[Footnote 1:  The italics are mine.]

Time and peace, sufficient for the up-building of the nation, that is the theme everywhere.  Yet he knew that a sacrifice of everything for peace was the surest road both to war and ruin.  Peace must be kept; yet war was still the last resort, and he was ready to go to war with the Spaniards, as with the Indians, if all else failed.  But he did not mean to have all else fail, nor did he mean to submit to Spanish insolence and exactions.  The grievances of the pioneers of the West were to be removed, if possible, by treaty, and if that way was impossible, then by fighting.

Carmichael, who had been minister at Madrid under the confederation, had been continued there by the new government.  But while the intrigues of Spain to detach Kentucky, and the interference and exactions of Spanish officials, went on, our negotiation for the settlement of our rights to the navigation of the Mississippi halted.  Tired of this inaction, Washington, late in 1791, united William Short, our minister to Holland, in a commission with Carmichael, to open a fresh and special negotiation as to the Mississippi, and at the same time a confidential agent was sent to Florida to seek some arrangements with the governor as to fugitive slaves, a matter of burning interest to the planters on the border.  The joint commission bore no fruit, and the troubles in the West increased.  Fostered by Genet, they came near bringing on war and detaching the western settlements from the Union, so that it was clearly necessary to take more vigorous measures.

Accordingly, in 1794, after Genet had been dismissed, Washington sent Thomas Pinckney, who for some years had been minister in London, on a special treaty-making mission to Madrid.  The first results were vexatious and unpromising enough, and Pinckney wrote at the outset that he had had two interviews with the Duke de Alcudia, but to no purpose.  It was the old game of delay, he said, with inquiries as to why we had not replied to propositions, which in fact never had been made.  Even what Pinckney wrote, unsatisfactory as it was, could not be wholly made out, for some passages were in a cipher to which the State Department had no key.  Washington wrote to Pickering, then acting as Secretary of State:  “A kind of fatality seems to have pursued this negotiation, and, in short, all our concerns with Spain, from the appointment of Mr. Carmichael, under the new government, as minister to that country, to the present day....  Enough, however, appears already to show the temper and policy of the Spanish court, and its undignified conduct as it respects themselves, and insulting as it relates to us; and I fear it will prove that the late treaty of peace with France portends nothing favorable to these United States.”  Washington’s patience had been sorely tried by the delays and shifty evasions of Spain, but he was now on the brink of success, just as he concluded that negotiation was hopeless.