It was not alone fear that the ambitious Napoleon might obtain a foothold in neighbouring territory which moved the Jeffersonians to this inconsistent step. Neither was the action due entirely to fear lest Britain might obtain possession of it in the renewed war with France. The law of compulsion showed in other particulars. The advance of the American pioneers across the continent could not be checked. They had compelled the Atlantic-coast majority into making the Pinckney Treaty which opened the mouth of the Mississippi in 1795. Remembrance of their threatened secession compelled Jefferson to try to quiet their fears freshly aroused by the transfer of Louisiana to France, and the closing of the Mississippi. Ex-Governor Monroe, of Virginia, was chosen to assist Livingston, because his former executive position had put him in touch with the Western people. In several ways Louisiana played havoc with strict-construction theories. So regardful of the rights of the individual had the Jeffersonians been in the early days that many had hesitated about creating Territories in the western vacant lands, lest the people migrating to them should not enjoy equal rights with their fellows in the States. When the inhabitants of the Mississippi Territory in 1799 petitioned for promotion to the second grade of territorial government, Jefferson denounced the first grade, which had been given to them by Congress a few years before, as "a despotic oligarchy without a rational object." Within five years, he and his party were facing the problem of establishing a status for some forty thousand white people, whom the United States had acquired with the Louisiana country. The problem was whether to violate the doctrine of the rights of man as well as the treaty and hold these people perpetually as colonists, or, by providing for their erection into States, further imperil the sectional balance of power, further endanger the sovereignty of the individual States, and contribute to the growing strength of the Central Government.