migration. The pioneers, like the early settlers of Plymouth and the Connecticut valley, carried with them a simple political philosophy. The land was God's earth, and whoever wished might settle where he would. There were no distinctions of birth or wealth in the little clearing "edged by the primeval forest." The men formed associations to punish thieving, restrain lawlessness, and guard their settlements from becoming 'asylums for fugitives from justice and their just debts." They organized themselves into military companies, the Kentuckians offering "a respectable body of prime riflemen" to aid George Rogers Clark in his campaign of 1778. The existence of these pioneer settlements was one of the chief factors in the surrender to Congress of the Western land claims of the states and the creation of that national domain which, as we have seen, was one of the greatest sources of strength and authority to the Union.

The Western settlers naturally wanted the free use of the Mississippi. As early as 1780 they prayed Congress that "the trade on the western waters" might be opened for their relief; and John Jay, the Secretary of Congress, was soon afterward laboring in Madrid to secure this boon. But the Spanish minister Florida-Blanca told Jay that his master the king regarded the exclusion of all foreigners from the Mississippi as far more important even than the recovery of Gibraltar. Jay left Madrid in 1782 to take part in the peace negotiations at Paris, but on the arrival at Philadelphia of Gardoqui, the first Spanish minister to the United States, Jay, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs, resumed the diplomatic negotiations. The Eastern states wanted a commercial treaty with Spain which should admit their lumber, wheat, whale oil, fish, indigo, and naval stores into the Spanish ports, bringing in return much needed specie into the United States. Such a treaty would also influence France, Portugal, and the Mediterranean powers to make favorable terms for our shipping. As an offset to these advantages the right of a few thousand back countrymen to carry their hogs and tobacco to the Spanish ports on the lower Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico seemed trifling. Why

should the settlement of the West be encouraged anyway? It only drained off men needed for the industries at home and brought the new clearings into competition with the unoccupied areas in the old states, making labor dearer and land cheaper. The Southern states, with larger patriotic vision, supported the claims of the Western settlers and warned Congress that if it abandoned them to the pitiless Spanish policy of exclusion they might throw off their allegiance. Spanish agents were already busy sowing gold and discontent among the settlersand gold looked attractive to men who were reduced to paying their taxes in grain, skins, and whisky.

Jay, after endless haggling with Gardoqui, negotiated a compromise treaty in 1785, by which Spain was to make certain concessions to our Atlantic trade, but to keep the Mississippi closed to American boats for twenty-five years. The new West was in an uproar. An American trader's goods were confiscated at Natchez, and in return the Spanish stores at Vincennes were plundered. The new state of Franklin offered to raise 1500 men "to thrust the perfidious Castilian into a better conduct towards the people of the United States." A letter to Jay, purporting to come from a gentleman at the falls of the Ohio, declared that "to make us vassals to the Spaniards is a grievance not to be borne." "Twenty thousand troops," he continued, "can easily be raised west of the Alleghanies to drive the Spaniards from their settlements at the mouth of the river. If this is not countenanced in the east, we will throw off our allegiance and look elsewhere for help. Nor will we seek in vain, for even now Great Britain stands with open arms to receive us." Washington declared that the West stood upon a pivot-"the touch of a feather will turn them any way." Loyal as the men of the West were to the Union, the prospect of being condemned to a quarter of a century of economic stagnation for the benefit of the merchant princes of Boston and New York was enough to shake their allegiance; and the brutally frank assertion of Gorham of Massachusetts that it would be a good thing for the Atlantic states to have the Mississippi closed for twenty-five years drew from Madison a

stinging rebuke for selfish sectional feeling. The Jay-Gardoqui treaty failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states (nine), but the lesson of it was plain. Jefferson wrote from Paris in December, 1786, that the disposition to shut up the Mississippi gave him "serious apprehensions of the severance of the Eastern and Western parts of our Confederacy."

Although the important diplomatic controversies were with England and Spain, our foreign ministers everywhere felt their insignificance under the weak government of the Confederation. "We are the lowest and most obscure of the whole diplomatic tribe," wrote Jefferson in bitterness from Paris. France was our ally, but she opened only four of her home ports to our ships and revoked the complete freedom of trade which she had given us in the Indies during the war with England. Jefferson could make no head against the corrupt ring of taxfarmers who controlled the tobacco trade in France. The ministers of Louis XVI told him plainly that they could not recognize the American Congress as a "government." The Dutch bankers were anxious about their loans to the new republic and kept writing to Paris to be assured that repudiation and bankruptcy were not imminent. The pirates of the Barbary States seized our vessels in the Mediterranean, holding American seamen for ransom. An "ambassador" from Tripoli visited John Adams in London and demanded 30,000 guineas for each of the four Barbary powers (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli) as the price of a commercial treaty. As 120,000 guineas was half again as much as the total receipts of Congress, there was little temptation to yield to this blackmailing invitation. Jefferson wrote home urging that the United States "begin a navy and decide on a war with these pyrates,” adding that Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy their commerce. "Be assured," he says, "that the present disrespect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring us insults which must involve us in war: a coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit."

Some influential men even despaired of republican government at all. "The late turbulent scenes in Massachusetts

[Shays's Rebellion] and infamous ones in Rhode Island," wrote Madison early in 1787, "have done inexpressible injury to the republican character in that part of the United States; and a propensity towards monarchy is said to have been produced by it in some leading minds." Jay also, in a letter to Washington, expressed the fear that "if faction should long bear down law and government . . . the more sober part of the people may even think of a king." That some not only thought of a king but even made serious advances in seeking a candidate for the American throne is proved beyond a doubt by a letter discovered in the Prussian Hausarchiv at Charlottenburg (Berlin) and published in the American Historical Review for October, 1911. The letter was written by Prince Henry of Prussia, brother-in-law of Frederick the Great, to Baron Steuben, who made his home in New York after the American Revolution. It contains a respectful but firm declination to attempt to make good in the office in which George III had so recently failed.1 . Of course, these evils, foreign and domestic, were not the fault of the Articles of Confederation. They were in part the heritage of the war and in part due to social and political causes reaching far back into the colonial period. The rivalry between the debtor communities on the inland farms and the wealthy merchants and bankers of the coast regions, who lent them money at high rates of interest and bought up the best lands of the West at a few cents an acre; the reluctance in a

1 Many years later (December, 1816) James Monroe, then president-elect, in a letter to Andrew Jackson, declared that some of the leaders in 1786-1787 "entertained principles unfriendly to our system of government" and meant to make a change in it; and that they were disappointed in not getting the assent of George Washington (see Monroe, "Works," ed. Hamilton, Vol. V, p. 343).

2" In 1784 Washington traveled through the mountains to the Kanawha, and returning wrote several interesting and important letters on the subject of the Western lands. He declared that such was the rage for speculating in and forestalling lands that scarce a valuable spot within easy reach of the Ohio was left without a claimant. Men talked of 50,000 acres or even 500,000 with as much facility as a gentleman formerly did of 1000" (Edward Channing, "History of the United States," Vol. III, p. 530). Washington's own holdings of Western land, according to his will, were 41,136 acres, exclusive of his lands in the settled parts of Virginia.

time of economic depression to pay taxes to be sent to a remote treasury and spent for objects of dubious benefit; the harsh effects of the British Navigation Acts and the jealous Spanish policy of closing the Mississippi,-all would have existed even if the strongest kind of federal government had been devised in 1780. Proof of this is the fact that these evils did not disappear until long after the Constitution was adopted. But these problems revealed more clearly every year the inadequacy of the Articles to keep the Union together. By 1786 the great majority of influential men had been converted to the position which a few like Hamilton, Washington, and Madison had reached before the treaty of peace was signed; namely, that more power must be lodged with Congress if we were to vindicate our independence before the nations of the world. "To be more exposed in the eyes of the world and more contemptible than we are already," wrote Washington, "is hardly possible. . . . The Confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without a substance. . . . We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion."

The tendency of our historical writing has been to do full justice to the "anarchy and confusion" under the Articles, in order that they may serve as a foil against which the almost supernatural virtues of the Constitution shall shine with an added brilliancy. But in spite of the deserved disparagement of the Articles, several important positive contributions to nationalism were made under them and by them in the trying years of our critical period. The Union was actually held together and Union sentiment was undoubtedly stronger in 1787 than at the close of the war. Sectionalism was rebuked and even hissed on the floor of Congress. The great back country was rapidly settled by men who looked to the national government for protection and petitioned Congress for statehood. Through the voluntary surrender of their Western claims by several of the states an immense national domain was acquired, whose sale held the promise (when the Indians should be subjugated and the quarrel with Spain settled) of extinguishing the whole domestic debt. Our diplomacy, if not successful,