and neglect with which the Virginian and Federal Governments had rewarded his really great services.  He wrote to Gardoqui in the spring of 1788, boasting of his feats of arms in the past, bitterly complaining of the way he had been treated, and offering to lead a large colony to settle in the Spanish dominions; for, he said, he had become convinced that neither property nor character was safe under a government so weak as that of the United States, and he therefore wished to put himself at the disposal of the King of Spain. [Footnote:  Gardoqui MSS., Clark to Gardoqui, Falls of the Ohio, March 15, 1788.] Nothing came of this proposal.

    The Proposal of Wilkinson, Brown, and Innes.

Another proposal which likewise came to nothing, is noteworthy because of the men who made it, and because of its peculiar nature.  The proposers were all Kentuckians.  Among them were Wilkinson, one Benjamin Sebastian, whom the Spaniards pensioned in the same manner they did Wilkinson, John Brown, the Kentucky delegate in Congress, and Harry Innes, the Attorney-General of Kentucky.  All were more or less identified both with the obscure separatist movements in that commonwealth, and with the legitimate agitation for statehood into which some of these movements insensibly merged.  In the spring of 1789 they proposed to Gardoqui to enter into an agreement somewhat similar to the one he had made with Morgan.  But they named as the spot where they wished to settle the lands on the east bank of the Mississippi, in the neighborhood of the Yazoo, and they urged as a reason for granting the lands that they were part of the territory in dispute between Spain and the United States, and that the new settlers would hold them under the Spanish King, and would defend them against the Americans. [Footnote:  Gardoqui MSS., Gardoqui to Floridablanca, June 29, 1789.]

This country was claimed by, and finally awarded to, the United States, and claimed by the State of Georgia in particular.  It was here that the adventurers proposed to erect a barrier State which should be vassal to Spain, one of the chief purposes of the settlement being to arrest the Americans’ advance.  They thus deliberately offered to do all the damage they could to their own country, if the foreign country would give them certain advantages.  The apologists for these separatist leaders often advance the excuse—­itself not a weighty one—­that they at least deserved well of their own section; but Wilkinson and his associates proposed a plan which was not only hostile to the interests of the American nation as a whole, but which was especially hostile to the interests of Kentucky, Georgia, and the other frontier communities.  The men who proposed to enter into the scheme were certainly not loyal to their country; although the adventurers were not actuated by hostile designs against it, engaging in the adventure simply from motives of private gain.  The only palliation—­there is no full excuse—­for their offence is the fact that the Union was then so loose and weak, and its benefits so problematical, that it received the hearty and unswerving loyalty of only the most far-seeing and broadly patriotic men; and that many men of the highest standing and of the most undoubted probity shared the views on which Brown and Innes acted.