226 The Winning of the West 



had they profited by Spanish aid against their own 

 people, would the Westerners have remained allied 

 or subject to the Spaniards longer than the imme 

 diate needs of the moment demanded. At the bot 

 tom the Spaniards knew this, and their encourage 

 ment of American immigration was fitful and faint 

 hearted. 



Many Americans, however, were themselves eager 

 to enter into some arrangement of the kind, whether 

 as individual settlers, or, more often, as companies 

 who wished to form little colonies. Their eagerness 

 in this matter caused much concern to many of the 

 Federalists of the Eastern States, who commented 

 with bitterness upon the light-hearted manner in 

 which these settlers forsook their native land, and 

 not only forswore their allegiance to it, but bound 

 themselves to take up arms against it in event of 

 war. These critics failed to understand that the 

 wilderness dwellers of that day, to whom the Na 

 tional Government was little more than a name, 

 and the Union but a new idea, could not be ex 

 pected to pay much heed to the imaginary line di 

 viding one waste space from another, and that, after 

 all, their patriotism was dormant, not dead. More 

 over, some of the Easterners were as blind as the 

 Spaniards themselves to the inevitable outcome of 

 such settlements as those proposed, and were also 

 alarmed at the mere natural movement of the popu 

 lation, fearing lest it might result in crippling the 

 old States, and in laying the foundation of a new 

 and possibly hostile country. They themselves had 



