The New Hampshire Gazette

(No. I.)

Considerations in favor of our seaport towns, and of the Eastern and Northern States, arising out of the purchase of Louisiana.

It has long been obvious to every judicious merchant and commercial politician, that the coasting business of the United States is the most sure and the most valuable branch of our carrying trade, because foreign restrictions cannot affect it. New Orleans may be considered as a modern Alexandria, at the mouth of our American Nile. It is intimately connected with the American Archipelago (the gulph of Mexico) and its neighboring islands and bays, and it must become a vast place of exchange and deposit for foreign goods and for the productions and manufactures of America. The carriage of American and foreign merchandize between our gulph ports and those of the Atlantic states, will appear, in the current year, to be a great and highly valuable branch of our trade. It will immensely and rapidly increase, and it will ultimately become, (in regard to the coasting tonnage it will employ) very far superior to that of any other American port. The cultivated parts of all the West India islands are not, at this moment, equal in acres to the quantity of land we acquire, which is capable of producing West India produce.

Sugar, coffee, cocoa, rice, pimento, molasses, cane juice spirit or rum, cotton, indigo, gums, turmeric, saffron, rhubarb, ginger, probably tea, and in general most of the precious articles of produce, which the West India islands do or can yield, may be raised on a number of tracts of land, within the limits of Louisiana, which are equal in size to all the settled plantations of the West Indies, now in actual cultivation for the same articles. There can be no doubt that these Louisiana plantations, many of which have been cleared by the French, by the Spaniards, by the Americans, and by English, Irish, and Scotch people settled there at various times, will be able immediately to produce large quantities of the articles mentioned. These they will sell to our Atlantic merchants, and ship owners who will be able to bring them free of duty and free of war insurances, to every port in the Eastern, Northern and other Atlantic states. The acquisition of half a dozen islands like Porto Rico would not be so greatly and certainly beneficial to our American merchants. The people of those rich Louisiana plantations will be too busy with their sugars, their coffee, their molasses, &c. to concern themselves with the catching of fish, the making of spermaceti, liver and fish oils and candles, ship building, wood cutting and those branches of manufacture, which have arisen and will arise in the Eastern, Northern, and Atlantic ports and countries. Hence our ship owners, mariners, manufacturers and mechanics will derive great and constant advantages from this new acquisition of territory. It is said that our present government and administration and the republicans generally have no merit from our success in this case, although it is a notorious fact that every Frenchman or Spaniard, who has conferred with the friends of the republican cause, in and out of office, has been uniformly led to see the weight and force of the numerous and solid arguments, which were opposed to any foreign colonization there.-- While some federalists were exciting all the public passions against France and Spain, on account of the alleged mischiefs those nations were to do us on the Mississippi, the friends of our government and no doubt the proper persons in the government itself, were using those facts to convince every considerate Frenchman and Spaniard, that they ought to yield the country about the Mississippi to the United States. The official correspondence will prove, as we believe, its early, zealous, and unceasing endeavors to acquire every thing that could be acquired in that quarter. For the present we shall leave to our readers the serious contemplation of the vast advantages, which will be derived to our ship owners, mariners, merchants, fishermen, manufacturers and mechanics, from their supplying and transporting to our ports in Louisiana all the articles which are shut out of the West India islands by foreign acts of parliament, arrets, orders of councils, proclamations, and the great benefits of receiving from thence all those articles which we are not allowed to bring away from the islands and colonies of the European nations.

COLUMBUS.