The West had grown with astonishing rapidity during the seven years following the close of the Revolutionary War.  In 1790 there were in Kentucky nearly seventy-four thousand, and in the Southwest Territory nearly thirty-six thousand souls.  In the Northwest Territory the period of rapid growth Years had not yet begun, and the old French inhabitants still formed the majority of the population.

The changes during these seven years had been vital.  In the West, as elsewhere through the Union, the years succeeding the triumphant close of the Revolution were those which determined whether the victory was or was not worth winning.  To throw off the yoke of the stranger was useless and worse than useless if we showed ourselves unable to turn to good account the freedom we had gained.  Unless we could build up a great nation, and unless we possessed the power and self-restraint to frame an orderly and stable government, and to live under its laws when framed, the long years of warfare against the armies of the king were wasted and went for naught.

At the close of the Revolution the West was seething with sedition.  There were three tasks before the Westerners; all three had to be accomplished, under pain of utter failure.  It was their duty to invade and tame the shaggy wilderness; to drive back the Indians and their European allies; and to erect free governments which should form parts of the indissoluble Union.  If the spirit of sedition, of lawlessness, and of wild individualism and separatism had conquered, then our history would merely have anticipated the dismal tale of the Spanish-American republics.

Viewed from this standpoint the history of the West during these eventful years has a special and peculiar interest.  The inflow of the teeming throng of settlers was the most striking feature; but it was no more important than the half-seen struggle in which the Union party finally triumphed over the restless strivers for disunion.  The extent and reality of the danger are shown by the numerous separatist movements.  The intrigues in which so many of the leaders engaged with Spain, for the purpose of setting up barrier states, in some degree feudatory to the Spaniards; the movement in Kentucky for violent separation from Virginia, and the more secret movement for separation from the United States; the turbulent career of the commonwealth of Franklin; the attitude of isolation of interest from all their neighbors assumed by the Cumberland settlers:—­all these various movements and attitudes were significant of the looseness of the Federal tie, and were ominous of the anarchic violence, weakness, and misrule which would have followed the breaking of that tie.