The American officials who assumed control of the Louisiana Purchase territory were quite certain about the Spanish legal system they were displacing. “[T]he laws, rules of justice, and the forms of proceeding,” Amos Stoddard reported from St. Louis two weeks after receiving possession of Upper Louisiana on behalf of the United States, “were almost wholly arbitrary—for each successive Lieut. Governor has totally changed or abrogated those established by his predecessor.” Under “the despotism of the Dons,” as Frederick Bates described the preceding four decades of Spanish government in St. Louis and the surrounding area, the residents “knew that they had no rights and that they were absolutely dependent, in all things, on the will and pleasure of the Governor.” In New Orleans Governor William Claiborne described a legal “system in most points incongenial with the principles of our own Government,” one in which “the executives of the collony have often exercised a dispensing power over th[e] Laws, and the people consequently have been habituated to the uncertain operation of rules occasionally modified by the wisdom or caprice of those in power.” In short, this was a government of men, not laws; the task at hand was to get rid of it as soon as possible. As Bates explained to future governor (and ex-explorer) Meriwether Lewis, “we are endeavouring to establish the empire of the laws; and to substitute those laws in the place of the arbitrary Rescripts of proconsular Agents.”