But in recent years another cause of the war and the chief cause has been discovered. This was land hunger. The United States entered the conflict at the insistence of the south and west, despite the opposition of the northeastern states. The inland section overruled the opposition of the maritime section. At that time, there was an ardent expansionist sentiment along the whole western and southern border looking towards the annexation of Canada and Florida, with a vaguer idea of seizing all of the Spanish possessions of North America. Spain then owned Florida. Spain and Great Britain were allies against Napoleon, and a war with one was looked upon as a war with both. The belief that the United States would some day annex Canada had existed continuously since the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin had advocated the buying of Canada by the United States, since we failed to take it during the Revolution. The Continental Congress made an effort to capture Canada, but our armies were repulsed. Washington had objected to leaving Canada in British hands. In 1803 Governor Morris of Pennsylvania wrote that at the time of the Constitutional Convention he knew "that all North America must at length be annexed to us--happy indeed if the lust of dominion stop there." This idea, however, was a vague dream till about 1810. There had been friction in the northwest between the Americans and British. The British retained trading posts in the northwest after they had agreed to give them up by the treaty of 1783 recognizing the independence of the United States. These were held to compensate the Tories for their property confiscated during the Revolutionary War, which had not been done. For this reason, the British held the northwest posts until 1796, when they were given up by the Jay Treaty. All the Indian trouble in that section was attributed to British propaganda, which incited the Indians against the United States. The Canadian traders made friends with the Indians to get their trade while the Americans were aggressively pushing them back from their land. The result was that the Indian was more friendly to the British in Canada than to the United States. The idea of annexing Canada was intensified after 1810 because of the belief that the Indians were being turned against the United States by the British. The south was almost unanimous in its demand for the annexation of Florida, while the southwest was taking a lively interest in Mexico. This land hunger was making its appearance rapidly, but it was several years later that the phrase "manifest destiny" was to come into general use.