USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 32
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366
THE SPANISH QUESTION.
It had been an object of Spain to induce the American fron- tiersmen to settle on lands beyond the Mississippi. Miró had invited Robertson to this end. Gardoqui had sent emissaries to the western country to disclose a like plan. His agents found little willingness to accept such offers, though some adventurous spirits like Stenben and George Rogers Clark were ready to lend their influence.
In July, 1788. Spanish troops had been sent to fortify New Madrid, a position on the river some distance below St. Louis. As a part of the scheme to strengthen the line of the Missis- sippi against piratieal inroads of the Americans, Natchez was further fortified, and a fleet of patrol boats was soon placed on the river.
Colonel George Morgan of New Jersey, a revolutionary soldier, had of late been trying to induce Congress to help him found a colony near Kaskaskia. This pending, Gardoqui sought him with an offer of coneeding twelve or fifteen million acres of land at New Madrid. On October 3, 1788, the terms were set- tled. It was expected that his followers would be Protestants, and guarantees against religious interference were made. Free trade down the river satisfied the commercial requirements. The position of New Madrid, nearly opposite the mouth of the Ohio, gave earnest of a large town. Morgan issued a circular setting forth the advantages of the plan. It promised land at an eighth of a dollar an acre, with aid in building dwellings. It set forth the richness of the country, the abundance of buffalo ,and other game, which, if furnished by contractors, would cost a penny the pound. Free transportation down the Ohio of all household effects would be given. Schoolmasters would. aceom- pany the emigrants.
One of these circulars coming to the hands of Madison, he wrote to Washington (March 26, 1789) that it contained " the most authentic and precise evidence of the Spanish projeet that has come to my knowledge." He also wrote to Jefferson that " no doubt the project has the sanction of Gardoqui," and the Mississippi is " the bait for a defection of the western people."
This movement of Gardoqui was but one of the rival meas- ures which estranged Miro from the Spanish agent at the seat of government. and neither the latter nor Wilkinson was satis- fied with the prospect. It was too evidently a sinister stroke at
367
DORCHESTER AND KENTUCKY.
the secret plans of the Spanish faction in Kentucky. Wilkin- son had just obtained (August) a renewal of his license from Miró, and a cargo of dry goods had been sent up the river to him, accompanied by the prudent advice from his confederate not to put too high a price upon his wares, for fear of diminishing among the Kentuckians the advantages of Spanish intercourse.
The other new phase of western condition, to which reference has been made, on being developed in the autumn of 1788, was not on the side of the Mississippi, but on that of Canada. There was a faction, as has been indicated, among the Kentucky politicians, who looked rather to France than to Spain for the solution of their difficulties. It was hoped that France would assert her right to Louisiana, and invite the west to a share in it. Some such representation had been made to the French minis- try, when it came to the notice of the English. It was through some one at Detroit that Lord Dorchester's attention was first called to the chance of making common cause with the disaffected west. The same informant told the Canadian governor of the movement then gathering head for the occupation of the Mus- kingum country. A hint was also given of that disloyal spirit which the secret service books of Sir Henry Clinton have fas- tened, justly or unjustly, upon a soldier of the Revolution who was at this time a leader in the Ohio movement. This corre- spondent of Dorchester adds that " a General Parsons among them has made advances to establish commercial interests with Canada." If this could happen north of the Ohio, there was a glimmering hope that some similar leader might be found south of the Ohio, to be clandestinely beckoned into toils. Very likely this secret informer in Detroit was a half-pay British officer, Colonel John Connolly, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who in 1775 had served the royal cause under Lord Dunmore. For this he had suffered a long imprisonment. He had also a dis- tinct personal grievance against the Americans for the confis- cation of some property at the falls of the Ohio. He saw, or thought he saw, how it was the commercial instinct of the east, particularly of New England, which had started the new life on the Ohio, and had sent adventurous people, possessed "of a universal facility," to fill up "this tempting, though remote country."
368
THE SPANISH QUESTION.
Connolly was such a person as Dorchester needed to probe the secret impulses of the settlers south of the Ohio. He left Detroit in October, and, proceeding by the Miami, reached Lou- isville in time to witness the canvass which was then going on among the electors of the new convention. In this he saw the Spanish and anti-Spanish factions striving for mastery. He heard much of the outspoken advocacy of Wilkinson on the Separatist side.
While Connolly thus looked on, he gave out that he was on the spot simply to see after his own interests in confiscated property. He admitted his real object cautiously, and probably never committed himself to many persons. Among those whom he approached was Colonel Thomas Marshall, who very promptly reminded him that if Lord Dorchester meant kindness, he had best first stop the raids of the Indians on the frontiers. Later, on November 18, 1788, or thereabouts, Connolly met Wilkin- son at his own house. To him he diselosed his full plans. Ten thousand men were to be sent from Canada down the Missis- sippi, while a British fleet foreed the river on the Gulf side.
Wilkinson was not more pleased with seeing his own plans foiled by this new scheme than he had been with Gardoqui's projects. Accordingly, by the aid of confederates, he caused a feigned personal attack to be made on Connolly, which made the spy apprehensive of assassination, and prompted him to leave hastily for Detroit.
Connolly, who on reflection thought he had escaped a private plot, and that really half the Kentuckians were ready for his scheme, made a rather sanguine report to Dorchester. The governor's letters to Sydney show that certainly there had been some considerable response to his overtures. The late John Mason Brown, in his vindication of John Brown, brings to light, from the English archives, a paper of reflections from one of these seeming clandestine partisans. A few weeks after Connolly's disappearance, both Marshall and Harry Innes communicated to Washington what they knew of Connolly's doings.
While Connolly was still in Kentucky, the convention, whose preliminary canvass he had been watching at Louisville, met at Danville on November 3. It had appeared at one time as if
369
BROWN AND WILKINSON.
Wilkinson would be rejected in his candidature, but his skillful dissembling saved him, while his confederates were defeated.
The convention adopted an address to Congress, in which it was said : " As it is the natural right of the people of this country to navigate the Mississippi, so they have also a right, derived from treaties and national compacts," and these rights " we conjure you to procure."
Brown, with an air of knowing more than he expressed, ad- vised the convention to wait patiently until what they wanted came. What he meant by this enigma is clear enough, when Oliver Pollock informs Miró that there is, in Brown's opinion, no salvation for Kentucky but in swinging over to Spain.
A motion was made to send a temperate and respectful ad- dress to the Virginia Assembly, urging an act of separation. Wilkinson tried in vain to substitute a vote instructing the delegates in the Assembly ; and then read to the convention a memorial which he said he had left with Miró to be sent to Madrid. From the best evidence obtainable Wilkinson in this paper had unreservedly committed himself to the Spanish plot. In all these steps his purpose, by his own confession to Miró, was to foster a spirit of revolt, and to irritate Congress to some incautious act. When such views obtained as Governor Clin- ton had openly professed to Gardoqui, namely, that the peopling of the West from the East was a national calamity, it was not difficult to hope for Congress to be equally indiscreet. To help on such a plot, Wilkinson told Miró that he looked to Spain to sow other seeds of discord between the East and the West, and Miró sent his friend five thousand dollars to use in tampering with the conscience of the unyielding.
As a blind, Wilkinson further moved to ask Congress to take decided action against Spain, and it was so agreed.
Before the year closed, Wilkinson had begun to think that, after all, his plans might irretrievably fail. Such a mischance was perhaps hinted at by his confederate, Dunn, to whom St. Clair, now on the Ohio with a show of military authority, and knowing Wilkinson's intrigues, was writing in a warning vein, and begging him to " detach Wilkinson from the Spanish party." In this conjunction Wilkinson and his friends sent a petition to Gardoqui for a grant of land on the Yazoo and the Missis- sippi ; and writing to Miró about it, he informed him that his
370
THE SPANISH QUESTION.
purpose was merely to secure a place of refuge for himself and his adherents, in case it should become necessary to have one.
This measure off his mind, Wilkinson made haste to show Gardoqui how important a factor he might become in thwarting British intrigue, by informing that Spanish agent (January 1, 1789) that the emissaries from Detroit were still active in the west. Just at the same time, Robertson, thinking to propitiate Miró by naming a district on the Cumberland after him, wrote (January 11, 1789), as did later General Robert Smith (March 4), that the time was approaching for the Cumberland people to join with Spain. Wilkinson almost simultaneously was dis- patching a new flotilla of twenty flatboats to continue his com- mercial connection with New Orleans. So it seemed to the Spanish intriguers north and south that there were to be renewed efforts in behalf of Spain, before her American confederates slunk away to the Yazoo.
The inauguration of the new government at New York, set for March, was not far distant, and time would, therefore, before long show what its effect was to be on Wilkinson's purposes, Washington, with the interval rapidly shortening before great responsibilities would devolve upon him, and fully informed of what was doing in the west, caused a warning to be inserted in the Alexandria Gazette that this Spanish intrigue " was preg- nant with much mischief." Later, in March, 1789, not long before he was to be inaugurated, he wrote to Innes : "I have little doubt but that a perseverance in temperate measures will produce a national policy mutually advantageous to all parts of the American Republic." It was significant of a steady hand ready to grasp the helm.
From a letter addressed by Wilkinson to Miró, on February 12, 1789, we learn just how the situation seemed to that conspir- ator, or rather how he chose to make it seem to his confederate. He assured him that the leading men in Kentucky, with the exception of Colonels Marshall and Muter, were committed to " the important objects to which we aim ; " and that some delay was inevitable till the new government had assembled and de- «lared itself, and that if it would be in the way of resentment, the securing of the Yazoo grant might prove timely. Mean- while, he trusted that Spain would not relax her efforts to sow dissension in the west. He recounted the circumstances of Con-
371
WILKINSON AND MCGILLIVRAY.
nolly's mission and of his ignominious flight. He said there is a current rumor that England is trying to restore Gibraltar to Spain at the price of New Orleans and the Floridas.
Two days later (February 14, 1789), Wilkinson dispatched a second letter. In this he regrets that Gardoqui, instead of Miró, had been given the power to treat with Kentucky, and hopes that the Yazoo country will enable him and Miró to defeat the plans of Gardoqui and Morgan at New Madrid. Miró, as it appears from a remonstrance which he sent on May 20 to Madrid, did not conceal his fears that Gardoqui had been over- reached by Morgan, and that the true object of the American was to plant a new American State west of the Mississippi. With this apprehension, Miro later (July) ordered the com- mandant at New Madrid to strengthen his defenses, while he did ostensibly what he could for the comfort of the new colony.
There might well be ground for fear on Miró's part that with all his magnificent vision of an extended Spanish dominion, he was himself, as he deemed Gardoqui to be, dealing with traitors, who at any moment might turn upon him. His position was certainly a trying one. Sent to govern a province, his govern- ment had dispatched a covert enemy, with powers that war- ranted him to invade this province and set up other jurisdictions. Amid all this perplexity came in May the news of the death of the Spanish king and the accession of Charles IV., and he knew not what change of policy.
The Mississippi, although coveted, was in fact the weak side of Louisiana, for it opened a path to her enemies, both up and down its course. The river once passed and in control, the mines of New Mexico were within the invaders' grasp. New Orleans, with its five thousand people, sheltering a disaffected French preponderance, was a prize for any daring commander. The forty-two thousand inhabitants of Louisiana had little better cohesion to make a defensive front.
It had been, if it was not now, clear to Miro's mind that the two main supports of his hopes were Wilkinson and McGilli. vray, - the one to seduce the west, the other, supposed to hold more or less control over the seventy thousand Indians of the southwest, to make them serve as a barrier to Spanish territory.
To add to Miró's perplexities, he had become, through the communications of Wilkinson and Pollock, aware of the rival
972
THE SPANISH QUESTION.
intrigues of France and England. France had given up Lou- isiana to Spain because she had failed to secure the returns she wished from its trade and mines. Since then, the American subduers of the wilderness had shown her that the true wealth of the Great Valley was not in its deposits or in its furs, but in its agricultural products. This development was relied upon to arouse French cupidity. It was said that not an acre had been cleared abont Natchez but by Americans, who were now supplying the markets of New Orleans from their farms, - now reported, with probable exaggeration, by one observer as three thousand in number, averaging four hundred acres each. Pro- ductiveness like this made something more of the country than a bulwark of the New Mexican mines. The French must re- member, it was set forth, that by gaining the west, they would gain supremacy in the market for flax, hemp, and wool, and could drive all tobaccos out of the trade by their own. There were thirty thousand old subjects of France, they were reminded, who stood ready to welcome them in place of their Spanish masters. Beside these, they could depend on the sympathy and aid of the French on the Wabash and in Canada, and open an asylum to the disaffected, who were already flying from the French shores before the seething agitations of the Revolution.
In aid of this French scheme, some interested persons in Ken- tucky had transmitted to the French representative in New York a memoir upon the condition of the western country, calcu- lated to affect the Gallie imagination. Fortunately, it did not bring the direful effects which Barlow's promises had produced on the Ohio. Indeed, Kentucky at this time had much more to offer to immigrants than the territory north of the Ohio. The migration of settlers was so rapid and so large that it is diffi- cult to reach a conservative estimate of it. The Ohio and the road from Limestone and the Wilderness Road were crowded with the trains of pioneers. During the twelve months divided between 1788 and 1789, to take no account of the overland movements, twenty thousand persons had passed down the Ohio, past Fort Harmar, in eight or nine hundred boats. With them were counted seven thousand horses, three thousand cows, nine hundred sheep, and six hundred wagons, - and all were, with few exceptions, bound for the Kentucky settlements.
There were at this time, as contrasted with the scant popula-
373
FRENCH AND ENGLISH FACTIONS.
tion north of the Ohio, not a great deal short of one hundred thousand souls in the settlements of Kentucky, Cumberland, and Watauga. What disturbed Miro most, and offered the greatest inducement to the French and English factions, was that more than twenty thousand riflemen, a large part mounted, were ready to belt their fringed shirts for any emergency. Kentucky alone, it was thought, could send ten thousand mili- tia to a point of danger, and her mounted patrols were always alert in the traveled ways.
In urging an alliance with France, its advocates claimed that the Alleghanies forbade for the west all communication with the Atlantic ; that the unity of the Republic " was broken by the mountains ; " that the success of the seaboard could not contribute to the prosperity of the west. " The west, in short, requires a. protector. The first who will stretch out its arms to it will have the greatest acquisition that could be desired in the New World."
It is not probable that this project of a French alliance, looming as it did at times in excitable minds, ever made much progress. Its real effect was to thwart and incite by turns the energies of both the English and the Spanish.
The British scheme had more of reality in it; but it also failed of maturity. That there were in the west supporters of an English connection, beyond the numbers which Connolly encountered, would seem to be evident from the correspondence of Dorchester with the home government. In one of the gov- ernor's dispatches (April 11, 1789) he transmitted some " des- ultory reflections of a gentleman of Kentucky," which, if not the work of Wilkinson, was in quite his manner, and would have emphasized that intriguer's faithlessness to Miró, had he known of it. The writer says that " the politics of the western country must speedily eventuate in an appeal to Spain or Britain." In transmitting this paper, Dorchester wrote that the factions in Kentucky that promised best looked to an alliance with Great Britain, for the purpose of detaching that region from the Union and capturing New Orleans. The people urge, said Dorchester in effect, that Spain had helped the United States against England, and that there was now the chance to pay them off. Still, they wanted no active assistance till New Orleans was captured. Having thus put the case, Dorchester
374
THE SPANISH QUESTION.
asked the ministry how far he could safely go in responding to such appeals.
In this, as in other problems, the newly installed federal gov- ernment was likely to prove an antagonist to deal with, different from the defunct confederation. Grenville seems to have sus- pected this, and cautioned Dorchester against active interference. Wilkinson was well aware of the changed conditions, and on September 17, 1789, he wrote to Miró, in a pitiable and self- convicting spirit : " I have voluntarily alienated myself from the United States, and am not yet accepted by Spain. I have re- jected the proffered honors and rewards of Great Britain, while declining the preeminence which courted my acceptance in the United States. I have given my time, my property, and every exertion of my faculties to promote the interests of the Spanish monarchy. By this conduct I have hazarded the indignation of the American Union."
While this despondency was growing upon him, Wilkinson had failed of an election to the convention, which met on July 20, 1789. Without his leadership the Separatist faction hardly dared assert itself. The new proposition of Virginia which came before the convention had some objectionable provisions as to the public lands, and it was found necessary to take fur- ther time to settle the differences. So, the convention adjourn- ing, Kentucky was not yet a State; but the Spanish question had lost a great deal of its importance, and was for a while about dropping out of local polities. ,
CHAPTER XVII.
UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST.
1790.
WHEN the new federal government was put in operation, there was one Northern and one Southern State 'still without the Union. In November, 1789, North Carolina had adopted the constitution. Many questions touching the western country south of Kentucky could not be considered till North Carolina had thus acted. This region rounded out the country, in con- ception at least, to the Mississippi, and although Rhode Island still remained recusant, not acceding till May, 1790, Oliver Wolcott might well say, because of Rhode Island's insignifi- cance, that the "accession of North Carolina has blasted the hopes of the anti-federalists." With small delay, on February 25, 1790, through a deed signed by her senators, North Caro- lina ceded to the United States the region now called Tennessee, a territory then reckoned as extending east and west three hun- dred and sixty miles, and north and south over a degree and a half of latitude. The occupants of this territory, now some thirty thousand more or less, were not consulted, and the Indian . title still covered it, except at the east, where the Franklin ex- periment had been tried, and towards the west, where some two thousand square miles surrounded Nashville as a political centre. Within the cession lay lands assured to the Chickasaws by the treaty of Hopewell (January 10, 1783), and others confirmed to the Cherokees by the treaty of November 28, 1785, which were still further to be increased by the treaty of Holston, July 2, 1791. The lands thus preserved to the tribes made about five million acres in the east and central regions, with about half as much more towards the Mississippi. In addition, North Carolina had already pledged considerable areas to her revolu- tionary soldiers, to individual grantees, and for the redemption of her scrip, so that the United States got little or nothing
376
UNCERTAINTIES IN THE SOUTHWEST.
under the cession beyond the jurisdiction over the forty-five thousand square miles which constituted the territory. Indeed, it was thought that North Carolina in her previous grants had exceeded the area of the country by half a million acres.
On April 2, Congress accepted the cession, and in May, that body set up the ceded territory, to which was presumably added the narrow east and west strip already made over by South Carolina, as " the Territory south of the river Ohio." This act created a governor, and also three judges, who were to yield to a territorial assembly when the population could show a body of five thousand voters. The new government was to be guided by provisions similar to those of the ordinance of 1787, except that slavery was not prohibited. William Blount, a North Carolinian of popular yet dignified manners, who en- joyed the confidence of the people, was made governor, reaching his post in October. The territory was divided into two mili- tary districts, the eastern of which was placed under Sevier, now made brigadier-general, and the western under Robertson, to whom was accorded a like rank.
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