The Jeffersonians eagerly seized on the reports of a speech which Carleton made to the Miamis, who lived just south of Detroit, and used it to the utmost as a means of stirring up anti-British feeling. Carleton had said: 'You are witnesses that we have acted in the most peaceable manner and borne the language and conduct of the United States with patience. But I believe our patience is almost exhausted.' Applied to the vexed questions of the Western Posts, of the lawless ways of the exterminating American pioneers, and of the infinitely worse jobbing politicians behind them, this language was mildness itself. But in view of the high statesmanship of Washington and his government it was injudicious. All the same, Dundas, more especially because he was a cabinet minister, was even more injudicious when he adopted a tone of reproof towards Carleton, whose great services, past and present, entitled him to unusual respect and confidence. The negotiations for Jay's Treaty were then in progress in London, and Jefferson saw his chance of injuring both the American and British governments by magnifying Carleton's speech into an 'unwarrantable outrage.' He also hoped that an Indian war would upset the treaty and bring on a British war as well. And the prospect did look encouragingly black in the West, where the American general Wayne was ready waiting south of Lake Erie, while the trade in scalps was unusually brisk. Forty dollars was the regular market price for an ordinary Indian's scalp. But as much as a thousand was offered for Simon Girty's in the hope of getting that inconvenient British scout put quickly out of the way. Nearer home Jefferson and his band of demagogues had other arguments as well. The Federal North would suffer most by war, while the Republican South might use war as a means of repudiating all the debts she owed to Englishmen. This would have been a very different thing from the insolvency of the Continental Congress during the Revolution. It was dire want, not financial infamy, that made the Revolutionary paper money 'not worth a Continental.' But it would have been sheer theft for the Jeffersonian South to have made its honest obligations 'rotten as a Pennsylvanian bond.'