mselves to the necessary results of their policy. They often
choose their language with care, so that it may not commit them beyond
all hope of explanation or retraction. Brown, Innes, and the other
separatist leaders in Kentucky were not actuated by the motives of
personal corruption which influenced Wilkinson, Sebastian, and White to
conspire with Gardoqui and Miro for the break-up of the Union. Their
position, as far as the mere separatist feeling itself was concerned,
was not essentially different from that of George Clinton in New York or
Sumter in South Carolina. Of course, however, their connection with a
foreign power unpleasantly tainted their course, exactly as a similar
connection, with Great Britain instead of with Spain, tainted the
similar course of action Ethan Allen was pursuing at this very time in
Vermont. [Footnote: _Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography_,
XI., No. 2, p. 165. Ethan Alien's letter to Lord Dorchester.] In after
years they and their apologists endeavored to explain away their deeds
and words, and tried to show that they were not disunionists; precisely
as the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 and of
the resolutions of the Hartford Convention in 1814 tried in later years
to show that these also were not disunion movements. The effort is as
vain in one case as in the other. Brown's letter shows that he and the
party with which he was identified were ready to bring about Kentucky's
separation from the Union, if it could safely be done; the prospect of a
commercial alliance with Spain being one of their chief objects, and
affording one of their chief arguments.

Failure of the Separationist Movements.

The publication of Brown's letter and the boldness of the separatist
party spurred to renewed effort the Union men, one of whom, Col. Thomas
Marshall, an uncle of Humphrey Marshall and father of the great
Chief-Justice, sent a full account of the situation to Washington. The
more timid and wavering among the disunionists drew back; and the
agitation was dropped when the new National Government began to show
that it was thoroughly able to keep order at home, and enforce respect
abroad. [Footnote: Letter of Col. T. Marshall, September 11, 1790.]

These separatist movements were general in the West, on the Holston and
Cumberland, as well as on the Ohio, during the troubled years
immediately succeeding the Revolution; and they were furthered by the
intrigues