THE GEORGE ROGERS CLARK EXPEDITION
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completely successful, and Helm re- turned in a few days with the volun- teers as prisoners of war ; the consign- ment of gfoods was divided among Clark's command, making his men, as one of them expressed it, "almost rich." Most of the prisoners were paroled, but Hamilton and twenty-nine others were sent under escort to Virginia. Hamilton was treated with much sever- ity by his captors, who rightly charged him with a large share of the guilt in the atrocities committed on the frontier for three years previous. ClarK now received some small re-enforcements and was able to establish permanent garrisons at the posts which he had taken. In the following Spnng, he built a fort on the east bank of th<i Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio, which he called Fort Jefferson, in honor of the friend who, next to Patrick Henry, had done most in as- sisting him in starting out on his expe- dition. The conquest was now complete and Great Britain made no further ef- fort to retake the country.
The immediate result of the expedi- tion was to bring great relief to the settlers in the harried frontier. It also assured the permanence of the Ken- tucky settlements. But the ultynate results of the expedition were even more important. When the time came for the negotiation of the treaty of peace at the close of the Revolutionary War. Spain had become our ally as well as France. The Spanish statesmen of that day, with commendable foresight, saw in the young American Republic a prospective rival, destined to curtail if it did not destroy, the sovereignty of Spain in the western hemisphere. They strongly advocated the Allegheny Mountains as the western boundary of the new nation. France concurred in this suggestion, with the qualification that it favored conceding the Ameri- cans some country about the head- waters of the Tennessee and the re- gion lying between the Cumberland and the Ohio. This included most of the trans-Allegheny country in which American settlers were to be found in any considerable numbers.
Fortunately, Lord Shelbourne. the British minister in power at that time,
believed that it was to the interest of Great Britain that the United States should not be circumscribed within these narrow bounds. He foresaw that the United States was more likely to be a friendly power in the long run than either France or Spain, and if the Uni- ted States did not possess the trans- Allegheny country, France or Spain certainly would. The American peace commissioners, however, were much hampered by instructions from Con- gress to be guided . entirely by the wishes of France in their negotiations for peace. Their instructions in this regard were the result of generous ap- preciation on the part of Congress of the help of France during the war, but the action was exceedingly injudicious. Franklin was disposed to obey these in- structions, but Adams and Jay, the other two members of the commission, boldly disregarded them, and it was principally due to Jay's far-seeing statesmanship that we owe the Ameri- can suggestion that the parties should treat on the basis of each side re- taining the territory which it then occupied. This left us in control of the country between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, for in all that region at the close of the Revolutionary War, Great Britain had posts only on the shores of the Lakes. The suggestion was acceded to by Great Britain at a conference at which the representatives of France and Spain were not present, and much to the displeasure of our allies the Mississippi was named in the treaty as our western boundary.
It is as nearly certain as any matter of historical speculation can be that, but for the heroism of Clark's fron- tiersmen and but for his genius as a commander, that great country lying between the Alleghenies and the Miss- issippi north of the Ohio, which now contains a quarter of our population and wealth, must have been lost to the American people at the close of the Revolution.
Had we lost the trans-Allegheny country in the making of the treaty of T783, it is difficult to see how we could ever have secured the country stretch- ing from the Mississippi to the Pacific, our present land o^i^i|:pjjijs<^oOgle
