As for Sevier, when he saw that he was baffled he suddenly became a Federalist and an advocate of a strong Central Government; and this, doubtless, not because of love for Federalism, but to show his hostility to North Carolina, which had at first refused to enter the new Union.

[Footnote: _Columbian Magazine,_ Aug.

27, 1788, vol.ii., 542.] This particular move was fairly comic in its abrupt unexpectedness.
An Independent Frontier State.
Thus the last spark of independent life flickered out in Franklin proper.

The people who had settled on the Indian borders were left without government, North Carolina regarding them as trespassers on the Indian territory.

[Footnote: Haywood, 195.] They accordingly met and organized a rude governmental machine, on the model of the Commonwealth of Franklin; and the wild little state existed as a separate and independent republic until the new Federal Government included it in the territory south of the Ohio.