Every statesman makes occasional errors; and
the leniency of judgment needed by Patrick Henry, and needed far more by
Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, and George Clinton, must be extended to
frontier leaders for whose temporary coldness to the Union there was
much greater excuse.
Characteristics of the Frontiersmen.
When we deal, not with the leading statesmen of the frontier
communities, but with the ordinary frontier folk themselves, there is
need to apply the same tests used in dealing with the rude, strong
peoples of by-gone ages. The standard by which international, and even
domestic, morality is judged, must vary for different countries under
widely different conditions, for exactly the same reasons that it must
vary for different periods of the world's history. We cannot expect the
refined virtues of a highly artificial civilization from frontiersmen
who for generations have been roughened and hardened by the same kind of
ferocious wilderness toil that once fell to the lot of their remote
barbarian ancestors.
The Kentuckian, from his clearing in the great forest, looked with bold
and greedy eyes at the Spanish possessions, much as Markman, Goth, and
Frank had once peered through their marshy woods at the Roman dominions.
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