separate government in the West.

The Government Authorities Disapprove.

From the close of the revolution the Virginian government had been
worried by the separatist movements in Kentucky. In 1784 two
"stirrers-up of sedition" had been fined and imprisoned, and an adherent
of the Virginian government, writing from Kentucky, mentioned that one
of the worst effects of the Indian inroads was to confine the settlers
to the stations, which were hot-beds of sedition and discord, besides
excuses for indolence and rags. [Footnote: Va. State Papers, III., pp.
585, 589.] The people who distrusted the frontiersmen complained that
among them were many knaves and outlaws from every State in the Union,
who flew to the frontier as to a refuge; while even those who did not
share this distrust admitted that the fact that the people in Kentucky
came from many different States helped to make them discontented with
Virginia. [Footnote: Draper MSS. Clark Papers, Walter Darrell to William
Fleming, April 14, 1783.]

Georgia and the Frontiersmen

In Georgia the conditions were much as they were on the Ohio. Georgia
was a frontier State, with the ambitions and the lawlessness of the
frontier; and the backwoodsmen felt towards her as they did towards no
other member of the old Thirteen. Soon after Clark established his
garrison in Vincennes, various inflammatory letters were circulated in
the western country, calling for action against both the Central
Government and the Spaniards, and appealing for sympathy and aid both to
the Georgians and to Sevier's insurrectionary State of Franklin. Among
others, a Kentuckian wrote from Louisville to Georgia, bitterly
complaining about the failure of the United States to open the
Mississippi; denouncing the Federal Government in extravagant language,
and threatening hostilities against the Spaniards, and a revolt against
the Continental Congress. [Footnote: _Do_., Letter of Thomas Green to
the Governor of Georgia, December 23, 1786.] This letter was
intercepted, and, of course, increased still more the suspicion felt
about Clark's motives, for though Clark denied that he had actually seen
the letter, he was certainly cognizant of its purport, and approved the
movement which lay behind it. [Footnote: Green's "Spanish Conspiracy,"
p. 74.] One of his fellow Kentuckians, writing about him at this time,
remarks: "Clark is playing hell...eternally drunk and yet full of
design. I told him he would be