A Wilderness So Immense Read Online Free Page B

worried about Spain’s claws than her infirmities. Spain’s weakening grip on her colonies in North America excited international intrigue and frontier plots in the trans-Appalachian west, as well as commercial rivalries among the thirteen loosely confederated states whose gentle coalition he represented at the court of Versailles. Jefferson was confident that the United States, not Spain, was destined to be “the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled,” and to that end he advised Archibald Stuart that American frontiersmen
    should take care to not… press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them peice by peice. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have. This is all we are as yet ready to receive.
    Jefferson feared that Spain’s weakness in the Mississippi Valley encouraged British expansion from Canada and tempted the French to reenter the continent from the Caribbean—and these fears had substance. The British still held forts around the Great Lakes that they had agreed to surrender after the American Revolution, and British fur traders and merchants plied the rivers of North America with little regard for boundary lines in the forest. And there were Frenchmen who dreamt of regaining Louisiana, and who kept that dream alive in confidential memoranda to Louis XVI and his ministers.
    As was often the case for the savvy Virginian, while he did not want American frontiersmen pressing “too soon on the Spaniards,” he did not want foreign adventurers pressing on them at all. The United States in 1786 lacked the political, financial, or military capacity for decisive action in the vast interior of the huge continent, and the news from Stuart and others made it clear that the Atlantic states had troubles brewing in the backcountry. Anger was building in western Massachusetts. Hard times, high taxes, and foreclosures for debt would soon ignite an agrarian revolt led by Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolution. If Shays’s Rebellion put frontier farmers and coastal merchants at each other’s throats over east-west differences within a single New England state, what might happen further south where the Appalachian Mountains posed a more formidable obstacle to trade and communication? Wherethe navigable rivers drained west down the Ohio to the Mississippi? Sectional self-interest, compounded by the ever-increasing distances that separated frontier communities from their eastern capitals, posed a serious threat to the union. “The navigation of the Mississippi we must have,” Jefferson said. The survival, independence, and character of the nation depended on it. As Major Isaac B. Dunn, a Revolutionary War veteran from Pennsylvania, wrote from his new mercantile office in New Orleans, “when you have seen the situation of the people, added to the prodegious emigrations pushing to the western side of the Ohio from the eastern part of this continent—you will conclude … that nature Designed New Orleans to be the Mart of this country—and this country to be the richest in the World—the Period cannot be very distant.” 24
    Jefferson had read Stuart’s report that “a separation Betwixt the eastern and western parts of this state will be Proposed in this Assembly” with neither alarm nor surprise. Like most Virginians, he favored eventual statehood for Kentucky, whose residents had carried the Old Dominion’s economy and culture far inland from the seat of government at Richmond. The greater danger arose from the divergent “Interests of that country and the Atlantick States,” which were, at the moment, working against Kentucky statehood. The danger was not statehood
within
the union, but the specter of western independence and disunion. Stuart knew there was talk in the west of establishing a separate republic “Independent of the