ered 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 constituent 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 Washington, 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 Washington 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