TENNESSEE HISTORICAL MAGAZINE: Published under the Authority of The Tennessee Historical Society, VOLUME IV. Nashville, 1918
All spelling errors are as they appear in the original
THE SPANISH "CONSPIRACY” IN TENNESSEE.
To the Editor of the TENNESSEE HISTORICAL MAGAZINE :
Please permit me a few words in reply to the article under the above caption in your number of December, 1917, just called to my attention .
While no man has the right to object to or to protest the facts of history, neither has any man the right to pervert those facts, nor unjustly to characterize them according to his own whim or fancy, and thereby to detract from the good name and fame of men, who in their day and generation served the State and its people faithfully and well, with singular disinterestedness, sacrifice and devotion .
“The dead , bụt sceptered sovereigns, who still rule our spirits from their urns. "
Let us make this matter entirely clear; no one objects to authentic records and ancient documents being brought to light and published, even though they may contain little or nothing that is new. But what every honest man must emphatically object to, and reprobate as most unjust, unfair, uncalled for and altogether reprehensible, is for any private individual to add his own disparaging characterization to those documents, especially when that characterization is wholly at variance with the record itself, and any just interpretation thereof.
“ CONSPIRACY .
"A combination of men for an evil purpose ; an agreement between two or more persons to commit some crime in concert, as treason, sedition or insurrection; an agreement for the purpose of wrongfully prejudicing another, or to injure public trade, to affect public health, to insult public justice, etc.; a plot." — Webster .
“Conspiracy. A combination of persons for an evil purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to commit in concert something reprehensible, injurious, or illegal; particularly a combination to commit treason, or excite sedition or insurrection; a plot ; concerted treason. ” — Century Dictionary .
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. " -Constitution of the United States, Article III, Section 3.
Now with these authoritative definitions before us, can it be truthfully said that the pioneers, Sevier, Robertson, Bledsoe , and Daniel Smith, were guilty of the crime of conspiracy ?
Who were these men?
Sevier was the first Governor of Tennessee. James Robertson was a General in the United States Army, commissioned by Washington while serving as first President of the United States. Bledsoe was a leading pioneer of the State, a man of distinction and importance in his day, while Daniel Smith was a United States Senator, one of the first to represent Tennessee in the Congress. As for Dr. White, he was the ancestor of the present Chief Justice of the United States .
Such men ought not to be lightly, much less unjustly and wantonly, accused of crimes, for if their reputations may be thus assailed, then no man's reputation is safe, neither that of the living nor that of the dead . These men have lain in honored graves for more than a century, and since they cannot defend themselves when thus wrongfully attacked, it is our sacred duty to defend for them, on their own accounts as well as on account of their descendants, also to protect the fair name of the State of Tennessee, that they did so much to found and defend with their arms and their blood.
A few dates will help not a little to set this matter in a clear and unmistakable light .
October 19, 1781, the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown ended the Revolutionary War. By the treaty of peace England acknowledged North Carolina, as well as each of the other original thirteen States, to be severally independent, sovereign States. They were then so loosely joined together by the Articles of Confederation of 1777-8 that no one then disputed what was expressly stated in Article II, that each State was an independent sovereign, and its inhabitants were its citizens and owed allegiance in the last analysis to it alone and acknowledging no other sovereign.
In practice the Articles of Confederation failed to give satisfaction. Under them the government of the United States was so feeble as to be little better than no government at all, and the country was rapidly drifting towards disintegration
and anarchy.
Thereupon Virginia, taking the lead, a constitutional convention was called to form a more perfect Union and frame a better constitution.
Washington presided and the Constitution of the United States was drafted .
It provided that when nine States should ratify it, then it should go into effect between the States so ratifying.
It was so ratified, and went into effect in the spring of 1789 .
But the new Constitution was not to the liking of North Carolina, nor of Rhode Island. On August 1, 1788, North Carolina rejected the Constitution, and did not recede from this stand and join the Union until November 21, 1789, some time after the new government had been organized . Rhode Island did not join until 1790.
None of the letters brought forward and quoted as proof of this so - called conspiracy were written after North Carolina joined the Union, November 21, 1789, and before that joinder the citizens of North Carolina owed no allegiance to the new United States government, therefore they were at perfect liberty to form an alliance with Spain, or even to give their allegiance to Spain, provided only, they got the consent of North Carolina; and it is plain from the face of the article now being replied to that they did everything openly and above board, and never contemplated moving one decisive step in this business without such an act first passed by North Carolina as would enable them rightfully and legally so to do, and since this is so, how can it be said that they were criminal conspirators, plotting treason? On the contrary, they were free men, proposing to exercise the right of self-determination in a perfectly just and legal way. If there were a conspiracy, then the State of North Carolina was particeps criminis when it passed an act naming the new district in Middle Tennessee Miro, after the Spanish Governor at New Orleans.
North Carolina had never shown any but the slightest interest in the welfare of these western settlers who had crossed the mountains to make homes for themselves in the wilderness. The older part of the State did not wish to stand the taxation necessary to care for and build up the newer part, and North Carolina would probably have been glad to get rid of the western settlements on any terms. Neither she, nor the United States, had ever supplied them with so much as powder and ball to defend themselves against the Indians, while the Indians were supplied by both Spain and England. As to the United States, they cared so little for these people that they offered at one time to trade away to a foreign nation for twenty - five years the right of these westerners to navigate the Mississippi River in order to further by the trade the codfish in dustry of New England. The navigation of the Mississippi was to the pioneers a vital matter, since it furnished the only means of transportation to the only possible market for their produce.
“You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life When you do take the means whereby I live. ”
Being a strong and hardy race, accustomed to rely upon self -help, finding themselves abandoned in the distant forests far to the west of the mountains, and left to shift for them selves by both the United States and North Carolina, they naturally looked about them to see what arrangements they might make for the protection of their property, their own lives and those of their wives and children. But it is nothing less than a reckless abuse of language to characterize them
as conspirators.
A deputation once called upon Lincoln with some request which he thought did not sufficiently discriminate between the names and the substance of things. The President asked, How many legs a sheep would have if you called its tail a leg. “ Five, ”was the prompt reply. "No," said Lincoln, "calling his tail a leg would not make it one." Your contributor in your number of last December owes an apology to the State of Tennessee and to its pioneers.
Thos . E. MATTHEWS.