also. They opposed giving the United States the necessary civil
and military power, although it was only by the possession and exercise
of such power that it would be possible to secure for the westerners
what they wished. In all human probability, the whole country round the
Great Lakes would still be British territory, and the mouth of the
Mississippi still in the hands of some European power, had the folly of
the separatists won the day and had the West been broken up into
independent States.

Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.

These shortcomings were not special or peculiar to the frontiersmen of
the Ohio valley at the close of the eighteenth century. All our
frontiersmen have betrayed a tendency towards them at times, though the
exhibitions of this tendency have grown steadily less and less decided.
In Vermont, during the years between the close of the Revolution and the
adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs was very much what it
was in Kentucky at the same time. [Footnote: _Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography_, xi., No. 2, pp. 160-165, Letters of Levi Allen,
Ethan Allen, and others, from 1787 to 1790.] In each territory there was
acute friction with a neighboring State. In each there was a small knot
of men who wished the community to keep out of the new American nation,
and to enter into some sort of alliance with a European nation, England
in one case, Spain in the other. In each there was a considerable but
fluctuating separatist party, desirous that the territory should become
an independent nation on its own account. In each case the separatist
movements failed, and the final triumph lay with the men of broadly
national ideas, so that both Kentucky and Vermont became States of one
indissoluble Union.

Final Triumph of the Union Party.

This final triumph of the Union party in these first-formed frontier
States was fraught with immeasurable good for them and for the whole
nation of which they became parts. It established a precedent for the
action of all the other States that sprang into being as the frontier
rolled westward. It decided that the interior of North America should
form part of one great Republic, and should not be parcelled out among a
crowd of English-speaking Uruguays and Ecquadors, powerful only to
damage one another, and helpless to exact respect from alien foes or to
keep order in their own households. It vastly increased the significance
of the outcome o