A Century of Expansion Author:Willis Fletcher Johnson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI AGGRESSION AND CONCESSION Texas and Oregon, though widely separated in geography, are inseparably connected in history. The direct interest of t... more »he United States began in one of them and was reasserted in the other at the same time. It was Jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana that brought us into immediate contact with Texas, and, indeed, with a disputed boundary between us and it, and it was the Lewis and Clark expedition, despatched at the same time by Jefferson, that strengthened the title of the United States to Oregon which had been founded upon the discoveries and explorations of Robert Gray. Moreover, as already suggested, it was the acquisition of Louisiana that made the annexation of Oregon practicable. The Louisiana Purchase included the western part of Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, thus causing our boundaries to abut directly upon the Oregon territory. Without the Louisiana Purchase, Oregon would have remained geographically detached and isolated from the United States. Again, the Texas and Oregon questions were further brought to notice and were further con- TEXAS AND OREGON, SHOWING THE AREAS SEIZED FROM MEXICO AND YIELDED TO GREAT BRITAIN. nected by the Florida treaty. Under that convention the United States specifically relinquished to Spain the shadowy claim upon Texas which it had received from France, and in return received from Spain full title, as far as Spain could give it, to the whole Oregon territory, to wit, all the lands west of the Rocky Mountains north of the present state of California up to the Russian possessions. Thus bracketed together, Texas and Oregon continued to be joint objects of controversy until they were both at nearly the same time acquired by the United States. At the end, however, pol...« less