colony and province of Louisiana, with the same extent that it already has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it, and, such as it should be, after the treaties passed subsequently between Spain and other powers." In 1803, Bonaparte, the first consul of the French republic, ceded Louisiana to the United States, as fully, and in the same manner, as it had been retroceded to France by Spain, under the treaty of San Ildefonso; and, by virtue of this grant, Messrs. Madison, Monroe, Adams, Clay, Van Buren, Jackson, and Polk, contended that the original limit of the new state had been the Rio Grande. However, by the third article of our treaty with Spain, in 1819, all our pretensions to extend the territory of Louisiana towards Mexico on the Rio Grande, were abandoned by adopting the river Sabine as our boundary in that quarter.
The Mexican authorities upon this subject are either silent or doubtful. No light is to be gathered from the geographical researches of Humboldt, whose elucidations of New Spain are in many respects the fullest and most satisfactory. In the year 1835, Stephen Austin published a map of Texas, representing the Nueces as the western confine,—and in 1836, General Almonte the former minister from Mexico to the United States, published a memoir upon Texas in which, whilst describing the Texan department of Bejar, he says—"That notwithstanding it has been hitherto believed that the Rio de las Nueces is the dividing line of Coahuila and Texas, inasmuch as it is always thus represented on maps, I am informed by the government of the state, that geographers have been in error upon this subject; and that the true line should commence at the mouth of the river Aransaso, and follow it to its source; thence, it should continue by a straight line until it strikes the junction of the rivers Medina and San Antonio, and then, pursuing the east bank of the Medina to its head waters, it should terminate on the confines of Chihuahua." 1