After Power had conferred with Judge Sebastian he visited Wilkinson, at the time a major general in the United States army and stationed at Detroit. Wilkinson was much put out by the visit and told Power he had been instructed to arrest him. He did not do this but sent him under guard to Fort Massac, from which point he was permitted to go to New Madrid and from there returned to New Orleans.
Power reported to Carondelet that Wilkinson received him ungraciously and said: "We are both lost without deriving any benefit from your journey. * * * The project is chimerical, as the western country has obtained by the treaty of 1795 all she wants. Spain had best abide by the treaty which has overturned all my plans and rendered ten years' labor useless."
As is known, the Jay treaty came very near causing war between France and the United States. Many Kentuckians felt that France had good reason for declaring war. Her charge against this government was that by the concessions made to Great Britain, America had disregarded her commercial and defensive allegiance with France.
From the organization of the Union Virginia, and, after Kentucky was carved from it, Kentucky were anti-federal states, championing state rights and declaring in no uncertain terms that the Federal Government was a creature of the states.
The Federal Government and the State of Kentucky kept close watch upon each other; the State jealously guarding her rights and the Federal Government ever suspicious of the separatist spirit of Kentucky; though a reference by vote of the people would have disclosed that only a small though influential minority advocated such a policy.
Just preceding the passage by Congress of the alien and sedition laws, political conditions in Kentucky were such as to at last make the Federal Government popular. Indian outrages had been suppressed; free navigation of the Mississippi had been procured; the British forts of the Northwest had been surrendered; but a storm of protest against the centralizing tendencies of the government swept Kentucky upon the enactment of these laws; though their purpose was to curb the anti-federalist spirit.
They thought but little of the alien law, providing for the expulsion of foreigners, but were greatly incensed at the sedition statute which made it a high misdemeanor to abuse the president or congress. Their protest was not evidence of sedition but a well developed sensitiveness against the danger of over-government.