228 The Winning of the West 



their faith, and rendering it easy to turn them from 

 it, and the Spaniards brought Irish priests into the 

 country and placed them among the American set 

 tlers with the avowed object of converting them. 44 

 Such toleration naturally appealed very little to men 

 who were accustomed to a liberty as complete in 

 matters ecclesiastical as in matters civil. When the 

 Spanish authorities, at Natchez, or elsewhere, pub 

 lished edicts interfering with the free exercise of 

 the Protestant religion, many of the settlers left, 45 

 while in regions remote from the Spanish centres 

 of government the edicts were quietly disobeyed or 

 ignored. 



One of the many proposed colonies ultimately re 

 sulted in the founding of a town which to this day 

 bears the name of New Madrid. This particular 

 scheme originated in the fertile brain of one Col. 

 George Morgan, a native of New Jersey, but long 

 engaged in trading on the Mississippi. He origi 

 nally organized a company to acquire lands under 

 the United States, but meeting with little response 

 to his proposition from the Continental Congress, in 

 1788 he turned to Spain. With Gardoqui, who was 

 then in New York, he was soon on a footing of in 

 timacy, as their letters show; for these include in 

 vitations to dinner, to attend commencement at 

 Princeton, to visit one another, and the like. The 

 Spaniard, a cultivated man, was pleased at being 

 thrown in with an adventurer who was a college 



44 Gayarrd, III., 181, 200, 202. 

 44 Va. State Papers, IV, 30. 



