I must beg your Excellency's permission to take this early opportunity of thanking you for the honor you did me in writing by Mr. White.
I still hope that your Government, and these Settlements, are destined to be mutually friendly and usefull, the people here are impressed with the necessity of it.
We have just held a Convention; which has agreed that our members shall insist on being Seperated from North Carolina.
Unprotected, we are to be obedient to the new Congress of the United States; but we cannot but wish for a more interesting Connection.
The United States afford us no protection. The district of Miró is daily plundered and the inhabitants murdered by the Creeks, and Cherokees, unprovoked.
For my own part, I conceive highly of the advantages of your Government. [217]
A serious obstacle to the execution of the plans of Robertson and the other leaders of the Cumberland settlements was the prompt action of North Carolina. In actual conformity with the wishes of the Western people, as set forth in the petition of Robertson and Hayes, their representatives, made two years earlier, [218] the legislature of North Carolina in December passed the second act of cession, by which the Western territory of North Carolina was ceded to the United States. Instead of securing an act of separation from North Carolina as the preparatory step to forming what Robertson calls "a more interesting connection" with Spain, Robertson and his associates now found themselves and the transmontane region which they represented flung bodily into the arms of the United States. Despite the unequivocal offer of the calculating and desperate Sevier to "deliver" Franklin to Spain, and the ingenious efforts of Robertson and his associates to place the Cumberland region under the domination of Spain, the Spanish court by its temporizing policy of evasion and indecision definitely relinquished the ready opportunities thereby afforded, of utilizing the powerful separatist tendencies of Tennessee for the purpose of adding the empire upon the Western waters to the Spanish domain in America.
The year 1790 marks the end of an era—the heroic age of the pioneers of the Old Southwest. Following the acceptance of North Carolina's deed of cession of her Western lands to the Union (April 2, 1790) the Southwest Territory was erected on May 26th; and William Blount, a North Carolina gentleman of eminence and distinction, was appointed on June 8th to the post of governor of the territory. Two years later (June 1, 1792) Kentucky was admitted into the Union.
It is a remarkable and inspiring circumstance, in testimony of the martial instincts and unwavering loyalty of the transmontane people, that the two men to whom the Western country in great measure owed its preservation, the inciting and flaming spirits of the King's Mountain campaign, were the unopposed first choice of the people as leaders in the trying experiment of Statehood—John Sevier of Tennessee and Isaac Shelby of Kentucky. Had Franklin possessed the patient will of Kentucky, she might well have preceded that region into the Union. It was not, however, until June 1, 1796, that Tennessee, after a romantic and arduous struggle, finally passed through the wide-flung portals into the domain of national statehood.
[LIST OF NOTES]
[1] Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, a stirring recital with chief stress thrown upon the militant characteristics of the frontiersmen, is open to grave criticism because of failure to give adequate account of social and economic tendencies, the development of democracy, and the evolution of government under the pressure of frontier conditions.
[2] Johnson MSS., xii, No. 127.
[3] Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797, 217.
[4] Turner: "Significance of the Frontier in American History," American Historical Association Report, 1893.