Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.
These shortcomings were not special or peculiar to the frontiersmen of
the Ohio valley at the close of the eighteenth century. All our
frontiersmen have betrayed a tendency towards them at times, though the
exhibitions of this tendency have grown steadily less and less decided.
In Vermont, during the years between the close of the Revolution and the
adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs was very much what it
was in Kentucky at the same time. [Footnote: _Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography_, xi., No. 2, pp. 160-165, Letters of Levi Allen,
Ethan Allen, and others, from 1787 to 1790.] In each territory there was
acute friction with a neighboring State. In each there was a small knot
of men who wished the community to keep out of the new American nation,
and to enter into some sort of alliance with a European nation, England
in one case, Spain in the other. In each there was a considerable but
fluctuating separatist party, desirous that the territory should become
an independent nation on its own account. In each case the separatist
movements failed, and the final triumph lay with the men of broadly
national ideas, so that both Kentucky and Vermont became States of one
indissoluble Union.
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