It was for the failure to
give aid against these that Kentucky hated Washington, hated the East, hated
the National Government, and plotted to wrest Kentucky away from the Union,
and either make her an independent power or ally her with France or Spain.
But over the sea now France--France that had come to the rescue of the
colonies in their struggle for independence--this same beautiful, passionate
France was fighting all Europe unaided and victorious. The spectacle had
amazed the world. In no other spot had sympathy been more fiercely kindled
than along that Western border where life was always tense with martial
passion. It had passed from station to station, like a torch blazing in the
darkness and with a two-forked fire--gratitude to France, hatred of
England--hatred rankling in a people who had come out of the very heart of
the English stock as you would hew the heart out of a tree. So that when,
two years before this, Citizen Genet, the ambassador of the French republic,
had landed at Charleston, been driven through the country to New York amid
the acclamations of French sympathizers, and disregarding the
President'sproclamation of neutrality, had begun to equip privateers and
enlist crews to act against the commerce of England and Spain, it was to the
backwoodsmen of Kentucky that he sent four agents, to enlist an army,
appoint a generalissimo, and descend upon the Spanish settlements at the
mouth of the Mississippi--those same hated settlements that had refused to
the Kentuckians the right of navigation for their commerce, thus shutting
them off from the world by water, as the mountains shut them off from the
world by land.
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