Kant River meant "sugarcane" in English. If the Cotton Belt were further subdivided, the area near the mouth of the Mississippi River was suited to growing subtropical plants, and sugarcane was merely one of them.
After Charles II's Restoration, he not only failed to repeal the Navigation Acts but instead "enumerated" colonial products. Sugar, tobacco, indigo, and other dyes were all on the list. They were grown in the South and had little effect on the "North."
If the Missouri River served as the boundary, part of the central Great Plains would have to be ceded. This region was exceptionally suited to growing wheat and corn.
At present, Americans mainly settled east of the Appalachian Mountains. Even in the twentieth century, 80 percent of Americans lived on the East Coast, while only 20 percent of the population lived in the West.
Yet the grain produced in this very region would, after the potato blight, impact Britain's Corn Laws.
The ninety-seventh meridian was the "most perfect" solution. Yet even the Spaniards, who used the thirty-first parallel north to settle their conflict with Americans over Florida, had referred to the St. Marys River. Nothing made a more suitable "natural boundary" than a river.
Even if boundary markers could be erected through surveying, however they had originally been set up was how people would dig them back out. Besides, surveying almost the entirety of Anglo-America was hardly realistic.
When the Constitution of the French Republic was drafted in 1799, a mechanism for reviewing unconstitutional acts was included. Napoleon declared the Revolution over because the problems that had existed since its outbreak had finally been resolved.
But it was not Napoleon who introduced this mechanism. Sieyès's constitutional objective was, first and foremost, opposition to privilege; second, natural law and innate human rights. "Do not