and the
rapids at Louisville. On the ninth of December of the same year, he
reports one hundred and forty-six boats, three thousand one hundred and
ninety-six souls, one thousand three hundred and eighty-one horses, one
hundred and sixty-five wagons, one hundred and seventy-one cattle, and
two hundred and forty-five sheep as on the way to Kentucky, between the
first of June and the date of his communication. In 1790, the first
census of the United States showed a population of seventy-three
thousand six hundred and seventy-seven. On June 1st, 1792, Kentucky
became the fifteenth commonwealth in the federal union; the first of the
great states west of the Alleghenies that were to add so much wealth,
resource and vital strength to the government of the United States.

CHAPTER X

THE BRITISH POLICIES

_--The British reluctant to surrender the control of the
Northwest--their tampering with the Indian tribes._

The seventh article of the definitive treaty of peace between the United
States and Great Britain in 1783, provided that "His Britannic Majesty,"
should, with all convenient speed, "withdraw all his armies, garrisons,
and fleets from the said United States, and from every port, place and
harbour within the same," but when demand was made upon General
Frederick Haldimand, the British governor of Canada, for the important
posts of Niagara, Oswego, Michillimacinac and Detroit, he refused to
surrender them up, alleging that he had no explicit orders so to do, and
that until he had received such commands, he conceived it to be his duty
as a soldier to take no step in that direction. This action of Haldimand
was cool and deliberate and received the full and entire approbation of
the British cabinet. Tories, and apologists for Great Britain, have
written much about a justification for this action, but there is no real
justification. Lord Carmarthen, the British secretary of state,
afterwards said to John Adams that English creditors had met with
unlawful impediments in the collection of their debts, but the real
reason why England violated her treaty he did not state. She retained
the posts to control the tribes. She looked with covetous eye on the
lucrative fur-trade of the northwest territory upon which the commerce
of Canada was in great measure dependent, and sooner than resist the
entreaties of her merchants and traders, she was willing to embroil a
people of her own race and blood, in a series of long and m