Nothing can show more strikingly than this the almost inconceivable difficulties with which the President was contending. To develop a policy of wise and dignified neutrality, and to impress it upon the world, was a great enough task in itself. But Washington was obliged to impress it also upon his own people, and to teach them that they must have a policy of their own toward other nations. He had to carry this through in the teeth of an opposition so utterly colonial that it could not grasp the idea of having any policy but that which, from sympathy or hate, they took from foreigners. Beyond the mountains, he had to bring this home to men to whom American nationality was such a dead letter that they were willing to defy their own government, throw off their allegiance, and enlist for an offensive war under the banners of a crazy French Girondist. It is neither easy nor pleasant to carry out a new foreign policy in time of general war, with one's own people united in its support; but when the foreign divisions are repeated at home, the task is enhanced in difficulty a thousand-fold. Nevertheless, there was the work to do, and the President faced it. He dealt with Genet, he prevailed in public opinion on the seaboard, and in some fashion he maintained order west of the mountains.
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.