European events also conspired towards an extension of slavery. After the French troops, already depleted by yellow fever, were defeated by the negro insurgents at San Domingo, Napoleon realized the uncertainty of France retaining the great Louisiana Territory which had been but recently repossessed from Spain. To circumvent the English, who had long coveted this domain, Napoleon, in 1803, offered it to the United States for fifteen million dollars. American settlers along the Mississippi had already experienced difficulties with the Spanish who claimed complete control of the Mississippi River south of the Yazoo, and though Congress had been given no constitutional prerogative for acquiring new territory, Jefferson, who was then President, saw the varied importance of this acquisition, and successfully and with very little criticism directed the negotiations. This brought into the United States, not only a vast terra incognita, but an extensive Franco-Spanish civilization stretching along the Gulf of Mexico, with French outposts scattered along the great river systems and reaching into the very heart of America. The divergence of this civilization from that of English colonization was not only racial, but its tone had been qualified by the spirit in which the settlements had been made and the polity adopted by each. It possessed nothing of New England’s austerity, or of Virginia’s somewhat stolid stateliness, but was characterized by a graceful picturesqueness and a delightful bonhomie. The black-robed priest if not the pathfinder who blazed the way for French settlements was usually the comrade and companion of those who did. Religion and settlement went hand in hand. None of the torturing and enslaving methods used by the Puritans to force upon the natives a cold, stern religion, unattractive even to other Christian sects, or by the Spanish in Mexico and Florida, were resorted to by the French. Wherever there was a priest, Mass began the day. The mystic ceremony, performed in the dewy freshness of early morning within the forest’s depths, or on a strip of sandy beach beside the mighty waters; the solemn gestures of the celebrant and the adoring attitude of the worshippers appealed to the Indian imagination, and the French were soon importuned to invoke their Great Spirit to aid the red man, to bring rain or to heal the sick or wounded.