The United States authorities vainly sought peace; while the British instigated the tribes to war, and the savages themselves never thought of ceasing their hostilities. The frontiersmen also wished war, and regarded the British and Indians with an equal hatred. They knew that the presence of the British in the Lake Posts meant Indian war; they knew that the Indians would war on them, whether they behaved well or ill, until the tribes suffered some signal overthrow; and they coveted the Indian lands with a desire as simple as it was brutal. Nor were land hunger and revenge the only motives that stirred them to aggression; meaner feelings were mixed with the greed for untilled prairie and unfelled forest, and the fierce longing for blood. Throughout our history as a nation, as long as we had a frontier, there was always a class of frontiersmen for whom an Indian war meant the chance to acquire wealth at the expense of the Government: and on the Ohio in 1792 and '93 there were plenty of men who, in the event of a campaign, hoped to make profit out of the goods, horses, and cattle they supplied the soldiers. One of Madison's Kentucky friends wrote him with rather startling frankness that the welfare of the new State hinged on the advent of an army to assail the Indians, first, because of the defence it would give the settlers, and, secondly, because it would be the chief means for introducing into the country a sufficient quantity of money for circulation. [Footnote: State Dep. MSS., Madison Papers, Hubbard Taylor to Madison, Jan. 3, 1792.] Madison himself evidently saw nothing out of the way in this twofold motive of the frontiersmen for wishing the presence of an army. In all the border communities there was a lack of circulating medium, and an earnest desire to obtain more by any expedient. Like many other frontiersmen, Madison's correspondent indulged almost equally in complaints of the Indian ravages, and in denunciations of the regular army which alone could put an end to them and of the national party which sustained the army. [Footnote: _Do._, Taylor to Madison, April 16, 1792; May 8 and 17, 1792; May 23, 1793, etc.] Wayne Appointed to Command Western Army. Major General Anthony Wayne, a Pennsylvanian, had been chosen to succeed St. Clair in the command of the army; and on him devolved the task of wresting victory from the formidable forest tribes, fighting as the latter were in the almost impenetrable wilderness of their own country. The tribes were aided by the support covertly, and often openly, yielded them by the British. They had even more effective allies in the suspicion with which the backwoodsmen regarded the regular army, and the supine indifference of the people at large, which forced the administration to try every means to obtain peace before adopting the only manly and honorable course, a vigorous war. Wayne's Character and History.