[Footnote:
Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Floridablanca, June 29, 1789.]
This country was claimed by, and finally awarded to, the United States,
and claimed by the State of Georgia in particular. It was here that the
adventurers proposed to erect a barrier State which should be vassal to
Spain, one of the chief purposes of the settlement being to arrest the
Americans' advance. They thus deliberately offered to do all the damage
they could to their own country, if the foreign country would give them
certain advantages. The apologists for these separatist leaders often
advance the excuse--itself not a weighty one--that they at least
deserved well of their own section; but Wilkinson and his associates
proposed a plan which was not only hostile to the interests of the
American nation as a whole, but which was especially hostile to the
interests of Kentucky, Georgia, and the other frontier communities. The
men who proposed to enter into the scheme were certainly not loyal to
their country; although the adventurers were not actuated by hostile
designs against it, engaging in the adventure simply from motives of
private gain. The only palliation--there is no full excuse--for their
offence is the fact that the Union was then so loose and weak, and its
benefits so problematical, that it received the hearty and unswerving
loyalty of only the most far-seeing and broadly patriotic men; and that
many men of the highest standing and of the most undoubted probity
shared the views on which Brown and Innes acted.
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