148 The Winning of the West 



States would fill their continental battalions we 

 should be able to oppose a regular and permanent 

 force to the enemy in every quarter. If they will 

 not, they must certainly take measures to defend 

 themselves by their militia, however expensive and 

 ruinous the system." 57 It was impossible to state 

 with more straightforward clearness the fact that 

 Kentucky owed the unprotected condition in which 

 she was left, to the divided or States-rights system 

 of government that then existed ; and that she would 

 have had ample protection and incidentally greater 

 liberty had the central authority been stronger. 



At last Clark was empowered to raise the men he 

 wished, and he passed and repassed from Fort Pitt 

 to the Falls of the Ohio and thence to the Illinois 

 in the vain effort to get troops. The inertness and 

 shortsightedness of the frontiersmen, above all the 

 exhaustion of the States, and their timid selfishness 

 and inability to enforce their commands, baffled all 

 of Clark's efforts. In his letters to Washington he 

 bitterly laments his enforced dependence upon "per- 



57 State Department MSS., No. 147, Vol. V. Reports of 

 Board of War. Letter of Washington, June 8, 1781. It is 

 impossible to study any part of the Revolutionary struggle 

 without coming to the conclusion that Washington would 

 have ended it in half the time it actually lasted, had the 

 jangling States and their governments, as well as the Conti- 

 nental Congress, backed him up half as effectively as the 

 Confederate people and government backed up Lee, or as 

 the Northerners and the Washington administration backed 

 up McClellan still more as they backed up Grant. The 

 whole of our Revolutionary history is a running commentary 

 on the anarchic weakness of disunion, and the utter lack of 

 liberty that follows in its train. 



