because of his knowledge of the Cumberland area, as reported by Boone to Henderson, was subsequently engaged to act as the agent of the land company, fixing his station at Mansker's Lick.52

On his return to North Carolina in 1771, Boone's glowing description of Kentucky "soon excited in others the spirit of an enterprise which in point of magnitude and peril, as well as constancy and heroism displayed in its execution, has never been paralleled in the history of America "58 In 1772, the Watauga settlers secured from the Cherokee Indians, for a valuable consideration, a ten years' lease of the lands upon which they were settled. Boone, who had established friendly relations with James Robertson, communicated to Henderson the details of the leases and purchases which Robertson, Brown, and Sevier had made of the rich valley lands. After consulting with the Indians, Robertson informed Boone, acting as Henderson's confidential agent, that he believed, if the inducement were large enough, the Indians would sell. Following his own disastrous failure to effect individual colonization without attempting to secure by purchase the Indian title, in 1773, Boone in 1774 advised Henderson and his associates that the Cherokees were disposed to sell the Kentucky area.54 Having previously assured himself of the legal validity of the purchase and after personally visiting the Cherokee chiefs in their principal village to secure their consent to the sale, Henderson proceeded to reorganize the land company, first into the Louisa and then into the Transylvania Company. With the aid of his associates he carried through the treaty of Sycamore Shoals, purchased for £10,000 sterling the Indian title to the greater portion of the Kentucky area, and commissioned Boone to cut out a passage to the heart of Kentucky. Boonesborough became the focus of the great struggles for predominance on the Western frontier.55 There

52 An exhaustive study of Boone's itinerary has been made by the present writer, in order to fix the exact route which he followed. In addition to the wealth of local materials, the Draper MSS., including Draper's Life of Boone, are rich in information on the subject. Through the personal investigations of Mr. John P. Arthur, of Asheville, N. C., who went over Boone's route in North Carolina, as well as the researches of the present writer, this portion of the route has recently been marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution under the direction of Mrs. J. Lindsay Patterson, of Winston-Salem, N. C. Cf. Home and Country, April, 1914; Sky-Land, September, 1914.

53 Morehead's Address at Boonesborough (1840).

54 In a little newspaper, The Harbinger, published at Chapel Hill, N. C., in 1834, the venerable Pleasant Henderson, brother of Richard and fellow-pioneer with Boone at Boonesborough, writing from Tennessee, relates that in 1774 Richard Henderson was "induced to attempt a purchase of that country (the Kentucky area) from the Cherokee Indians through the suggestions and advice of the late Col. Daniel Boone ".

55 Cf. the writer's Life and Times of Richard Henderson; "The Beginnings of American Expansion"; and "Forerunners of the Republic: Richard Hender

was the struggle of the white man against the red man, of the colonial against the Briton. There was the struggle of the Transylvania Company, first against royal authority, and then against the authority of Virginia. But deeper than all was the struggle between the spirit of individual colonization as embodied in the pioneers, and the spirit of commercial enterprise as embodied in the Transylvania Company. The conflict between the individualistic democracy of the pioneer and the commercial proprietorship of the Transylvania Company was settled only when George Rogers Clark, with iron hand, forced upon Virginia his own selection as virtual military dictator of the West. The drastic settlement of that conflict also made possible the most spectacular and meteoric campaign in Western history-closing only when Clark and his unterrified frontiersmen grounded their arms in Kaskaskia and Vincennes.56

In his appeal to the Kentucky legislature, the octogenarian Boone says that he "may claim, without arrogance, to have been the author of the principal means which contributed to the settlement of a country on the Mississippi and its waters, which now (1812) produces the happiness of a million of his fellow-creatures; and of the exploring and acquisition of a country that will make. happy many millions in time to come". The present research compels us to discount the high-flown language of the ancient petitioner for land. Boone was the pathfinder and way-breaker-wonderful independent explorer and equally skilled executant of the designs of others.57 But to Henderson, Hart, Williams, and their associates, animated by the spirit of constructive civilization, rather than to Boone, with his unsocial and nomadic instincts, belongs the larger measure of credit for the inauguration of the militant expansionist movement of Westson and American Expansion", loc. cit. In a supplementary paper, the present writer purposes to detail, in extenso, the history of this expansionist movement from 1772 onward. All the accounts hitherto given of this momentous episode in our national history are singularly fragmentary and inaccurate. The recent discovery by the present writer of many documents not hitherto accessible to historical students clarifies the entire situation. Only now for the first time is it possible to throw into true perspective Boone's abortive effort to invade Kentucky in 1773, his relation to the Transylvania Company in the capacity of confidential agent, Henderson's prudent procedure in securing the highest legal sanction for the purchase, the details of the "Great Treaty" of Sycamore Shoals, the invasion of Kentucky in 1775, and the subsequent history, both governmental and corporate, of the Transylvania Company.

56 Henderson, "Forerunners of the Republic: George Rogers Clark and the Western Crisis", Neale's Monthly, June, 1913; James, George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771-1781 (Ill. Hist. Soc. Publications, vol. VIII.); Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era ", AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, I. 70-87, 251-269.

57 Cf. Henderson, "Forerunners of the Republic: Daniel Boone ", Neale's Monthly, February, 1913.

ern colonization. The creative causes of the Westward movement were rooted, not in romance, but in economic enterprise, not in Providence, but in political vision. It was the Transylvania Company which at its own expense successfully colonized the Kentucky area with between two and three hundred men; and with true revolutionary ardor defying the royal authority as expressed through the crown governors of the colonies of North Carolina and Virginia, exhausted all means, through appeals to the Continental Congress, to Patrick Henry, Jefferson, and the Adamses, and finally to the legislature of Virginia, in their ultimately fruitless efforts to create a fourteenth American colony. And yet, despite this failure, Henderson and his associates furnished to the world "one of the most heroic displays of that typical American spirit of comprehensive aggrandizement of which so much is heard to-day "58 It is a coincidence of historic significance that just one day after the dropping musketry at Lexington and Concord was heard round the world, Henderson and his little band reached the site of the future Boonesborough. Here the colonists reared a bulwark of enduring strength to resist the fierce incursions of bands of hostile savages during the period of the American Revolution. Unquestionably the strenuous borderers, with their roving instincts, would in any event ultimately have established impregnable strongholds in the Kentucky area. But had it not been for the Transylvania Company and Daniel Boone, no secure stronghold, to protect the whites against the savages, might have been established and fortified in 1775. In that event, the American colonies, convulsed in a titanic struggle, might well have seen Kentucky overrun by savage hordes, led by English officers, throughout the Revolution. In consequence, the American colonies. at the close of the Revolution would probably have been compelled to leave in British hands the vast and fertile regions beyond the Alleghanies.

58 Hulbert, Pilots of the Republic.

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.

DOCUMENTS

Letters relating to the Negotiations at Ghent, 1812-1814

THE history of the negotiations at Ghent is already so fully known that we are not to expect the discovery of new documents which will alter it in its essential features. Certainly it is not imagined that the papers which follow do this; yet it may be thought that, when brought together from a variety of repositories, they cast an interesting light on some aspects of the negotiation, and especially, since nearly all are private letters, upon the state of mind of the commissioners at different periods in their task.

For the first two we are indebted to Professor Frank A. Golder of the State College of Washington, who has been exploring the materials for American history in the archives of St. Petersburg, on behalf of the Department of Historical Research in the Carnegie Institution of Washington. They show the Russian chancellor, Count Romanzoff, sending offers of mediation to Great Britain, through Russia's representative in London, three days before his interview with Adams on September 21 (N. S.), 1812, in which he proposed it to the United States in terms much the same as those of the letter here printed. Romanzoff told Adams that he had already made the offer to Cathcart, British ambassador, who was to transmit it to his government, but the present letter is not mentioned.

Of the other letters, seven are derived from the Crawford Transcripts in the Library of Congress, a small but interesting series of photostat facsimiles of originals in the possession of Miss Fannie Crawford, of Columbus, Mississippi. Crawford, American minister in Paris 1813-1815, was the nearest, of all American public men of the first rank, to the commissioners at Ghent. It was natural that they should write freely to him, and, as Mr. Henry Adams has shown in his Life of Gallatin, Crawford was able to perform some substantial services to them. One of his letters is here printed, derived from the papers of Jonathan Russell in the library of Brown University. The letter of Russell to Crawford printed below is of curious interest as anticipating in spirit, and to some extent in sub1 Adams, Memoirs, II. 401-404.

2 Pp. 510-513; see also Writings of Gallatin, I. 619, 622. Copies of these same letters of Crawford and Lafayette are among the Jonathan Russell Papers in the library of Brown University.

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stance, his virulent attack on Adams, in a letter of the next year to Clay.3

Two letters, to which the editor's attention was called by Professor Ulrich B. Phillips of the University of Michigan, are from the Adams manuscripts in the custody of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Two are from the papers of James A. Bayard, possessed by his great-grandson, Richard H. Bayard, Esq., of Baltimore; and one, also of Bayard, is from the cabinet of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. A much fuller exhibit of Bayard's relation to the whole mission will be presented by the ample publication of his papers, as the next volume of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, in the forthcoming Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1913.

Cordial thanks are offered to all those possessors or custodians of manuscripts who have contributed to the present collection— Mr. Sergius Goriainov, chief of the archives of the Imperial Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Gaillard Hunt, chief of the Division of Manuscripts in the Library of Congress, Professor Harry L. Koopman, librarian of Brown University, Mr. Worthington C. Ford of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mr. Richard H. Bayard, and Dr. John W. Jordan, librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

I. COUNT ROMANZOFF TO BARON P. DE NICOLAY.1

Monsieur le Baron,

La Paix de la Russie avec l'Angleterre paroissait présenter cet immense benefice au Commerce de presque tous les peuples navigateurs, qu'elle affranchissait leur rélations de cette gêne, de cette tourmente continuelle à la quelle il étoit sans cesse livrée depuis quelques années. L'Empereur consideroit avec plaisir un resultât aussi conforme à toutes Ses pensées et qui se présentoit comme n'étant pas douteux. Il le devient cependant par la guerre qui s'allume entre l'Angleterre et l'Amérique.

Sa Majesté Impériale voit à regret que cette nouvelle episode va placer de si grandes entrâves à la prospérité Commerciale des Nations. L'amour de l'humanité et ce qu'elle doit à Ses peuples, dont le Commerce a déja assés souffert, Lui commande de faire tout ce qui dépendra d'Elle, pour écarter les maux que prépare cette guerre aux Peuples même qui n'y prendront pas de part. Sa Majesté, qui Se plait à rendre justice à la 3 The letter alluded to, dated Stockholm, October 15, 1815, was printed as a broadside for political use by the Jackson men in 1827, and is reprinted in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, XLIV. 308–317.

4 This document is classified in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg as "Londres, 1812, no. 23, Exp." Baron Nicolay was Russian chargé d'affaires at London in the absence of Count Lieven, the ambassador. The language of the letter resembles very closely that which Adams reports Romanzoff as using in an interview with him three days later, September 21. Adams, Memoirs, II. 401–403; American State Papers, Foreign Relations, III. 625.