Remembrance
of their threatened secession compelled Jefferson to try to quiet their
fears freshly aroused by the transfer of Louisiana to France, and the
closing of the Mississippi. Ex-Governor Monroe, of Virginia, was
chosen to assist Livingston, because his former executive position had
put him in touch with the Western people.
In several ways Louisiana played havoc with strict-construction
theories. So regardful of the rights of the individual had the
Jeffersonians been in the early days that many had hesitated about
creating Territories in the western vacant lands, lest the people
migrating to them should not enjoy equal rights with their fellows in
the States. When the inhabitants of the Mississippi Territory in 1799
petitioned for promotion to the second grade of territorial government,
Jefferson denounced the first grade, which had been given to them by
Congress a few years before, as "a despotic oligarchy without a rational
object." Within five years, he and his party were facing the problem
of establishing a status for some forty thousand white people, whom
the United States had acquired with the Louisiana country.
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