If the Jeffersonians had been driven from their first ground by this territorial acquisition, the Federalists had fared no better. They had first called into being the genii of the "implied powers," and now had the mortification of seeing it serve their enemies. Having swung in the change of 1801 from the "ins" to the "outs," they became the opposition party and were compelled to resist many measures and principles which they had formerly advocated. They had gradually lost State after State until they were confined to New England. The former great national party, the party of Hamilton, Jay, and Adams, the party to which Washington had leaned, was shrinking into a sectional faction. Where it had once wished to give the Union every means of aggrandisement, it was now compelled to oppose almost doubling its domain, lest the balance of power between the different parts be lost. It feared the ascendency which Louisiana would give to the Southern interests, never foreseeing from the shape of the addition that the advantage would in time lie with the North. Professing devotion to the Union, they would now deprive it of the advantages resulting from prolonging indefinitely its holding of colonies. They must have seen the result if the domain had never extended beyond the Mississippi. The territory both north and south of the Ohio would speedily be made into States according to existing arrangements. The great prestige inuring to the Union from territorial control would thereby cease. But with the addition of new provinces from time to time, the holding of territories preliminary to statehood must be indefinitely prolonged. The functions of the Union would be multiplied instead of diminished. By the acquisition of Louisiana, Jefferson effectually settled the twenty years of internal dispute over the navigation of the lower Mississippi. From source to mouth, it flowed presumably through American territory. Americans were to be found on both sides the great water highway. Those west of the river had crossed upon invitation of Spain, who hoped in this way to people her province without loss to her other possessions. The colonists taken across the river by Colonel Morgan and others had caused no little alarm to statesmen in the Confederation days, lest the population of the United States be drawn off to people a Spanish possession and so weaken the Republic. Among the thirty-five thousand or more people to be found about the city of New Orleans and along the lower Mississippi and the Red rivers was a small percentage of Americans; but a much larger proportion was to be found in the six thousand inhabitants of St. Louis and the small villages near by.