III., 181, 200, 202.] Such toleration naturally appealed very little to men who were accustomed to a liberty as complete in matters ecclesiastical as in matters civil.  When the Spanish authorities, at Natchez, or elsewhere, published edicts interfering with the free exercise of the Protestant religion, many of the settlers left, [Footnote:  Va.  State Papers, IV., 30.] while in regions remote from the Spanish centres of government the edicts were quietly disobeyed or ignored.

    Founding of New Madrid.

One of the many proposed colonies ultimately resulted in the founding of a town which to this day bears the name of New Madrid.  This particular scheme originated in the fertile brain of one Col.  George Morgan, a native of New Jersey, but long engaged in trading on the Mississippi.  He originally organized a company to acquire lands under the United States, but meeting with little response to his proposition from the Continental Congress, in 1788 he turned to Spain.  With Gardoqui, who was then in New York, he was soon on a footing of intimacy, as their letters show; for these include invitations to dinner, to attend commencement at Princeton, to visit one another, and the like.  The Spainard, a cultivated man, was pleased at being thrown in with an adventurer who was a college graduate and a gentleman; for many of the would-be colonizers were needy ne’er-do-wells, who were anxious either to borrow money, or else to secure a promise of freedom from arrest for debt when they should move to the new country.  Morgan’s plans were on a magnificent scale.  He wished a tract of land as large as a principality on the west bank of the Mississippi.  This he proposed to people with tens of thousands of settlers, whom he should govern under the commission of the King of Spain.  Gardoqui entered into the plan with enthusiasm, but obstacles and delays of all kinds were encountered, and the dwindling outcome was the emigration of a few families of frontiersmen, and the founding of a squalid hamlet named after the Iberian capital. [Footnote:  Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Morgan, Sept. 2, 1788.  Morgan to Gardoqui, Aug. 30, 1788.  Letters of Sept. 9, 1788, Sept. 12, 1788; Gardoqui to Miro, Oct. 4, 1788, to Floridablanca, June 28, 1789.  Letter to Gardoqui, Jan. 22, 1788.]

    Clark’s Proposal.

Another adventurer who at this time proposed to found a colony in Spanish territory was no less a person than George Rogers Clark.  Clark had indulged in something very like piracy at the expense of Spanish subjects but eighteen months previously.  He was ready at any time to lead the Westerners to the conquest of Louisiana; and a few years later he did his best to organize a freebooting expedition against New Orleans in the name of the French Revolutionary Government.  But he was quite willing to do his fighting on behalf of Spain, instead of against her; for by this time he was savage with anger and chagrin at the indifference