uggestions, decided to retain their military posts along the Great
Lakes within the boundaries of the United States. To justify them in
so doing, they pointed with unanswerable truth to the fact that the
United States had not carried out the provisions of the Treaty of 1783
regarding British debts, and that Tories, contrary to the letter and
spirit of that treaty, were still proscribed by law. The State courts
felt in no way bound to enforce the treaty, nor did State legislatures
choose to carry it out. British debts remained uncollectible, and the
British therefore retained their western posts and through them plied a
lucrative trade with the Indians to the south of the Great Lakes.

In the years after the war, a steady flow of settlers entered the Ohio
valley, resuming the movement begun before the Revolution, and took up
land in Kentucky and the Northwest territory. By 1792 Kentucky {159}
was ready to be admitted as a State, and Tennessee and Ohio were
organized as territories. These settlers naturally found the Indians
opposing their advance, and the years 1783-1794 are a chronicle of
smouldering border warfare, broken by intermittent truces. During all
this time it was the firm belief of the frontiersmen that the Indian
hostility was stimulated by the British posts, and hatred of England
and the English grew into an article of faith on their part.
Ultimately, the new government under Washington undertook a decisive
campaign. At first, in 1791, General St. Clair, invading Ohio with raw
troops, was fearfully defeated, with butchery and mutilation of more
than two-thirds of his force; but in 1794 General Wayne, with a more
carefully drilled body, compelled the Indians to retreat. Yet with the
British posts still there, a full control was impossible.

The new constitution, which gave the United States ample powers of
enforcing treaties and making commercial discriminations, did not at
once produce any alteration in the existing unsatisfactory situation.
Spain remained steadily indifferent and unfriendly. France, undergoing
the earlier stages of her own revolution, was incapable of carrying out
any consistent action. The Pitt Ministry, absorbed in the game of
European politics and in internal {160} legislation, sent a Minister,
Hammond, but was content to let its commercial and frontier policies
continue. But when, in 1792, the French Revolution took a graver
character, with the overthrow of the monarchy, and