If the Union could be broken up, or the jealousies between the
States and sections fanned into flame, there would be little chance of a
successful aggressive movement by the Americans of any one commonwealth.
The Spanish authorities sought to achieve these ends by every species of
bribery and corrupt diplomacy. They placed even more reliance upon the
war-like confederacies of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and
Chickasaws, thrust in between themselves and the frontier settlements;
and while protesting to the Americans with smooth treachery that they
were striving to keep the Indians at peace, they secretly incited them
to hostilities, and furnished them with arms and munitions of war. The
British held the Lake Posts by open exhibition of strength, though they
too were not above conniving at treachery and allowing their agents
covertly to urge the red tribes to resist the American advance; but the
Spaniards, by preference, trusted to fraud rather than to force.
Negotiations between Spain and the United States Concerning
the Free Navigation of the Mississippi.
In the last resort the question of the navigation of the Mississippi had
to be decided between the Governments of Spain and the United States;
and it was chiefly through the latter that the westerners could,
indirectly, but most powerfully, make their influence felt, in the long
and intricate negotiations carried on towards the close of the
Revolutionary War between the representatives of Spain, France, and the
United States, Spain had taken high ground in reference to this and
to all other western questions, and France had supported her in her
desire to exclude the Americans from all rights in the vast regions
beyond the Alleghanies.
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