desire to exclude the Americans from all rights in the vast regions
beyond the Alleghanies. At that time the delegates from the southern, no
less than from the northern, States, in the Continental Congress, showed
much weakness in yielding to this attitude of France and Spain. On the
motion of those from Virginia all the delegates with the exception of
those from North Carolina voted to instruct Jay, then Minister to Spain,
to surrender outright the free navigation of the Mississippi. Later,
when he was one of the Commissioners to treat for peace, they
practically repeated the blunder by instructing Jay and his colleagues
to assent to whatever France proposed. With rare wisdom and courage Jay
repudiated these instructions. The chief credit for the resulting
diplomatic triumph, almost as essential as the victory at Yorktown
itself to our national well-being, belongs to him, and by his conduct he
laid the men of the West under an obligation which they never
acknowledged during his lifetime. [Footnote: It is not the least of Mann
Butler's good points that in his "History" he does full justice to Jay.
Another Kentuckian, Mr. Thomas Marshall Green, has recently done the
same in his "Spanish Conspiracy."]

Jay and Gardoqui.

Shortly after his return to America he was made Secretary of Foreign
Affairs, and was serving as such when, in the spring of 1785, Don Diego
Gardoqui arrived in Philadelphia, bearing a commission from his Catholic
Majesty to Congress. At this time the brilliant and restless soldier
Galvez had left Louisiana and become Viceroy of Mexico, thus removing
from Louisiana the one Spaniard whose energy and military capacity would
have rendered him formidable to the Americans in the event of war. He
was succeeded in the government of the creole province by Don Estevan
Miro, already colonel of the Louisiana regiment.

Gardoqui was not an able man, although with some capacity for a certain
kind of intrigue. He was a fit representative of the Spanish court, with
its fundamental weakness and its impossible pretensions. He entirely
misunderstood the people with whom he had to deal, and whether he was or
was not himself personally honest, he based his chief hopes of success
in dealing with others upon their supposed susceptibility to the
influence of corruption and dishonorable intrigue. He and Jay could come
to no agreement, and the negotiations were finally broken off. Before
this happened, in the fall of 1786