tion, organized a
government, and appealed to Congress for recognition as a State of the
Confederation. For three years the State of Franklin, as it was
officially christened, under the able leadership of Governor John
Sovier, refused to recognize the authority of North Carolina, even to
the point of resisting the militia by arms. But Congress turned a deaf
ear to the petitions of the insurgents; and in the year 1788, diplomacy
succeeding where coercion had failed, the people of Franklin returned to
their first allegiance.

Much the same centrifugal forces were at work in northwestern Virginia
and western Pennsylvania, a region which felt its isolation keenly.
"Separated by a vast, extensive and almost impassible Tract of
Mountains, by Nature itself formed and pointed out as a Boundary between
this Country and those below it," the settlers of this trans-Alleghany
region besought Congress to recognize them as a "sister colony and
fourteenth province of the American Confederacy."

More menacing to the integrity of Virginia was a movement for
independent statehood among the people of Kentucky. Rivers were the
highways of their commerce and the current of all bore their flatboats
away from the parent State. New Orleans was their inevitable _entrepot_.
The forces of nature seemed to conspire to throw these western
settlements into the hands of Spain. Washington was deeply impressed by
the necessity of connecting the headwaters of the James and the Potomac
with the tributaries of the Ohio, if the trade and allegiance of the
people of Kentucky were to be secured to Virginia and to the Union. "The
western States," he wrote to Governor Harrison of Virginia, "stand as it
were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way." The
situation in Kentucky became more acute as intimations reached the
people that John Jay was proposing to renounce the free navigation of
the Mississippi.

In the summer of 1785, Don Diego de Gardoqui, the first accredited
Minister from Spain, arrived in the United States to settle all
outstanding differences between the two countries. Congress appointed
John Jay as its diplomatic agent and instructed him to hold insistently
to the thirty-first parallel as the southern boundary of the States and
to the free navigation of the Mississippi. The prospect of agreement was
very slight. The American claims were based solely on the Treaty of 1783
which the King of Spain was determined not to recogn