Volume IV Part 10 (1/2)

[Footnote: Robertson MSS., Pickering to Blount, March 23, 1795.] He failed to point out how it was possible, without force, to carry out these instructions.

A more shameful letter was never written, and it was sufficient of itself to show Pickering's conspicuous incapacity for the position he held. The trouble was that he represented not very unfairly the sentiment of a large portion of the Eastern, and especially the Northeastern, people. When Blount visited Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 to urge a vigorous national war as the only thing which could bring the Indians to behave themselves, [Footnote: Blount MSS., Blount to Smith, June 17, 1793.] he reported that Was.h.i.+ngton had an entirely just idea of the whole Indian business, but that Congress generally knew little of the matter and was not disposed to act. [Footnote: Robertson MSS., Blount to gentleman in c.u.mberland, Philadelphia, Aug. 28, 1793.]

His report was correct; and he might have added that the congressmen were no more ignorant, and no more reluctant to do right, than their const.i.tuents.

Misconduct of the Federal Government.

The truth is that the United States Government during the six years from 1791 to 1796 behaved shamefully to the people who were settled along the c.u.mberland and Holston. This was the more inexcusable in view of the fact that, thanks to the example of Blount, Sevier, and Robertson, the Tennesseeans, alone among the frontiersmen, showed an intelligent appreciation of the benefits of the Union and a readiness to render it loyal support. The Kentuckians acted far less rationally; yet the Government tolerated much misconduct on their part, and largely for their benefit carried on a great national war against the Northwestern Indians. In the Southwest almost all that the Administration did was to prohibit the frontiersmen from protecting themselves. Peace was finally brought about largely through the effect of Wayne's victory, and the knowledge of the Creeks that they would have to stand alone in any further warfare; but it would not have been obtained at all if Sevier and the other frontier leaders had not carried on their destructive counter-inroads into the Cherokee and Upper Creek country, and if under Robertson's orders Nickajack and Running Water had not been destroyed; while the support of the Chickasaws and friendly Cherokees in stopping the Creek war parties was essential. The Southwesterners owed thanks to General Wayne and his army and to their own strong right hands; but they had small cause for grat.i.tude to the Federal Government. They owed still less to the Northeasterners, or indeed to any of the men of the eastern seaboard; the benefits arising from Pinckney's treaty form the only exception. This neglect brought its own punishment. Blount and Sevier were naturally inclined to Federalism, and it was probably only the supineness of the Federal Government in failing to support the Southwesterners against the Indians which threw Tennessee, when it became a State, into the arms of the Democratic party.

Peace.

However, peace was finally wrung from the Indians, and by the beginning of 1796 the outrages ceased. The frontiers, north and south alike, enjoyed a respite from Indian warfare for the first time in a generation; nor was the peace interrupted until fifteen years afterwards.

Growth of Tennessee.

Throngs of emigrants had come into Tennessee. A wagon road had been chopped to the c.u.mberland District, and as the Indians gradually ceased their ravages, the settlements about Nashville began to grow as rapidly as the settlements along the Holston. In 1796 the required limit of population had been reached, and Tennessee with over seventy-six thousand inhabitants was formally admitted as a State of the Federal Union; Sevier was elected Governor, Blount was made one of the Senators, and Andrew Jackson was chosen Representative in Congress.

The Tennessee Const.i.tution.

In their State Const.i.tution the hard-working backwoods farmers showed a conservative spirit which would seem strange to the radical democracy of new Western States to-day. An elective Governor and two legislative houses were provided; and the representation was proportioned, not to the population at large, but to the citizen who paid taxes; for persons with some little property were still considered to be the rightful depositaries of political power. The Const.i.tution established freedom of the press, and complete religious liberty--a liberty then denied in the parent State of North Carolina; but it contained some unwise and unjust provisions. The Judges were appointed by the Legislature, and were completely subservient to it; and, through the influence of the land speculators all lands except town lots were taxed alike, so that the men who had obtained possession of the best tracts s.h.i.+fted to other shoulders much of their own proper burden. [Footnote: ”Const.i.tutional History of Tennessee,” by Joshua W. Caldwell, p. 101, another of Robert Clark's publications; an admirable study of inst.i.tutional development in Tennessee.]

CHAPTER IV.

INTRIGUES AND LAND SPECULATIONS--THE TREATIES OF JAY AND PINCKNEY, 1793-1797.

The Current of Tendency.

Throughout the history of the winning of the West what is noteworthy is the current of tendency rather than the mere succession of individual events. The general movement, and the general spirit behind the movement, became evident in many different forms, and if attention is paid only to some particular manifestation we lose sight of its true import and of its explanation. Particular obstacles r.e.t.a.r.ded or diverted, particular causes accelerated, the current; but the set was always in one direction. The peculiar circ.u.mstances of each case must always be taken into account, but it is also necessary to understand that it was but one link in the chain of causation.

The Causes of the Various Separatist and Filibustering Movements.

Such events as Burr's conspiracy or the conquest of Texas cannot be properly understood if we fail to remember that they were but the most spectacular or most important manifestations of what occurred many times. The Texans won a striking victory and performed a feat of the utmost importance in our history; and, moreover, it happened that at the moment the accession of Texas was warmly favored by the party of the slave-holders. Burr had been Vice-President of the United States, and was a brilliant and able man, of imposing personality, whose intrigues in the West attracted an attention altogether disproportionate to their real weight. In consequence each event is often treated as if it were isolated and stood apart from the general current of western history; whereas in truth each was but the most striking or important among a host or others. The feats performed by Austin and Houston and the other founders of the Texan Republic were identical in kind with the feats merely attempted, or but partially performed, by the men who, like Morgan, Elijah Clark, and George Rogers Clark, at different times either sought to found colonies in the Spanish-speaking lands under Spanish authority, or else strove to conquer these lands outright by force of arms. Boone settled in Missouri when it was still under the Spanish Government, and himself accepted a Spanish commission. Whether Missouri had or had not been ceded first by Spain to France and then by France to the United States early in the present century, really would not have altered its final destiny, so far at least as concerns the fact that it would ultimately have been independent of both France and Spain, and would have been dominated by an English-speaking people; for when once the backwoodsmen, of whom Boone was the forerunner, became sufficiently numerous in the land they were certain to throw off the yoke of the foreigner; and the fact that they had voluntarily entered the land and put themselves under this yoke would have made no more difference to them than it afterwards made to the Texans. So it was with Aaron Burr.

His conspiracy was merely one, and by no means the most dangerous, of the various conspiracies in which men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and many of the members of the early Democratic societies in Kentucky, bore a part. It was rendered possible only by the temper of the people and by the peculiar circ.u.mstances which also rendered the earlier conspiracies possible; and it came to naught for the same reasons that they came to naught, and was even more hopeless, because it was undertaken later, when the conditions were less favorable.

Clark's Part in the Proposed French Attack on Spain.

The movement deliberately entered into by many of the Kentuckians in the years 1793 and 1794, to conquer Louisiana on behalf of France, must be treated in this way. The leader in this movement was George Rogers Clark. His chance of success arose from the fact that there were on the frontier many men of restless, adventurous, warlike type, who felt a spirit of unruly defiance toward the home government and who greedily eyed the rich Spanish lands. Whether they got the lands by conquest or by colonization, and whether they warred under one flag or another, was to them a matter of little moment. Clark's career is of itself sufficient to prove the truth of this. He had already been at the head of a movement to make war against the Spaniards, in defiance of the Central Government, on behalf of the Western settlements. On another occasion he had offered his sword to the Spanish Government, and had requested permission to found in Spanish territory a State which should be tributary to Spain and a barrier against the American advance. He had thus already sought to lead the Westerners against Spain in a warfare undertaken purely by themselves and for their own objects, and had also offered to form by the help of some of these Westerners a State which should be a const.i.tuent portion of the Spanish dominion. He now readily undertook the task of raising an army of Westerners to overrun Louisiana in the interests of the French Republic. The conditions which rendered possible these various movements were substantially the same, although the immediate causes, or occasions, were different. In any event the result would ultimately have been the conquest of the Spanish dominions by the armed frontiersmen, and the upbuilding of English-speaking States on Spanish territory.

The American Sympathizers with the French Revolution.

The expedition which at the moment Clark proposed to head took its peculiar shape from outside causes. At this period Genet was in the midst of his preposterous career as Minister from the French Republic to the United States. The various bodies of men who afterwards coalesced into the Democratic-Republican party were frantically in favor of the French Revolution, regarding it with a fatuous admiration quite as foolish as the horror with which it affected most of the Federalists.

They were already looking to Jefferson as their leader, and Jefferson, though at the time Secretary of State under Was.h.i.+ngton, was secretly encouraging them, and was playing a very discreditable part toward his chief. The ultra admirers of the French Revolution not only lost their own heads, but turned Genet's as well, and persuaded him that the people were with him and were ready to oppose Was.h.i.+ngton and the Central Government in the interests of revolutionary France. Genet wished to embroil America with England, and sought to fit out American privateers on the seacoast towns to prey on the English commerce, and to organize on the Ohio River an armed expedition to conquer Louisiana, as Spain was then an ally of England and at war with France.

The Jeffersonians' Western Policy.

All over the country Genet's admirers formed Democratic societies on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of France. They were of course either useless or noxious in such a country and under such a government as that of the United States, and exercised a very mischievous effect. Kentucky was already under the influence of the same forces that were at work in Virginia and elsewhere, and the cla.s.ses of her people who were politically dominant were saturated with the ideas of those doctrinaire politicians of whom Jefferson was chief. These Jeffersonian doctrinaires were men who at certain crises, in certain countries, might have rendered great service to the cause of liberty and humanity; but their influence in America was on the whole distinctly evil, save that, by a series of accidents, they became the especial champions of the westward extension of the nation, and in consequence were identified with a movement which was all-essential to the national well-being.

Kentucky Ripe for Genet's Intrigues.

Kentucky was ripe for Genet's intrigues, and he found the available leader for the movement in the person of George Rogers Clark. Clark was deeply imbittered, not only with the United States Government but with Virginia, for the Virginia a.s.sembly had refused to pay any of the debts he had contracted on account of the State, and had not even reimbursed him for what he had spent. [Footnote: Draper MSS., J. Clark to G. R.