spring of 1788, boasting of his feats of arms in the past,
bitterly complaining of the way he had been treated, and offering to
lead a large colony to settle in the Spanish dominions; for, he said, he
had become convinced that neither property nor character was safe under
a government so weak as that of the United States, and he therefore
wished to put himself at the disposal of the King of Spain. [Footnote:
Gardoqui MSS., Clark to Gardoqui, Falls of the Ohio, March 15, 1788.]
Nothing came of this proposal.

The Proposal of Wilkinson, Brown, and Innes.

Another proposal which likewise came to nothing, is noteworthy because
of the men who made it, and because of its peculiar nature. The
proposers were all Kentuckians. Among them were Wilkinson, one Benjamin
Sebastian, whom the Spaniards pensioned in the same manner they did
Wilkinson, John Brown, the Kentucky delegate in Congress, and Harry
Innes, the Attorney-General of Kentucky. All were more or less
identified both with the obscure separatist movements in that
commonwealth, and with the legitimate agitation for statehood into which
some of these movements insensibly merged. In the spring of 1789 they
proposed to Gardoqui to enter into an agreement somewhat similar to the
one he had made with Morgan. But they named as the spot where they
wished to settle the lands on the east bank of the Mississippi, in the
neighborhood of the Yazoo, and they urged as a reason for granting the
lands that they were part of the territory in dispute between Spain and
the United States, and that the new settlers would hold them under the
Spanish King, and would defend them against the Americans. [Footnote:
Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Floridablanca, June 29, 1789.]

This country was claimed by, and finally awarded to, the United States,
and claimed by the State of Georgia in particular. It was here that the
adventurers proposed to erect a barrier State which should be vassal to
Spain, one of the chief purposes of the settlement being to arrest the
Americans' advance. They thus deliberately offered to do all the damage
they could to their own country, if the foreign country would give them
certain advantages. The apologists for these separatist leaders often
advance the excuse--itself not a weighty one--that they at least
deserved well of their own section; but Wilkinson and his associates
proposed a plan which was not only hostile to the interests of the
American nation as a whole, but