They were discussing the letters that had passed between the President and
his Excellency for the suppression of a revolution in Kentucky. During this
spring of 1795 the news had reached Kentucky that Jay had at last concluded
a treaty with England. The ratification of this was to be followed by the
surrender of those terrible Northwestern posts that for twenty years had
been the source of destruction and despair to the single-handed, maddened,
or massacred Kentuckians. Behind those forts had rested the inexhaustible
power of the Indian confederacies, of Canada, of England. Out of them,
summer after summer, armies that knew no pity had swarmed down upon the
doggedly advancing line of the Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen. Against them,
sometimes unaided, sometimes with the aid of Virginia or of the National
Government, the pioneers hurled their frantic retaliating armies: Clarke and
Boone and Kenton often and often; Harmar followed by St. Clair; St. Clair
followed by Wayne. It was for the old failure to give aid against these that
Kentucky had hated Virginia and resolved to tear herself loose from the
mother State and either perish or triumph alone.
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