the chief function of government was to provide for the griping
military needs of the community, and the one pressing duty of its chief
was to lead his followers with valor and wisdom in the struggle with the
stranger. [Footnote: My friend, Professor Alexander Johnson, of
Princeton, is inclined to regard these frontier county organizations as
reproductions of a very primitive type of government indeed, deeming
that they were formed primarily for war against outsiders, that their
military organization was the essential feature, the real reason for
their existence. I can hardly accept this view in its entirety; though
fully recognizing the extreme importance of the military side of the
little governments, it seems to me that the preservation of order, and
especially the necessity for regulating the disposition of the land,
were quite as powerful factors in impelling the settlers to act
together. It is important to keep in mind the territorial organization
of the militia companies and regiments; a county and a regiment, a
forted village and a company, were usually coextensive.]

These little communities were extremely independent in feeling, not only
of the Federal Government, but of their parent States, and even of one
another. They had won their positions by their own courage and
hardihood; very few State troops and hardly a Continental soldier had
appeared west of the Alleghanies. They had heartily sympathized with
their several mother colonies when they became the United States, and
had manfully played their part in the Revolutionary war. Moreover they
were united among themselves by ties of good-will and of services
mutually rendered. Kentucky, for instance, had been succored more than
once by troops raised among the Watauga Carolinians or the Holston
Virginians, and in her turn she had sent needed supplies to the
Cumberland. But when the strain of the war was over the separatist
spirit asserted itself very strongly. The groups of western settlements
not only looked on the Union itself very coldly, but they were also more
or less actively hostile to their parent States, and regarded even one
another as foreign communities; [Footnote: See in Gardoqui MSS. the
letters of George Rogers Clark to Gardoqui, March 15, 1788; and of John
Sevier to Gardoqui, September 12, 1788; and in the Robertson MS. the
letter of Robertson to McGillivray, August 3, 1788. It is necessary to
allude to the feeling here; but the separatist and di