Desire to Seize the Spanish Lands.

However, the Westerners wished more than the privilege of sending down stream the products of their woods and pastures and tilled farms.  They had already begun to cast longing eyes on the fair Spanish possessions.  Spain was still the greatest of colonial powers.  In wealth, in extent, and in population—­both native and European—­her colonies surpassed even those of England; and by far the most important of her possessions were in the New World.  For two centuries her European rivals, English, French, and Dutch, had warred against her in America, with the net result of taking from her a few islands in the West Indies.  On the American mainland her possessions were even larger than they had been in the age of the great Conquisadores; the age of Cortes, Pizarro, De Soto, and Coronado.  Yet it was evident that her grasp had grown feeble.  Every bold, lawless, ambitious leader among the frontier folk dreamed of wresting from the Spaniard some portion of his rich and ill-guarded domain.

    Relations of the Frontiersmen to the Central Government.

It was not alone the attitude of the frontiersmen towards Spain that was novel, and based upon a situation for which there was little precedent.  Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard, and with the Federal Government, likewise had to be adjusted without much chance of profiting by antecedent experience.  Many phases of these relations between the people who stayed at home, and those who wandered off to make homes, between the frontiersmen as they formed young States, and the Central Government representing the old States, were entirely new, and were ill-understood by both parties.  Truths which all citizens have now grown to accept as axiomatic were then seen clearly only by the very greatest men, and by most others were seen dimly, if at all.  What is now regarded as inevitable and proper was then held as something abnormal, unnatural, and greatly to be dreaded.  The men engaged in building new commonwealths did not, as yet, understand that they owed the Union as much as did the dwellers in the old States.  They were apt to let liberty become mere anarchy and license, to talk extravagantly about their rights while ignoring their duties, and to rail at the weakness of the Central Government while at the same time opposing with foolish violence every effort to make it stronger.  On the other hand, the people of the long-settled country found difficulty in heartily accepting the idea that the new communities, as they sprang up in the forest, were entitled to stand exactly on a level with the old, not only as regards their own rights, but as regards the right to shape the destiny of the Union itself.

    The Union still Inchoate.