and the Union both owe much:  Humphrey Marshall, afterwards a Federalist senator from Kentucky, and the author of an interesting and amusing and fundamentally sound, albeit somewhat rancorous, history of his State.  This loyal counter-movement hindered and hampered the separatists greatly, and made them cautious about advocating outright disunion.  It was one of the causes which combined to render abortive both the separatist agitations, and the Spanish intrigues of the period.

    Gardoqui’s Intrigues.

While Miro was corresponding with Wilkinson and arranging for pensioning both him and Sebastian, Gardoqui was busy at New York.  His efforts at negotiation were fruitless; for his instructions positively forbade him to yield the navigation of the Mississippi, or to allow the rectification of the boundary lines as claimed by the United States; [Footnote:  Gardoqui MSS., Instructions, July 25 and October 2, 1784.] while the representatives of the latter refused to treat at all unless both of these points were conceded. [Footnote:  Do., Gardoqui’s Letters, June 19, 1786, October 28, 1786, December 5, 1787, July 25, 1788, etc.] Jay he found to be particularly intractable, and in one of his letters he expressed the hope that he would be replaced by Richard Henry Lee, whom Gardoqui considered to be in the Spanish interest.  He was much interested in the case of Vermont, [Footnote:  Do., May II, 1787.] which at that time was in doubt whether to remain an independent State, to join the Union, or even possibly to form some kind of alliance with the British; and what he saw occurring in this New England State made him for the moment hopeful about the result of the Spanish designs on Kentucky.

Gardoqui was an over-hopeful man, accustomed to that diplomacy which acts on the supposition that every one has his price.  After the manner of his kind, he was prone to ascribe absurdly evil motives to all men, and to be duped himself in consequence. [Footnote:  John Mason Brown, “Political Beginnings of Kentucky,” 138.] He never understood the people with whom he was dealing.  He was sure that they could all be reached by underhand and corrupt influences of some kind, if he could only find out where to put on the pressure.  The perfect freedom with which many loyal men talked to and before him puzzled him; and their characteristicly American habit of indulging in gloomy forebodings as to the nation’s future—­when they were not insisting that the said future would be one of unparalleled magnificence—­gave him wild hopes that it might prove possible to corrupt them.  He was confirmed in his belief by the undoubted corruption and disloyalty to their country, shown by a few of the men he met, the most important of those who were in his pay being an alleged Catholic, James White, once a North Carolina delegate and afterwards Indian agent.  Moreover others who never indulged in overt disloyalty to the Union undoubtedly consulted