The paper was at first decidedly Federalist in sentiment. No sympathy was expressed with Genet or with the efforts undertaken by the Western allies of the French Minister to organize a force for the conquest of Louisiana; and the Tennessee settlers generally took the side of law and order in the earlier disturbances in which the Federal Government was concerned. At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville, in 1795, one of the toasts was "The four western counties of Pennsylvania; may they repent their folly and sin no more"; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later they sympathized with the Kentuckians and Virginians in their nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws. Its Gradual Change of Tone. Gradually, however, the tone of the paper changed, as did the tone of the community, at least to the extent of becoming Democratic and anti-Federal; for the people felt that the Easterners did not sympathize with them either in their contests with the Indians or in their desire to control the Mississippi and the farther West. They grew to regard with particular vindictiveness the Federalists,--the aristocrats, as they styled them,--of the Southern seaboard States, notably of Virginia and South Carolina. One pathetic feature of the paper was the recurrence of advertisements by persons whose friends and kinsfolk had been carried off by the Indians, and who anxiously sought any trace of them. Queer Use of the "Gazette." But the _Gazette_ was used for the expression of opinions not only by the whites, but occasionally even by an Indian. One of the Cherokee chiefs, the Red Bird, put into the _Gazette_, for two buckskins, a talk to the Cherokee chief of the Upper Towns, in which he especially warned him to leave alone one William Cocke, "the white man who lived among the mulberry trees," for, said Red Bird, "the mulberry man talks very strong and runs very fast"; this same Cocke being afterwards one of the first two senators from Tennessee. The Red Bird ended his letter by the expression of the rather quaint wish, "that all the bad people on both sides were laid in the ground, for then there would not be so many mush men trying to make people to believe they were warriors." [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, November 3, 1792.] Efforts to Promote Higher Education.