Washington also saw, as we can see now very plainly, that, wrong and unpatriotic as the Kentucky attitude was, there was still an excuse for it. Those bold pioneers, to whom the country owes so much, had very substantial grievances. They knew nothing of the laws of nations, and did not yet realize that they had a country and a nationality; but they had the instincts of all great conquering races. They looked upon the Mississippi and felt that it was of right theirs, and that it must belong to the vast empire which they were winning from the wilderness. They saw the mighty river held and controlled by Spaniards, and they were harassed and interfered with by Spanish officials, whom they both hated and despised. To men of their mould and training there was but one solution conceivable. They must fight the Spaniard, and drive him from the land forever. Their purposes were quite right, but their methods were faulty. Washington, born to a life of adventure and backwoods conquest, had a good deal of real sympathy with these men, for he knew them to be in the main right, and his ultimate purposes were the same as theirs. But he had a nation in his charge to whom peace was precious. To have the backwoodsmen of Kentucky go down the river and harry the Spaniards out of the country, as their descendants afterwards harried the Mexicans out of Texas, would have been a refreshing sight, but it would have interfered sadly with the nation which was rising on the Atlantic seaboard, and of which Kentucky was a part. War was to be avoided, and above all a war into which we should have been dragged as the vassal of France; so Washington intended to wait, and he managed to make the Kentuckians wait too, a process by no means agreeable to that enterprising people. His own policy about the Mississippi, which has already been described, never wavered. He meant to have the great river, for his ideas of the empire of the future were quite as extended as those of the pioneers, and much more definite, but his way of getting it was to build up the Atlantic States and bind them, with their established resources, to the settlers over the mountains. This done, time would do the rest; and the sequel showed that he was right. A little more than a year after he came to the presidency he wrote to Lafayette: "Gradually recovering from the distresses in which the war left us, patiently advancing in our task of civil government, unentangled in the crooked politics of Europe, _wanting scarcely anything but the free navigation of the Mississippi, which we must have, and as certainly shall have, if we remain a nation_,"[1] etc. [Footnote 1: The italics are mine.]