la of heavy-laden flat-boats down the
Mississippi, and disposed of their contents at a high profit in New
Orleans.

The River Trade and the Separatist Spirit.

The power this gave Wilkinson, the way he had obtained it, and the use
he made of it, gave an impetus to the separatist party in Kentucky. He
was by no means the only man, however, who was at this time engaged in
the river trade to Louisiana; nor were his advantages over his
commercial rivals as marked as he alleged. They, too, had discovered
that the Spanish officials could be bribed to shut their eyes to
smuggling, and that citizens of Natchez could be hired to receive
property shipped thither as being theirs, so that it might be admitted
on payment of twenty-five per cent. duty. Merchants gathered quantities
of flour and bacon, but especially of tobacco, at Louisville, and thence
shipped it in flat-boats to Natchez, where it was received by their
correspondents; and keel boats sometimes made the return journey, though
the horses, cattle, and negro slaves were generally taken to Kentucky
overland. [Footnote: Draper MSS. John Williams to William Clark, New
Orleans, Feb. II, 1789; Girault to Do., July 26, 1788, from Natchez; Do.
to Do., Dec. 5, 1788; receipt of D. Brashear at Louisville, May 23,
1785.] All these traders naturally felt the Spanish control of the
navigation, and the intermittent but always possible hostility of the
Spanish officials, to be peculiarly irksome. They were, as a rule, too
shortsighted to see that the only permanent remedy for their troubles
was their own absorption into a solid and powerful Union. Therefore they
were always ready either to join a movement against Spain, or else to
join one which seemed to promise the acquisition of special privileges
from Spain.

Robertson Talks of Disunion.

The separatist feeling, and the desire to sunder the West from the East,
and join hands with Spain or Britain, were not confined to Kentucky. In
one shape or another, and with varying intensity, separatist agitations
took place in all portions of the West. In Cumberland, on the Holston,
among the western mountains of Virginia proper, and in Georgia--which
was practically a frontier community--there occurred manifestations of
the separatist spirit. A curious feature of these various agitations was
the slight extent to which a separatist movement in any one of these
localities depended upon or sympathized with a similar movement in any