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I 12
NEW ORLEANS YESTERDAY AND TODAY
productive in the colony. But events far from Louisiana shores were building up to a climax that would make New Orleans an American city.
In midland America the defeat of the English was followed by rapid development of the virgin territory. The settlers were producing vast stores of goods that would find an eager market in the Atlantic states, but the Allegheny Mountains formed a barrier. It would be much easier to send the produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where it could be reloaded and taken by ship to eastern ports. For a period Spain enforced an embargo, although smugglers were active. The pressures were building from frontiersmen who were ready to start shooting if necessary in order to have access to the Gulf of Mexico port. Finally, on October 27, 1795, Pinckney?s Treaty between Spain and the United States established commercial relations, granted Americans free navigation of the Mississippi and the right to deposit goods in New Orleans without payment of duty. When "Spain cancelled the right of deposit in 1802, President Thomas Jefferson's determination to try to acquire New Orleans led to the Louisiana Purchase.
Meanwhile, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, had forced Spain to return Louisiana. Spain was in a poor position to resist Bonaparte's pressure. The deal was sealed by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso on October 1, 1800.
j.w.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Dufour, Charles L. Ten Flags in the Wind. New York, 1967.
10.
f#? OLIVER POLLOCK f#*
In 1972, I first learned of this forgotten founding father from an article about him in the New Orleans Magazine. It told how James Alton James had discovered Pollock in doing research for a book on that hero of the Ohio River valley, General George Rogers Clark. James turned up a letter from the general himself, stating he could not have waged his 1777 victorious campaign had it not been for the financial support of ?Mr. Pollock of New Orleans.? Clark?s band of two hundred men captured settlements in Illinois and Indiana, as well as Colonel Hamilton, the British commander in the area. James, so impressed with Pollock?s years-long Revolutionary War exploits, wrote a book about him, Olivei' Pollock: The Life andTimes of an Unknown Patriot. James, thus, had acquired his knowledge of Pollock by accident, and so has the writer of this chapter. I have been a Pollock fan ever since.
The conquest of the Northwest by Clark, and holding it for the duration, cannot be underestimated. It was the only American campaign west of the Alleghenies and the S91,000 Pollock paid to finance it was worth every cent. Because of it, at the peace treaty following the war, the United States claimed its western boundary extended beyond the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, and included lands north of the Ohio River.
In the accompanying illustration I have labeled this territory ??Pollock Purchase,? with the implication that without it there