At the time when Kentucky was struggling for statehood, this feeling, though it had been given its death-blow by the success of the Revolution, still lingered here and there on the Atlantic coast.  It was manifest in the attitude of many prominent people—­the leaders in their communities—­towards the new commonwealths growing up beyond the Alleghanies.  Had this intolerant sectional feeling ever prevailed and been adopted as the policy of the Atlantic States, the West would have revolted, and would have been right in revolting.  But the manifestations of this sectionalism proved abortive; the broad patriotism of leaders like Washington prevailed.  In the actual event the East did full and free justice to the West.  In consequence we are now one nation.

    Separatist and Disunion Feeling in the West.

While many of the people on the eastern seaboard thus took an indefensible position in reference to the trans-Alleghany settlements, in the period immediately succeeding the Revolution, there were large bodies of the population of these same settlements, including very many of their popular leaders, whose own attitude towards the Union was, if anything, even more blameworthy.  They were clamorous about their rights, and were not unready to use veiled threats of disunion when they deemed these rights infringed; but they showed little appreciation of their own duties to the Union.  For certain of the positions which they assumed no excuse can be offered.  They harped continually on the feebleness of the Federal authorities, and the inability of these authorities to do them justice or offer them adequate protection against the Indian and the Spaniard; yet they bitterly opposed the adoption of the very Constitution which provided a strong and stable Federal Government, and turned the weak confederacy, despised at home and abroad, into one of the great nations of the earth.  They showed little self-control, little willingness to wait with patience until it was possible to remedy any of the real or fancied wrongs of which they complained.  They made no allowance for the difficulties so plentifully strewn in the path of the Federal authorities.  They clamored for prompt and effective action, and yet clamored just as loudly against the men who sought to create a national executive with power to take this prompt and effective action.  They demanded that the United States wrest from the British the Lake Posts, and from the Spaniards the navigation of the Mississippi.  Yet they seemed incapable of understanding that if they separated from the Union they would thereby forfeit all chance of achieving the very purposes they had in view, because they would then certainly be at the mercy of Britain, and probably, at least for some time, at the mercy of Spain also.  They opposed giving the United States the necessary civil and military power, although it was only by the possession and exercise of such power that it would be possible to secure for the westerners what they wished.  In all human probability, the whole country round the Great Lakes would still be British territory, and the mouth of the Mississippi still in the hands of some European power, had the folly of the separatists won the day and had the West been broken up into independent States.