This particular
scheme originated in the fertile brain of one Col. George Morgan, a
native of New Jersey, but long engaged in trading on the Mississippi. He
originally organized a company to acquire lands under the United States,
but meeting with little response to his proposition from the Continental
Congress, in 1788 he turned to Spain. With Gardoqui, who was then in New
York, he was soon on a footing of intimacy, as their letters show; for
these include invitations to dinner, to attend commencement at
Princeton, to visit one another, and the like. The Spainard, a
cultivated man, was pleased at being thrown in with an adventurer who
was a college graduate and a gentleman; for many of the would-be
colonizers were needy ne'er-do-wells, who were anxious either to borrow
money, or else to secure a promise of freedom from arrest for debt when
they should move to the new country. Morgan's plans were on a
magnificent scale. He wished a tract of land as large as a principality
on the west bank of the Mississippi. This he proposed to people with
tens of thousands of settlers, whom he should govern under the
commission of the King of Spain. Gardoqui entered into the plan with
enthusiasm, but obstacles and delays of all kinds were encountered, and
the dwindling outcome was the emigration of a few families of
frontiersmen, and the founding of a squalid hamlet named after the
Iberian capital.
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