The Northern States, having no immediate use for the Mississippi, were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her monopoly of the great waterway.

But Virginia and North Carolina were determined that America should not, by congressional enactment, surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed legislation as their reason for refusing to ratify the Constitution.

"The act which abandons it [the right of navigation] is an act of separation between the eastern and western country," Jefferson realized at last.

"An act of separation"-- that point had long been very clear to the Latin sachems of the Mississippi Valley! Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and on the other by the southward flow of the Mississippi and its tributary, the Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky and western Tennessee regarded New Orleans as their logical market, as the wide waters were their natural route.

If market and route were to be closed to them, their commercial advancement was something less than a dream.
In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning address, became Governor of Louisiana and fountainhead of the propaganda.