This advice was based
on Franklin's usual principle of merely mercantile morality; but he was
writing to a people who stood in sore need of just the teaching he could
furnish and who would have done well to heed it. They were slow to learn
that while sober, debt-paying thrift, love of order, and industry, are
perhaps not the loftiest virtues and are certainly not in themselves all
sufficient, they yet form an indispensable foundation, the lack of which
is but ill supplied by other qualities even of a very noble kind.
Sevier, also in the year 1787, carried on a long correspondence with
Evan Shelby, whose adherence to the state of Franklin he much desired,
as the stout old fellow was a power not only among the frontiersmen but
with the Virginian and North Carolinian authorities likewise. Sevier
persuaded the Legislature to offer Shelby the position of chief
magistrate of Franklin, and pressed him to accept it, and throw in his
lot with the Westerners, instead of trying to serve men at a distance.
Shelby refused; but Sevier was bent upon being pleasant, and thanked
Shelby for at least being neutral, even though not actively friendly. In
another letter, however, when he had begun to suspect Shelby of positive
hostility, he warned him that no unfriendly interference would be
tolerated.
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