“‘At that moment,’ pursued General Jackson, ‘none of our Commissioners knew what the real meaning of these words was. When they were uttered, the British Commissioners knew that Pakenham’s expedition had been decided on. Our Commissioners did not know it. Now, since I have been Chief Magistrate, I have learned from diplomatic sources of the most unquestionable authority, that the British ministry did not intend the Treaty of Ghent to apply to the Louisiana Purchase at all. The whole corporation of them, from 1803 to 1815—Pitt, the Duke of Portland, Granville, Percival, Lord Liverpool and Castlereagh—denied the legal right of Napoleon to sell Louisiana to us, and they held, therefore, that we had no right to that territory. So you see, Allen, that the words of Mr. Goulburn, on behalf of the British Commissioners, which I have quoted to you from Albert Gallatin’s Minutes of the Conference, had a far deeper significance than our commissioners could perpetrate. Those words were meant to lay the foundation for a claim on the Louisiana Purchase entirely external to the provisions of the Treaty of Ghent. And in that way the British Government was signing a treaty with one hand in front while with the other hand behind its back it was despatching Pakenham’s army to seize the fairest of our possessions. “‘You can also see, my dear William,’ said the old General, waxing warm (having once or twice more during the luncheon toasted the new star), ‘you can also see what an awful mess such a situation would have been if the British programme had been carried out in full. But Providence willed otherwise. All the tangled web that the cunning of the English Diplomats could weave around our unsuspecting commissioners at Ghent was torn to pieces and soaked with British blood in half an hour at New Orleans by the never-missing rifles of my Tennessee and Kentucky pioneers. And that ended it. British diplomacy could do wonders, but it couldn’t provide against such a contingency as that. The British Commissioners could throw sand in the eyes of ours at Ghent, but they couldn’t help the cold lead that my riflemen sprinkled in the faces of their soldiers at New Orleans. Now, Allen, you have the whole story. Now you know why Arkansas was saved at New Orleans. Let’s take another little one.’” Thomas E. Watson, at one time United States Senator from Georgia, in a history of Jackson, written after Buell’s history, quotes this interview and comments that it settles the question, and that if the British had captured New Orleans, the United States boundary line would have stopped at the Mississippi. CHAPTER XII. Captain Garland’s Testimony On the Spot.