations by the Peace of Paris of
1763 (at the end of the French and Indian/Seven Years' War) when Great
Britain took the eastern watershed and acquiesed in France's "gift" of
the western watershed (Louisiana) to Spain by a prior treaty of 1761.
The same "title"
and legal description of the Louisiana territory was cited in the Peace
of Paris of 1783 that ended the American Revolution, and again in the
secret treaty of 1801 whereby Spain ceded Louisiana back to France, and
yet again in the Louisiana Purchase Treaty of 1803, again in the treaty
of Ghent in
1814/5 that ended the War of 1812, and yet again in the Adams-Onis and
related treaties of 1818/9 that drew the international boundaries of the
Louisiana Territories.  In short, while one can challenge the legitimacy
of the initial claim - by 1803 all the parties to the Louisiana Purchase
recognized the "title" as it had been defined by a series of
international treaties.

  As to the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase (a question
addressed in greater detail in my book, A Wilderness So Immense) it is
interesting that both Jefferson and his opponents made no
_constitutional_ objection problem to acquiring LAND - aside from the
matter, as Fisher Ames put it, that the Louisiana Purchase spent "money,
of which we have not enough, for land, of which we have too much" and
the worry among New Englanders that cheap western land would drive down
land prices in the east and lure away their labor pool for seamen and
industrial workers.
Jefferson's critics DID protest mightily about admitting the RESIDENTS
of Louisiana into the Union. Jefferson tried several times to draft a
constitutional amendment addressing that matter - and ultimately decided
that he couldn't get anything ratified by the 6-months deadline for
ratifying the treaty, ya da ya da ya da .... All this is treated in some
detail in A Wilderness So Immense - and his several draft amendments are
in an appendix.

 
Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President Red Hill - The Patrick Henry
National Memorial 1250 Red Hill Road 
Brookneal, Virginia 24528     
www.redhill.org   or   www.PatrickHenry.com 
 
Please show me where the Native Americans passed title to their lands to
the French? Show me where the French even made contact with the Native
Americans who "held title" to their lands won to them by historical
occupation of those lands? France's claim to Louisiana was a BOGUS
claim. One which Jefferson had to right to purchase.

Also, show me where in the constitution, the president is given the
power to negotiate such a deal? It doesn't exist. Jefferson performed an
illegal act, broke his oath to defend the constitution, and should have
been impeached. 
Instead, the Congress decided to uphold his illegal purchase even they
possessed no authority to do so. The land belonged to the Native
Americans, not the French, nor the Americans. This action led to the
destruction of the way of life of the Natives to that soil, punctuated
by the American efforts to exterminate them as if they had no right to
exist.

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