USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 45
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Kentucky, "more extravagantly described than any other part of the United States," as one observer said, was commonly thought at this time to contain perhaps seventy thousand whites, and, when the blacks were included, the over-confident carried the population much higher. In the boastful talk about forcing the Mississippi, it was not infrequently held that there were thirty thousand men in the new State capable of bearing arms. There is no doubt that the Spanish stood in dread of some ebullition of passion which would hurl a large force against their settlements on the Mississippi, and the Kentuckians were spoken of, in connection with the Cumberland settlers, as "rest- less, poor, ambitious, and capable of the most daring enter- prises," and Carondelet was fearful of their ultimate attempts to cross the Mississippi. In Kentucky, more than in Tennessee, the population was being tempered by the arrival of some gentle Virginian stock among them, and was passing out of the in- choate roughness of a pioneer condition, though, up to a very recent time, Cooper, the traveler, was probably right in saying that no part of Kentucky, except a few miles round Lexington, was perfectly safe from Indian raids. The victory of Wayne was rapidly having its effect, in rendering the Wilderness Road safe without a mounted guard, and little was beginning to be heard of assaults on the armed packet-boats of the Ohio.
It was estimated that the emigration from the settled por- tions of the States east of the mountains to the west was be- come from forty to fifty thousand a year; but Kentucky was not getting now the share of it which she formerly did. The
NOTE. -. The opposite map, following Elihu Barker's large map of Kentucky, is from Carey's .American Atlas, Philadelphia, 1795, and shows the road connections of Frankfort, Danville, and Lexington with Che Olio and Cumberland rivers.
Fort Washington
Golunda Fast fork
Little Miama
1
River
Liching
MAS
Charleston
1
Woo
FORD
B
Mathil
North Fork of Lacking Johns ns Fort
O Fork UR
C. th Elkhorn ofane
oe Town
8 Bourbon C. House
M
Felkhem
Lexington
C.
storh
chap
Red River
Harrodfoifo
STRAS]
Madison C.H.
River
Danville
White lich
-
Red lick
Stanford
south fork
Brush Cr.
dro.
C:
Langfords
Glades
SGoose Cr.
C". UNT
Salt lick
shing
Buck Cr.
sile
1
Frankfort
South
Slate
Bourbon
River
R
Boons borough
Middle in
Kentucky
aint leck
.00
Iver
S Paint flick
IStation Canip C
S ON C.
HangingF COL
River
Scaffold Fork
White Oak C
Eagle
River
agle
-
St. ners Fork
n
528
THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.
confusion of land titles through overlapping grants and shiftless recording was doing much to repel the thrifty farmer. Larger bodies of emigrants went by the northern routes and stopped in the Genesee country, where perhaps the climate was not so inviting, but the soil was nearly as rich, and there were better means of taking produce to market. The opposition of New York laws to aliens holding lands was working, however, some detriment to settlement within its borders. The enterprise of Pennsylvania in opening roads and canals, and bringing new regions in the valley of the Susquehanna into occupaney, was another impediment to Kentucky's increase. The treaty of Greeneville in quieting the northwest was, moreover, bringing the region north of the Ohio into direct rivalry.
Kentucky, nevertheless, still had great advantages in rich and enduring soil. Everywhere the winter rotted the autumn's leaves, and in the spring there was clean turf beneath the trees. A Kentucky farmer, with perhaps pardonable warmth, told William Priest that he was obliged to plant his land six or seven years with hemp or tobacco before it was sufficiently poor to bear wheat. Grass grew with a surprising rankness. Clover grazed the horses' knees as they galloped through a sea of blossoms. Oaks, locusts, and beeches spread to enormous sizes. Where the trees would shade his crops, the farmer cleared his ground, which meant that he cut the trunks two feet above the soil, and grubbed out what was between the mutilated boles. If a seaboard farmer traversed the country, they pointed out land that would yield one hundred bushels of c'orn to the acre, and everywhere the erop was from fifty to eighty, or three times what the New Englander had been used to. Crèvecœur said that " a hundred families barely existing in some parts of Scotland will here in six years cause an an- nual exportation of ten thousand bushels of wheat." Again, serutinizing the component parts of the population, he says : " Ont of twelve families of emigrants of each country, gener- ally seven Scotch will succeed, nine German, and four Irish. The Scotch are frugal and laborious, but their wives cannot work so hard as German women. The Irish love to drink and to quarrel, and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything."
The lawless profligacy of the border, which the Irish had
529
BORDER LIFE.
done so much to maintain, and that assimilation of traits which entangles the evils of the savage with the vices of the white, was now beginning in Kentucky to disappear. The rogue who stole horses and altered ear-clips of the cattle and sheep was less often seen in the town. The bankrupt from the seaboard was sooner suspected, and was the less likely to gather the idlers at the trading-stores. The hunter, with his torn moccasins and dingy leggings, his shirt blood-stained, and his coon-skin cap
40
5
Si.
Lick
Times
GB
Ma.
Ne.
LUCKY
35
35
100
1,50
200 TuLES
[This map, from Henry Toulmin's Description of Kentucky, 1792, shows the counties of Ken- tucky at that time, namely ; Fa = Fayette ; Bo = Bourbon ; Ma = Madison; Me = Mercer ; Je = Jefferson ; Ne = Nelson ; Li = Lincoln. The towns are : 1, Lexington ; 2, Boonesborough ; 3, St. Aseph ; 4, Louisville ; 5, Harrodsburg. The Cherokee River, the modern Tennessee, is described as "navigable 900 miles," and the upper part of it (Te) is called "Teuasee river, a branch of the Cherokee."]
ragged and greasy, still came to the settlement for his powder and salt, and enticed Michael and Pat to the frontiers ; but his visits were less frequent, and he did not linger to make part of a life which had grown away from him. The storekeeper, ham- pered by barter, gave the tone to the community, while he devised the cutting of Spanish dollars into triangular eighths to supply the need of small change. The Rev. John Hurt, of Lexington, told Wansey that Kentucky was the place to make fortunes in trade. He instanced two men who started there with less than £200 apiece, and by keeping store, they were now (1794) worth £30,000. They were Scotch-Irish, one might assume, and that race had just planted some new seed in the founding of Blount College close by Knoxville, now the Uni-
OIHO
530
THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.
versity of Tennessee, in the country lying to the south of Ken- tucky and sharing most of its characteristics. Both regions were animated by one controlling impulse in their claims upon the free navigation of the Mississippi.
On December 6, 1791, the Spanish minister intimated to Jefferson that the authorities at Madrid were ready to treat for the settlement of their disputes. Short, at the Hague, was directed to join Carmichael in Madrid. On January 25, 1792, Jefferson informed the Spanish minister that the commissioners had been appointed, and on March 18 their instructions were ready for transmission. The trend of Jefferson's argument in these directions was that Spain, in the treaty of January 20, 1783, had agreed to restore without compensation all north of 31° of latitude, - the line of earlier charters, proclamations, and treaties, - and that the United States, by the Treaty of Inde- pendenee, received the rights of England north of that parallel, and that the bounds of the seeret elause of the latter treaty were not applicable because England had not obtained Florida, as might have been the case, in the treaty with Spain. As to the navigation of the Mississippi, that had been coneeded by . Spain to England in the treaty of 1763, and the United States had succeeded to the rights of Great Britain. Further, the right to use the mouth of a river belonged by the law of nature and of nations to the country holding the upper waters, and this right was not complete without a port of deposit. A right, Jefferson contended, was not to be confounded with a grant made to the most favored nation, and stood independent of any agreement. If Spain asked any compensation for the conces- sion, the commissioners were instructed to offset such a demand by a claim of damages for nine years of exclusion from the river.
There was in the councils of the President not a little disa- greement as to what concessions it might be well in the end to make, as was to be expected where Jefferson and Hamilton were in the circle of advisers. Hamilton was more urgent than his rival for delaying a war with Spain, though he saw, as all did, that a conflict was inevitable in the end, unless the point could be carried by negotiation. He urged an alliance with England as likely to ward off an outbreak, and thought it could
531
OPPOSING PARTIES.
be made for England's advantage by rectifying the northwest boundary line in a way to throw some portions of the upper Mississippi within British territory. This accorded with de- mands which England had often hinted at, and made later in the negotiation with Jay, as serving to make the provisions of the treaty of 1782 intelligible, inasmuch as a right to navigate the Mississippi, as that treaty gave, with no access to it, was unintel- ligible. Jefferson firmly objected to the alienation of any part of the territory of the United States on any conditions. Ham- ilton claimed that exigencies might easily sanction it. The ques- tion naturally aroused the antipathies of the two antagonistic factions into which the American people were rapidly dividing, and Randolph, as a sympathizer with the French, fell readily in with the views of Jefferson, while Knox sided with Hamilton. In New England, at this time, it would doubtless have been found on a poll that a withdrawal from the Union was more in favor than an alliance with France against England ; and Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, was so confident in this sentiment that he supposed that ninety-nine New Englanders out of a hundred held it. Washington carried a steady hand, and, though much inclined to take part with Hamilton against Jefferson, he told his cabinet that an English alliance for this end, giving the British a foothold on the Mississippi, was a remedy worse than the disease.
The year 1793 brought new disturbing elements into play. On January 21, news of the execution of Louis XVI. had reached New Orleans only to arouse in the French Creoles their latent republican sympathies. This alarmed Carondelet, and he began strengthening the outworks of the city, and laying out schemes for an extended defense of the province. The French sympathizers were closely in touch with the agitation already manifest among the Kentucky discontents, and there were rumors of a projected descent of an armed flotilla directed to unseat the Spanish authorities. It was known on the seaboard that letters were passing to Tom Paine, now a member of the National Assembly in Paris ; and two persons whom we have already encountered were supposed to be movers in these mis- chievous schemes against Spain. One was Dr. O'Fallon, not suppressed by the failure of his Natchez projects. The other
532
THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.
was George Rogers Clark, seeking with his shattered energy to emerge from what a contemporary observer called " a profound slumber for upwards of four years." Jefferson some time before had written to Innes that "no man alive rated Clark higher than I did, and would again were he to become once more what I knew him."
In view of these reports, already circulating, the President's cabinet, on March 10, determined on issuing a proclamation against any such warlike demonstration towards Spain, and Wayne was instructed to throw troops into Fort Massac, so as to intercept any armed invaders of Spanish territory. While the President's advisers were considering if the French Revo- Intion had annulled the obligations of the United States to France under the treaty of 1778, Genet, the new minister of the French Republic, armed with three hundred blank com- missions, as was reported, arrived on April 8, 1793, at Charles- ton, on board a French frigate. Before he left Carolina, he began issuing his commissions to ernisers against the enemies of France. Philadelphia newspapers of April contained both the President's proclamation and notices of Genet's arriving in that city. During May, 1793, that arrogant visitor was issuing other commissions and enjoying the excitement and jubilation with which his coming had been hailed. Jefferson grew warm in speaking of " the old spirit of 1776, rekindling. The news- papers from Boston to Charleston," he said, " prove this, and even the monocrat papers are obliged to publish the most furi- ous philippies against England." Jefferson, again in a letter to Monroe, June 4, assorts the people : " The old Tories joined by our merchants, who trade on British capital, and the idle rich, are with the kings. All other descriptions with the French." Madison, writing to Jefferson of the President's proclamation, " unconstitutional " and " pusillanimous," as the latter believed it, said : " It is mortifying that the President should have any- thing to apprehend from the snecess of liberty in another coun- try, since he owes his preeminence to the success of it in his own." The President disregarded the aspersions and found comfort in Hamilton's counsels.
Genet was soon planning to give coherency to the passions, already seething beyond the mountains, under the influence of the inflammatory discussions of the Jacobin clubs, which French
533
MICHIGAN AND THE PACIFIC.
adherents had been forming. A Frenchman, sojourning in Philadelphia, became his willing tool. André Michaux, a man of seientific attainments, had before this been selected by the American Philosophical Society to explore the valley of the Missouri in order to find a short and convenient passage to the Pacific. "It would seem by the maps," as his proposed instructions read, " as if the river called Oregon interlocked with the Missouri for a considerable distance ; " and in popular conception, as evinced by Morse's Geography of 1794, the two rivers were not kept asunder by any mountain ridge. Michaux was directed after reaching the Pacific to return by the same or some other route, and to avoid, both in going and returning, the Spanish settlements. The Spanish had always jealously guarded their trade in the Missouri valley, but had so far only partially succeeded in keeping the British out, and the next year, Carondelet was complaining that the London fur eom- panies operating in this region were making a hundred per cent. profit. It was, nevertheless, a subject of complaint by Dorchester that English traders were interfered with even when a hundred miles and more away from Spanish posts.
This unfruitful project of the Philosophical Society fell in opportunely with the interest in westward search, which was now engaging the attention of geographers. Vancouver had gone to the Pacific, in 1791, with instructions looking to his sailing east, perhaps as far as the Lake of the Woods, by a supposable passage, which might in some way be found to con- neet with the Atlantic. In April, 1792, he had reached . the northwest coast. On May 11, ensuing, Captain Gray in the Boston ship "Columbia," following Vancouver's track, had found what the latter missed, and had entered and ascended, for some twenty miles, a great river which he named after his ship. It was in part, by virtue of this exploration, that the United States ultimately assumed jurisdiction over this river's course for seven hundred and fifty-two miles, till by the treaty of 1846, the upper three hundred miles was given over to Brit-
NOTE. - The map on the following two pages is from the Spanish Archives, procured by Mr. Clarence W. Bowen, and given to Harvard College Library. It is a section of an Idea Topografica de los Altos del Missisipi y del Missouri, Año de 1785, with corrections to 1794. The British and Spanish flags show stations of those peoples, and the dotted lines are the English trading routes. The small squares are trading stations. The triangular ones are nomadic tribes ; the round spots are fixed tribes. It shows the Spanish notions regarding the connection of Lake Superior, Lake of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, and Hudson's Bay.
L. Onepid.
Barton.
N.
L
0 0 Maskedo.
Doupas
L
Manieton
Onepią
I F. Peter grand
BIF de Harsur. Lepinette.
R. Onepig.
Portage Raten.
Ale A Cristina
P. F. Ingles. .R.
JO Siox
Zur
Colorado
N. Siox.
cara
R. d
N. Pontas
N. Ris.
N. Mah
Armas de Transfix
MG.
derrota 1
N. Ris 1
BAHI
F. York
York.
Bungi
POSESIONES
X. Nep
N. Sauteux.
N. Sauteyz
de los montes.
Lalluvia.
I
N. Parleur
Pais hermosE
Partage
POSESIONES
N. Sioux
N' Sieux hab.
Portage.
Rio
MISSISIPY
536
THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.
ish control. The tributaries of the Columbia add six hundred additional miles to its navigable waters. Some three hundred and fifty thousand square miles of its valley sends its drainage ultimately to the sea, beyond where Vancouver saw the forbid- ding surf which kept him from entering the river, and enough of this vast area lies south of the 49° of latitude to make a fif- teenth part of the total area of the present United States. This territory was a factor in American civilization hardly com- prehended, when Michaux was contemplating an effort to reach that region overland.
The Spaniards, under Galiano and Valdez, had already, in 1792, abandoned the search for a passage from the Pacific through North America ; and it was left for an English adven- turer, Alexander Mackenzie, to be the first to traverse this great valley from the inland side. In June, 1793, Mackenzie was at the crown of the Rockies, known as Peace River pass. He here hit upon the first easily traversable route over the mountains, north of that at the headwaters of the Gila, and he had been the first white man to stand where the waters parted for the Atlantic and for the Pacific. On July 22, 1793, he cut his name on a rock overhanging the sea, in latitude 53º 21' in British Columbia. Thus within ten years from the time when England, by the treaty of Paris (1782-83), confined herself to the north of the Great Lakes, her flag had been carried to the Pacific.
While this English pioneer was thus approaching the sea, Michaux, his would-be rival, had abandoned the role of an ex- plorer for that of a political intriguer. Falling under the influ- ence of Genet, he had lent himself to the Jacobin schemes, and to further their western plans, Genet had asked Jefferson to recognize Michaux as a consul of France to reside in Kentucky. This project failing, the French minister devised for his new ally, still preserving the appearance of a scientific wanderer, a direct mission to the western people. On July 5, he showed to the secretary of state the instructions under which it was proposed that Michaux should act. There was no concealment in this document, and it was unblushingly declared that Michaux was to raise from the Kentuckians a force to attack New Or- leans, and was also to send an address to the French in Canada to rise and throw off the British yoke. There was some reserve
537
THE INTRIGUES OF MICHAUX.
in the fact that the proposed invading force was to rendezvous beyond the Mississippi, and outside of American jurisdiction, and in this Jefferson recognized a prudent provision. He was incautious enough, however, to give Michaux credentials to Governor Shelby, and others were obtained for presentation to Clark and Wilkinson.
BoYear
Buttons P.of Walesy
Coast seen by Tchirikow
R
1
Afsiniboels of the North
R
WH
this Land is supposed
the Fou-sàng
Afsiniboels of the South
L. cunipigon Winipig
V
River of the West .
Mantorus R
C. Blancos c.Mendo cin CFortune
Sioux
Padutas
Quivira
Farellones Los
Drakes Harbour New Albion
Tajos
R
MEXICO
stªFe
LOU
IS.
Natch
casa.granat
rie
Apa che's
RIVER OF THE WEST.
[A section of " An exact map of North America," in William Russell's History of America, vol. ii. p. 106, London, 1778. It connects Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods with Lake Superior. ]
Michaux's journal of his western progress, giving for the most part his scientific observations, has been edited by Charles S. Sargent in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1889). It gives something that the botanist finds of use, but the historian gets in the record only stray glimpses of this agent's real business.
The movement had all the effrontery which went with Genet's acts. This emissary told Wansey, the traveler, at a later day,
P.de la Concepcion.
Puerto de And nuevo
Te guayo
NEW
Colorado
K Pris
NEM
to be |
of the Chinese Geographers
S! Charles
Woods
Enntince of Martind' Aguilar
Entrance fournit by Juan de Fuca,
Pretended Entrance of Admiral Fonte
538
THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.
that all he did was not beyond what those who commissioned him, Roland and Brissot, expected him to do, and this was to the end of embroiling, if possible, the United States in a war with England and Spain. Genet further openly proposed to Jefferson that he could depend on two leaders in Kentucky to march an army of liberators to New Orleans, and one of these was George Rogers Clark, who in the previous February had written to Genet, offering his services. It is said that the agents of Genet, who carried west the commissions under which Clark was to act, were aceredited by letters from John Brown, who had been involved in Wilkinson's earlier schemes. These leaders had asked Genet for an advance of £3,000, but that minister did not find it convenient to furnish such a sum. . The grand aim of all was to set up Louisiana as an independent ally of both the United States and France.
There is no need to follow Michaux's itinerary very closely. On August 14, he left Pittsburg, and on the 24th he moaned over the misery of a small remnant of his countrymen remain- ing at Gallipolis ; and at Limestone he left the river for the interior settlements.
Just at this time, the Spanish agent in Philadelphia gave the President information of the proposed expedition of Clark, and Jefferson was instructed to warn Shelby to be on his guard ; but the Kentucky governor was either timorous or a sympa- thizer, and he replied that he knew nothing of any such ex- pedition. In September, Michaux was at Lexington and at Danville, and had various conferences with those to whom he had taken letters. On the 17th, he saw Clark at Louisville, who professed to believe that the scheme had been abandoned, it was so long since he had heard anything. The failure to for- ward the money which had been asked may have had something to do with Clark's ignorance, and with his picturing the difficul- ties in the path. There were better prospects when, in October, some money was received, and the blank commissions came to hand. On October 6, Michanx had returned to Danville. His journal is now provokingly meagre ; but Colonel George Nicho- las advanced a plan of having a French fleet first seize the month of the Mississippi, and this force having declared the country French, the Americans were to be invited to descend the river, fighting their way if it became necessary.
539
CLARK'S PROJECT.
The federal government was now (October) so far alarmed that Jefferson wrote to the backward Shelby, directing him to use military force if the courts were powerless to stop the pro- ceedings, and St. Clair was at the same time ordered to hold some militia in readiness. On November 6, Jefferson repeated his injunctions to Shelby, and asked him to remember that the government could best settle the Mississippi question by ne- gotiations then going on. On the next day, St. Clair wrote to Shelby a letter, which was probably to reach him in advance of the other, telling him of the gathering of French officers at the falls of the Ohio, and urging him to act promptly.
Meanwhile rumors of the Jacobins' intentions were reaching Carondelet in an exaggerated form. His alarm increasing, on January 2, 1794, the Spanish governor dispatched a letter to Simcoe, giving that British commander at Detroit the extrava- gant stories which had reached New Orleans. Carondelet in- formed him that a million dollars had been raised for the expe- dition under Clark, who had undertaken to raise five thousand men for the enterprise. He pointed out how it would be for the interest of England that Spain should secure a foothold in the Illinois country. Simcoe later (April 11) replied that, while he agreed with the views of Carondelet, there was no chance for his cooperation, since, indeed, with Wayne prepar- ing for an advance, the Canadian governor had enough to occupy him.
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