The writer will not pretend to say when the idea of the possibility or desirability or certainty of American control on the Pacific first entered men's minds. Some part of it no doubt occurred to the hardy New England sea captains who sailed around the Horn and up the western coast after the close of the Revolution. Some such vision probably animated the restless John Ledyard. Apparently it was in the thought of John Adams when, in his Defense of the American Constitution in 1787, he wrote: "Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone . .. and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."[1] Whatever may have been the hopes and purposes of Thomas Jefferson in his long-continued efforts to promote far western exploration, he apparently went no further than to look forward, as he wrote to John Jacob Astor, to the time when the descendants of the first settlers on the Pacific slope should "spread themselves through the whole length of that coast, covering it with free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest."[2]
Before Jefferson passed from the stage, however, others were to express views that were far less hesitating. "Nothing can or will limit the immigration westward, but the Western Ocean," declared Timothy Flint in 1825. "Alas! for the moving generation of the day, when the tide of advancing backwoodsmen shall have met the surge of the Pacific. They may then set themselves down and weep for other worlds."[3] The accumulating information in regard to the Oregon country and the Treaty of 1818 with Great Britain providing for joint occupancy directed
- ↑ Charles Francis Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, (Boston, 1850-56), IV, 293. Eighty years later, in his speech on the Alaska treaty, Charles Sumner referred to this statement by Adams, and interpreted it to predict the spread of the United States to the Pacific. "Thus," said Sumner, "according to the prophetic minister, even at that early day was the destiny of the Republic manifest." The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1874-83), XI, 222.
- ↑ Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1892-99), IX, 351.
- ↑ Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston, 1826), 203.
of Oregon and California (Boston, 1845).
