Genet wished to embroil America with England, and sought to fit out American privateers on the seacoast towns to prey on the English commerce, and to organize on the Ohio River an armed expedition to conquer Louisiana, as Spain was then an ally of England and at war with France.
The Jeffersonians' Western Policy.
All over the country Genet's admirers formed Democratic societies on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of France.

They were of course either useless or noxious in such a country and under such a government as that of the United States, and exercised a very mischievous effect.

Kentucky was already under the influence of the same forces that were at work in Virginia and elsewhere, and the classes of her people who were politically dominant were saturated with the ideas of those doctrinaire politicians of whom Jefferson was chief.

These Jeffersonian doctrinaires were men who at certain crises, in certain countries, might have rendered great service to the cause of liberty and humanity; but their influence in America was on the whole distinctly evil, save that, by a series of accidents, they became the especial champions of the westward extension of the nation, and in consequence were identified with a movement which was all-essential to the national well-being.
Kentucky Ripe for Genet's Intrigues.
Kentucky was ripe for Genet's intrigues, and he found the available leader for the movement in the person of George Rogers Clark.

Clark was deeply imbittered, not only with the United States Government but with Virginia, for the Virginia assembly had refused to pay any of the debts he had contracted on account of the State, and had not even reimbursed him for what he had spent.