country at the time; and now in the ill-knit, unstable Union, not as yet well adjusted and in good working shape under the Constitution, he saw his selfish advantage in promoting treasonable schemes for breaking apart, rather than for bringing to pass harmony. What precisely Aaron Burr designed has never been known, probably was never distinctly outlined in his own mind. He meant, no doubt, that events should determine how far he might go. Baffled in his ambition in the East, he resolved to make a trial in the West, hoping that through some dismemberment of the nation, and some robbery of Spain, Aaron Burr might sit exalted. He had won Blennerhassett; Wilkinson had lent an ear to his propositions. Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, young men on the threshold each of a great career, the one in Tennessee, the other in Kentucky, had felt the spell of his fascination, but recoiled at the suggestion of disloyalty. Claiborne, too, at New Orleans, though at first deferential to the eminent visitor, was utterly cold and unsympathetic before every suggestion of treason. New Orleans in general, on the contrary, was ex

cellent soil for the seed Burr was scattering. The creoles were full of grievances against the new order; the Americans, flatboat men and adventurers of the frontier, were born filibusters. In such a population the Union counted for little. But the story of Aaron Burr does not require from us more than a glance. Wilkinson betrayed him, as he did everybody. There were worthier instruments who wrought in the matter. Marshall sat in judgment on him; his downfall was accomplished. The Louisiana Purchase was saved. from the plots of home conspirators.

There was one last great peril from foreign encroachment to be faced. France had vanished from the continent with the solemn and pathetic lowering of the tricolor that winter day in 1803. Spain, oppressed with the Napoleonic incubus, no longer needed to be reckoned with. But England remained. To keep Louisiana out of the grasp of England the First Consul had sold it. A time came when the world-arbiter languished in Elba; and straightway England, her hands for the moment free, clutched at the prize

that had been withheld. The world then had rarely seen such an armament as she sent forth. Twenty thousand fighting-men were collected in a vast fleet; nor was the quality of the expedition inferior. Long years of war against an enemy almost miraculously able had developed both on land and sea extraordinary leadership. Soldiers and sailors had been trained and toughened under Wellington and Nelson in the most critical campaigning. With the end of 1814 they were at the Mississippi's mouth, and the odds were indeed against the forlorn Republic which for two years had been struggling on the northern frontier with very indifferent success against her formidable foe. So thought Sir Edward Pakenham, the commander, and those who sent him; and the expedition brought, besides the fighters, civil officials who, when the easy victory was gained, were to organize a broad British dependency on the Louisiana Purchase and the parts adjacent, which might attain who could predict what greatness!

Andrew Jackson, upon whom fell the duty to meet the attack, was the very type of imperious energy, a soul born for leader

ship. Out of the heterogeneous elements at hand when he arrived in December, he had managed to combine an effective force that now performed a wonder. His line, says Mr. Cable,* was about half a mile long, an entrenchment of the roughest at the best, and dwindling at the end into a mere double row of logs, two feet apart, and filled in between with earth. Here was an almost droll confusion of men, arms, and trappings. On the extreme right, at the river-bank, were some regular infantry and a company of Orleans rifles, with a few dragoons who served a howitzer. Next came a band of Louisiana creoles in gay and varied uniforms; then sailors with guns from a destroyed ship. A swarthy group of pirates from Barataria, serving two twenty-four pounders, had a position near; then a troop of negroes, another bunch of sailors, and a party of mulattoes from San Domingo. There was a stretch of blue marking the position of the Forty-fourth Infantry, next to whom an old artillery-man of Napoleon directed some Frenchmen in the management of a twelve-pounder. A long

* Creoles of Louisiana, p. 195.

line of brown homespun hunting shirts draped the lank Tennesseeans of Carroll; a bright cluster of marines; more artillery; then at the end Adair's Kentuckians and Coffee's Tennesseeans, frontiersmen all to whom the rifle was as another limb. There were on the main line but 3,200 men with 12 cannon. How the waifs and strays of Jackson's line accomplished an achievement of the first rank is a brilliant page in our story. Since then no foreigner with hostile purpose has encroached upon the soil of the United States.

The Louisiana Purchase having been explored, and saved from peril at the hands of domestic plotters and outside enemies, the question of the exact boundaries, up to this time ever present and most vexatious, was gradually settled. "What are the eastern boundaries of Louisiana?" said Livingston to Talleyrand in 1803, when the treaty was being arranged. "I do not know," was the reply. "You must take it as we received it." "But what do you mean to take?" asked Livingston, thinking about the retrocession from