[Footnote: Green, p. 78.]
Experience of a Cumberland Trader.
The rougher spirits, all along the border of course sympathized with
Clark. In this same year 1786 the goods and boats of a trader from the
Cumberland district were seized and confiscated by the Spanish
commandant at Natchez. [Footnote: State Dept. MSS., No. 124, vol. iii.
Papers transmitted by Blount, Hawkins, and Ashe, March 29, 1787,
including deposition of Thomas Amis, Nov 13, 1786. Letter from
Fayettsville, Dec. 29, 1786, etc.] At first the Cumberland
Indian-fighters determined to retaliate in kind, at no matter what cost;
but the wiser among their leaders finally "persuaded them not to imitate
their friends of Kentucky, and to wait patiently until some advice could
be received from Congress." One of these wise leaders, a representative
from the Cumberland district in the North Carolina legislature, in
writing to the North Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress,
after dwelling on the necessity of acquiring the right to the navigation
of the Mississippi, added with sound common-sense: "You may depend on
our exertions to keep all things quiet, and we agree entirely with you
that if our people are once let loose there will be no stopping them,
and that acts of retaliation poison the mind and give a licentiousness
to manners that can with great difficulty be restrained.
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