Louisiana and Aaron Burr 207 



themselves under this yoke would have made no 

 more difference to them than it afterward made 

 to the Texans. So it was with Aaron Burr. His 

 conspiracy was merely one, and by no means the 

 most dangerous, of the various conspiracies in which 

 men like Wilkinson, Sebastian, and many of the 

 members of the early Democratic societies in Ken- 

 tucky, bore a part. It was rendered possible only 

 by the temper of the people and by the peculiar cir- 

 cumstances which also rendered the earlier con- 

 spiracies possible; and it came to naught for the 

 same reasons that they came to naught, and was 

 even more hopeless, because it was undertaken later, 

 when the conditions were less favorable. 



The movement deliberately entered into by many 

 of the Kentuckians in the years 1793 and 1794, to 

 conquer Louisiana on behalf of France, must be 

 treated in this way. The leader in this movement 

 was George Rogers Clark. His chance of success 

 arose from the fact that there were on the frontier 

 many men of restless, adventurous, warlike type, 

 who felt a spirit of unruly defiance toward the 

 home government, and who greedily eyed the rich 

 Spanish lands. Whether they got the lands by con- 

 quest or by colonization, and whether they warred 

 under one flag or another, was to them a matter of 

 little moment. Clark's career is of itself sufficient 

 to prove the truth of this. He had already been 

 at the head of a movement to make war against 

 the Spaniards, in defiance of the Central Govern- 

 ment, on behalf of the Western settlements. On 



