St. Clair and Wayne 21 



The career of Franklin gave the clearest glimpse 

 of what might have been ; for it showed the gradual 

 breaking down of law and order, the rise of factions 

 ready to appeal to arms for success, the bitter broils 

 with neighboring States, the; reckless readiness to 

 provoke war with the Indians, unheeding their rights 

 or the woes such wars caused other frontier com- 

 munities, and finally the entire willingness of the 

 leaders to seek foreign aid when their cause was 

 declining. 



Had not the Constitution been adopted, and a 

 more perfect union been thus called into being, the 

 history of the State of Franklin would have been 

 repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies 

 to the Pacific coast ; only these little States, instead 

 of dying in the bud, would have gone through a 

 rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revo- 

 lutions, of silly and ferocious warfare against their 

 neighbors, and of degrading alliance with the for- 

 eigner. From these and a hundred other woes the 

 West no less than the East was saved by the knitting 

 together of the States into a Nation. 



This knitting process passed through its first and 

 most critical stage in the West during the period 

 intervening between the close of the war for inde- 

 pendence and the year which saw the organization 

 of the Southwest into a territory, ruled under the 

 laws, and by the agent, of the National Government. 

 During this time no step was taken toward settling 

 the question of boundary lines with our British and 

 Spanish neighbors ; that remained as it had been, the 



