Securing a domain
extending to the Mississippi in the Peace of 1783 had been simply
retaining what had been won largely by the colonists twenty years
before when the French were driven from the valley. In the Louisiana
question, the nation faced for the first time a national expansion.
To pronounce this the paramount action of the century in Union-making,
one need only think of the precedent for acquiring new territory thus
formed and which has been followed in no less than seven instances and
confirmed by a decision of the Supreme Court. It seems strange that
the framers of the Constitution did not foresee and provide for such
an emergency. Perhaps the omission was due to the intuitive feeling
that no nation in all history had hesitated to enlarge its domain when
advantage offered or necessity demanded. Necessity was here the moving
principle and it scattered to the winds party objection to using the
implied powers, and forced the friends of government to take refuge
in the preamble to the Constitution and in "all laws which are just
and necessary," a position from which they had tried in vain to drive
the Hamiltonians a few years before.
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