They looked upon
the Mississippi and felt that it was of right theirs, and that it must
belong to the vast empire which they were winning from the wilderness.
They saw the mighty river held and controlled by Spaniards, and they
were harassed and interfered with by Spanish officials, whom they both
hated and despised. To men of their mould and training there was but
one solution conceivable. They must fight the Spaniard, and drive him
from the land forever. Their purposes were quite right, but their
methods were faulty. Washington, born to a life of adventure and
backwoods conquest, had a good deal of real sympathy with these men,
for he knew them to be in the main right, and his ultimate purposes
were the same as theirs. But he had a nation in his charge to whom
peace was precious. To have the backwoodsmen of Kentucky go down the
river and harry the Spaniards out of the country, as their descendants
afterwards harried the Mexicans out of Texas, would have been a
refreshing sight, but it would have interfered sadly with the nation
which was rising on the Atlantic seaboard, and of which Kentucky was a
part. War was to be avoided, and above all a war into which we should
have been dragged as the vassal of France; so Washington intended to
wait, and he managed to make the Kentuckians wait too, a process by no
means agreeable to that enterprising people.
His own policy about the Mississippi, which has already been
described, never wavered. He meant to have the great river, for his
ideas of the empire of the future were quite as extended as those of
the pioneers, and much more definite, but his way of getting it was
to build up the Atlantic States and bind them, with their established
resources, to the settlers over the mountains.
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