provocateurs to corrupt the ignorant and incite the lawless, the
instigation of Indian massacres to daunt the brave, and the distribution
of gold to buy the avaricious.

As her final and supreme means of coercion, Spain refused to America the
right of navigation on the Mississippi and so deprived the Westerners of
a market for their produce. The Northern States, having no immediate use
for the Mississippi, were willing to placate Spain by acknowledging her
monopoly of the great waterway. But Virginia and North Carolina
were determined that America should not, by congressional enactment,
surrender her "natural right"; and they cited the proposed legislation
as their reason for refusing to ratify the Constitution. "The act which
abandons it [the right of navigation] is an act of separation between
the eastern and western country," Jefferson realized at last. "An act of
separation"--that point had long been very clear to the Latin sachems of
the Mississippi Valley!

Bounded as they were on one side by the precipitous mountains and on the
other by the southward flow of the Mississippi and its tributary, the
Ohio, the trappers and growers of corn in Kentucky and western Tennessee
regarded New Orleans as their logical market, as the wide waters were
their natural route. If market and route were to be closed to them,
their commercial advancement was something less than a dream.

In 1785, Don Estevan Miro, a gentleman of artful and winning address,
became Governor of Louisiana and fountainhead of the propaganda. He
wrote benign and brotherly epistles to James Robertson of the Cumberland
and to His Excellency of Franklin, suggesting that to be of service
to them was his dearest aim in life; and at the same time he kept the
southern Indians continually on the warpath. When Robertson wrote to
him of the Creek and Cherokee depredations, with a hint that the Spanish
might have some responsibility in the matter, Miro replied by offering
the Cumberlander a safe home on Spanish territory with freedom of
religion and no taxes. He disclaimed stirring up the Indians. He had,
in fact, advised Mr McGillivray, chief of the Creeks, to make peace.
He would try again what he could do with Mr. McGillivray. As to the
Cherokees, they resided in a very distant territory and he was not
acquainted with them; he might have added that he did not need to be:
his friend McGillivray was the potent personality among the Southern
tribes.

In Alexander M