The Critical Period of American History Part 6

[Sidenote: Conduct of neighbouring states.]

During the autumn similar disturbances had occurred in the states to the northward. At Exeter in New Hampshire and at Windsor and Rutland in Vermont the courts had been broken up by armed mobs, and at Rutland there had been bloodshed. When the Shays rebellion was put down, Governor Bowdoin requested the neighbouring states to lend their aid in bringing the insurgents to justice, and all complied with the request except Vermont and Rhode Island. The legislature of Rhode Island sympathized with the rebels, and refused to allow the governor to issue a warrant for their arrest. On the other hand, the governor of Vermont issued a proclamation out of courtesy toward Ma.s.sachusetts, but he caused it to be understood that this was but an empty form, as the state of Vermont could not afford to discourage immigration! A feeling of compa.s.sion for the insurgents was widely spread in Ma.s.sachusetts. In March the leaders were tried, and fourteen were convicted of treason and sentenced to death; but Governor Bowdoin, whose term was about to expire, granted a reprieve for a few weeks. At the annual election in April the candidates for the governorship were Bowdoin and Hanc.o.c.k, and it was generally believed that the latter would be more likely than the former to pardon the convicted men. So strong was this feeling that, although much grat.i.tude was felt toward Bowdoin, to whose energetic measures the prompt suppression of the rebellion was due, Hanc.o.c.k obtained a large majority. When the question of a pardon came up for discussion, Samuel Adams, who was then president of the senate, was strongly opposed to it, and one of his arguments was very characteristic. "In monarchies," he said, "the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished; but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death." This was Adams's sensitive point. He wanted the whole world to realize that the rule of a republic is a rule of law and order, and that liberty does not mean license. But in spite of this view, for which there was much to be said, the clemency of the American temperament prevailed, and Governor Hanc.o.c.k pardoned all the prisoners.

Nothing in the history of these disturbances is more instructive than the light incidentally thrown upon the relations between Congress and the state government. Just before the news of the rout at Petersham, Samuel Adams had proposed in the senate that the governor should be requested to write to Congress and inform that body of what was going on in Ma.s.sachusetts, stating that "although the legislature are firmly persuaded that ... in all probability they will be able speedily and effectively to suppress the rebellion, yet, if any unforeseen event should take place which may frustrate the measures of government, they rely upon such support from the United States as is expressly and solemnly stipulated by the articles of confederation." A resolution to this effect was carried in the senate, but defeated in the house through the influence of western county members in sympathy with the insurgents; and incredible as it may seem, the argument was freely used that it was incompatible with the dignity of Ma.s.sachusetts to allow United States troops to set foot upon her soil. When we reflect that the a.r.s.enal at Springfield, where the most considerable disturbance occurred, was itself federal property, the climax of absurdity might seem to have been reached.

[Sidenote: Congress afraid to interfere.]

It was left for Congress itself, however, to cap that climax. The progress of the insurrection in the autumn in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Ma.s.sachusetts, as well as the troubles in Rhode Island, had alarmed the whole country. It was feared that the insurgents in these states might join forces, and in some way kindle a flame that would run through the land. Accordingly Congress in October called upon the states for a continental force, but did not dare to declare openly what it was to be used for. It was thought necessary to say that the troops were wanted for an expedition against the northwestern Indians! National humiliation could go no further than such a confession, on the part of our central government, that it dared not use force in defence of those very articles of confederation to which it owed its existence. Things had come to such a pa.s.s that people of all shades of opinion were beginning to agree upon one thing,--that something must be done, and done quickly.

CHAPTER V.

GERMS OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY.

[Sidenote: Creation of a national domain beyond the Alleghanies.]

While the events we have heretofore contemplated seemed to prophesy the speedy dissolution and downfall of the half-formed American Union, a series of causes, obscure enough at first, but emerging gradually into distinctness and then into prominence, were preparing the way for the foundation of a national sovereignty. The growth of this sovereignty proceeded stealthily along such ancient lines of precedent as to take ready hold of people's minds, although few, if any, understood the full purport of what they were doing. Ever since the days when our English forefathers dwelt in village communities in the forests of northern Germany, the idea of a common land or folkland--a territory belonging to the whole community, and upon which new communities might be organized by a process a.n.a.logous to what physiologists call cell-multiplication--had been perfectly familiar to everybody. Townships budded from village or parish folkland in Maryland and Ma.s.sachusetts in the seventeenth century, just as they had done in England before the time of Alfred. The critical period of the Revolution witnessed the repet.i.tion of this process on a gigantic scale. It witnessed the creation of a national territory beyond the Alleghanies,--an enormous folkland in which all the thirteen old states had a common interest, and upon which new and derivative communities were already beginning to organize themselves. Questions about public lands are often regarded as the driest of historical deadwood. Discussions about them in newspapers and magazines belong to the cla.s.s of articles which the general reader usually skips. Yet there is a great deal of the philosophy of history wrapped up in this subject, and it now comes to confront us at a most interesting moment; for without studying this creation of a national domain between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, we cannot understand how our Federal Union came to be formed.

[Sidenote: Conflicting claims to the western territory.]

When England began to contend with France and Spain for the possession of North America, she made royal grants of land upon this continent, in royal ignorance of its extent and configuration. But until the Seven Years' War the eastward and westward part.i.tioning of these grants was of little practical consequence; for English dominion was bounded by the Alleghanies, and everything beyond was in the hands of the French. In that most momentous war the genius of the elder Pitt won the region east of the Mississippi for men of English race, while the vast territory of Louisiana, beyond, pa.s.sed under the control of Spain. During the Revolutionary War, in a series of romantic expeditions, the state of Virginia took military possession of a great part of the wilderness east of the Mississippi, founding towns in the Ohio and c.u.mberland valleys, and occupying with garrisons of her state militia the posts at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. We have seen how, through the skill of our commissioners at Paris, this n.o.ble country was secured for the Americans in the treaty of 1783, in spite of the reluctance of France and the hostility of Spain. Throughout the Revolutionary War the Americans claimed the territory as part of the United States; but when once it pa.s.sed from under the control of Great Britain, into whose hands did it go? To whom did it belong? To this question there were various and conflicting answers. North Carolina, indeed, had already taken possession of what was afterward called Tennessee, and at the beginning of the war Virginia had annexed Kentucky. As to these points there could be little or no dispute. But with the territory north of the Ohio River it was very different. Four states laid claim either to the whole or to parts of this territory, and these claims were not simply conflicting, but irreconcilable.

[Sidenote: Claims of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut.]

The charters of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut were framed at a time when people had not got over the notion that this part of the continent was not much wider than Mexico, and accordingly these colonies had received the royal permission to extend from sea to sea. The existence of a foreign colony of Dutchmen in the neighbourhood was a trifle about which these doc.u.ments did not trouble themselves; but when Charles II.

conquered this colony and bestowed it upon his brother, the province of New York became a stubborn fact, which could not be disregarded.

Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut peaceably settled their boundary line with New York, and laid no claims to land within the limits of that state; but they still continued to claim what lay beyond it, as far as the Mississippi River, where the Spanish dominion now began. The regions claimed by Ma.s.sachusetts have since become the southern halves of the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The region claimed by Connecticut was a narrow strip running over the northern portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and we have seen how much trouble was occasioned in Pennsylvania by this circ.u.mstance.

[Sidenote: Claims of New York.]

But New York laughed to scorn these claims of Connecticut. In the seventeenth century all the Algonquin tribes between Lake Erie and the c.u.mberland Mountains had become tributary to the Iroquois; and during the hundred years' struggle between France and England for the supremacy of this continent the Iroquois had put themselves under the protection of England, which thenceforth always treated them as an appurtenance to New York. For a hundred years before the Revolution, said New York, she had borne the expense of protecting the Iroquois against the French, and by various treaties she had become lawful suzerain over the Six Nations and their lands and the lands of their Algonquin va.s.sals. On such grounds New York claimed pretty much everything north of the Ohio and east of the Miami.

[Sidenote: Virginia's claims.]

But according to Virginia, it made little difference what Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut and New York thought about the matter, for every acre of land, from the Ohio River up to Lake Superior, belonged to her. Was not she the lordly "Old Dominion," out of which every one of the states had been carved? Even Cape Cod and Cape Ann were said to be in "North Virginia," until, in 1614, Captain John Smith invented the name "New England." It was a fair presumption that any uncarved territory belonged to Virginia; and it was further held that the original charter of 1609 used language which implicitly covered the northwestern territory, though, as Thomas Paine showed, in a pamphlet ent.i.tled "Public Good,"

this was very doubtful. But besides all this, it was Virginia that had actually conquered the disputed territory, and held every military post in it except those which the British had not surrendered; and who could doubt that possession was nine points in the law?

[Sidenote: Maryland's novel and beneficent suggestion, Oct. 15, 1777.]

Of these conflicting claims, those of New York and Virginia were the most grasping and the most formidable, because they concerned a region into which immigration was beginning rapidly to pour. They were regarded with strong disfavour by the small states, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, which were so situated that they never could expand in any direction. They looked forward with dread to a future in which New York and Virginia might wax powerful enough to tyrannize over their smaller neighbours. But of these protesting states it was only Maryland that fairly rose to the occasion, and suggested an idea which seemed startling at first, but from which mighty and unforeseen consequences were soon to follow.[5] It was on the 15th of October, 1777, just two days before Burgoyne's surrender, that this path-breaking idea first found expression in Congress. The articles of confederation were then just about to be presented to the several states to be ratified, and the question arose as to how the conflicting western claims should be settled. A motion was then made that "the United States in Congress a.s.sembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power to ascertain and fix the western boundary of such states as claim to the Mississippi, ... and lay out the land beyond the boundary so ascertained into separate and independent states, from time to time, as the numbers and circ.u.mstances of the people may require." To carry out such a motion, it would be necessary for the four claimant states to surrender their claims into the hands of the United States, and thus create a domain which should be owned by the confederacy in common. So bold a step towards centralization found no favour at the time. No other state but Maryland voted for it.

[Sidenote: The several states yield their claims in favour of the United States, 1780-85.]

But Maryland's course was well considered: she pursued it resolutely, and was rewarded with complete success. By February, 1779, all the other states had ratified the articles of confederation. In the following May, Maryland declared that she would not ratify the articles until she should receive some definite a.s.surance that the northwestern territory should become the common property of the United States, "subject to be parcelled out by Congress into free, convenient, and independent governments." The question, thus boldly brought into the foreground, was earnestly discussed in Congress and in the state legislatures, until in February, 1780, partly through the influence of General Schuyler, New York decided to cede all her claims to the western lands. This act of New York set things in motion, so that in September Congress recommended to all states having western claims to cede them to the United States.

In October, Congress, still pursuing the Maryland idea, went farther, and declared that all such lands as might be ceded should be sold in lots to immigrants and the money used for federal purposes, and that in due season distinct states should be formed there, to be admitted into the Union, with the same rights of sovereignty as the original thirteen states. As an inducement to Virginia, it was further provided that any state which had incurred expense during the war in defending its western possessions should receive compensation. To this general invitation Connecticut immediately responded by offering to cede everything to which she laid claim, except 3,250,000 acres on the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie, which she wished to reserve for educational purposes.

Washington disapproved of this reservation, but it was accepted by Congress, though the business was not completed until 1786. This part of the state of Ohio is still commonly spoken of as the "Connecticut Reserve." Half a million acres were given to citizens of Connecticut whose property had been destroyed in the British raids upon her coast towns, and the rest were sold, in 1795, for $1,200,000, in aid of schools and colleges.

In January, 1781, Virginia offered to surrender all the territory northwest of the Ohio, provided that Congress would guarantee her in the possession of Kentucky. This gave rise to a discussion which lasted nearly three years, until Virginia withdrew her proviso and made the cession absolute. It was accepted by Congress on the 1st of March, 1784, and on the 19th of April, in the following year,--the tenth anniversary of Lexington,--Ma.s.sachusetts surrendered her claims; and the whole northwestern territory--the area of the great states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (excepting the Connecticut Reserve)--thus became the common property of the half-formed nation.

Maryland, however, did not wait for this. As soon as New York and Virginia had become thoroughly committed to the movement, she ratified the articles of confederation, which thus went into operation on the 1st of March, 1781.

[Sidenote: Magnanimity of Virginia.]

This acquisition of a common territory speedily led to results not at all contemplated in the theory of union upon which the articles of confederation were based. It led to "the exercise of national sovereignty in the sense of eminent domain," as shown in the ordinances of 1784 and 1787, and prepared men's minds for the work of the Federal Convention. Great credit is due to Maryland for her resolute course in setting in motion this train of events. It aroused fierce indignation at the time, as to many people it looked unfriendly to the Union. Some hot-heads were even heard to say that if Maryland should persist any longer in her refusal to join the confederation, she ought to be summarily divided up between the neighbouring states, and her name erased from the map. But the brave little state had earned a better fate than that of Poland. When we have come to trace out the results of her action, we shall see that just as it was Ma.s.sachusetts that took the decisive step in bringing on the Revolutionary War when she threw the tea into Boston harbour, so it was Maryland that, by leading the way toward the creation of a national domain, laid the corner-stone of our Federal Union. Equal credit must be given to Virginia for her magnanimity in making the desired surrender. It was New York, indeed, that set the praiseworthy example; but New York, after all, surrendered only a shadowy claim, whereas Virginia gave up a magnificent and princely territory of which she was actually in possession. She might have held back and made endless trouble, just as, at the beginning of the Revolution, she might have refused to make common cause with Ma.s.sachusetts; but in both instances her leading statesmen showed a far-sighted wisdom and a breadth of patriotism for which no words of praise can be too strong. In the later instance, as in the earlier, Thomas Jefferson played an important part. He, who in after years, as president of the United States, was destined, by the purchase of Louisiana, to carry our western frontier beyond the Rocky Mountains, had, in 1779, done more than any one else to support the romantic campaign in which General Clark had taken possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. He had much to do with the generous policy which gave up the greater part of that country for a national domain, and on the very day on which the act of cession was completed he presented to Congress a remarkable plan for the government of the new territory, which was only partially successful because it attempted too much, but the results of which were in many ways notable.

[Sidenote: Jefferson proposes a scheme of government for the northwestern territory, 1784.]

In this plan, known as the Ordinance of 1784, Jefferson proposed to divide the northwestern territory into ten states, or just twice as many as have actually grown out of it. In each of these states the settlers might establish a local government, under the authority of Congress; and when in any one of them the population should come to equal that of the least populous of the original states, it might be admitted into the Union by the consent of nine states in Congress. The new states were to have universal suffrage; they must have republican forms of government; they must pay their shares of the federal debt; they must forever remain a part of the United States; and after the year 1800 negro slavery must be prohibited within their limits. The names of these ten states have afforded much amus.e.m.e.nt to Jefferson's biographers. In those days the schoolmaster was abroad in the land after a peculiar fashion. Just as we are now in the full tide of that Gothic revival which goes back for its beginnings to Sir Walter Scott; as we admire mediaeval things, and try to build our houses after old English models, and prefer words of what people call "Saxon" origin, and name our children Roland and Herbert, or Edith and Winifred, so our great-grandfathers lived in a time of cla.s.sical revival. They were always looking for precedents in Greek and Roman history; they were just beginning to try to make their wooden houses look like temples, with Doric columns; they preferred words of Latin origin; they signed their pamphlets "Brutus" and "Lycurgus," and in sober earnest baptized their children as Caesar, or Marcellus, or Darius. The map of the United States was just about to bloom forth with towns named Ithaca and Syracuse, Corinth and Sparta; and on the Ohio River, opposite the mouth of Licking Creek, a city had lately been founded, the name of which was truly portentous. "Losantiville" was this wonderful compound, in which the initial _L_ stood for "Licking," while _os_ signified "mouth," _anti_ "opposite," and _ville_ "town;" and the whole read backwards as "Town-opposite-mouth-of-Licking." In 1790 General St. Clair, then governor of the northwest territory, changed this name to Cincinnati, in honor of the military order to which he belonged. With such examples in mind, we may see that the names of the proposed ten states, from which the failure of Jefferson's ordinance has delivered us, ill.u.s.trated the prevalent taste of the time rather than any idiosyncrasy of the man. The proposed names were Sylvania, Michigania, Chersonesus, a.s.senisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia.

[Sidenote: He wishes to prohibit slavery in the national domain.]

It was not the nomenclature that stood in the way of Jefferson's scheme, but the wholesale way in which he tried to deal with the slavery question. He wished to hem in the probable extension of slavery by an impa.s.sable barrier, and accordingly he not only provided that it should be extinguished in the northwestern territory after the year 1800, but at the same time his anti-slavery ardour led him to try to extend the national dominion southward. He did his best to persuade the legislature of Virginia to crown its work by giving up Kentucky to the United States, and he urged that North Carolina and Georgia should also cede their western territories. As for South Carolina, she was shut in between the two neighbouring states in such wise that her western claims were vague and barren. Jefferson would thus have drawn a north-and-south line from Lake Erie down to the Spanish border of the Floridas, and west of this line he would have had all negro slavery end with the eighteenth century. The policy of restricting slavery, so as to let it die a natural death within a narrowly confined area,--the policy to sustain which Mr. Lincoln was elected president in 1860,--was thus first definitely outlined by Jefferson in 1784. It was the policy of forbidding slavery in the national territory. Had this policy succeeded then, it would have been an ounce of prevention worth many a pound of cure. But it failed because of its largeness, because it had too many elements to deal with. For the moment, the proposal to exclude slavery from the northwestern territory was defeated, because of the two thirds vote required in Congress for any important measure. It got only seven states in its favour, where it needed nine. This defeat, however, was retrieved three years later, when the famous Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery forever from the national territory north of the Ohio River. But Jefferson's scheme had not only to deal with the national domain as it was, but also to extend that domain southward to Florida; and in this it failed. Virginia could not be persuaded to give up Kentucky until too late. When Kentucky came into the Union, after the adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution, she came as a sovereign state, with all her domestic inst.i.tutions in her own hands. With the western districts of North Carolina the case was somewhat different, and the story of this region throws a curious light upon the affairs of that disorderly time.

[Sidenote: John Sevier, and the state of Franklin, 1784-87.]

In surrendering her western territory, North Carolina showed praiseworthy generosity. But the frontier settlers were too numerous to be handed about from one dominion to another, without saying something about it themselves; and their action complicated the matter, until it was too late for Jefferson's scheme to operate upon them. In June, 1784, North Carolina ceded the region since known as Tennessee, and allowed Congress two years in which to accept the grant. Meanwhile, her own authority was to remain supreme there. But the settlers grumbled and protested. Some of them were st.u.r.dy pioneers of the finest type, but along with these there was a lawless population of "white trash,"

ancestors of the peculiar race of men we find to-day in rural districts of Missouri and Arkansas. They were the refuse of North Carolina, gradually pushed westward by the advance of an orderly civilization.

Crime was rife in the settlements, and, in the absence of courts, a rough-and-ready justice was administered by vigilance committees. The Cherokees, moreover, were troublesome neighbours, and people lived in dread of their tomahawks. Pet.i.tions had again and again gone up to the legislature, urging the establishment of courts and a militia, but had pa.s.sed unheeded, and now it seemed that the state had withdrawn her protection entirely. The settlers did not wish to have their country made a national domain. If their own state could not protect them, it was quite clear to them that Congress could not. What was Congress, any way, but a roomful of men whom n.o.body heeded? So these backwoodsmen held a convention in a log-cabin at Jonesborough, and seceded from North Carolina. They declared that the three counties between the Bald Mountains and the Holston River const.i.tuted an independent state, to which they gave the name of Franklin; and they went on to frame a const.i.tution and elect a legislature with two chambers. For governor they chose John Sevier, one of the heroes of King's Mountain, a man of Huguenot ancestry, and such dauntless nature that he was generally known as the "lion of the border." Having done all this, the seceders, in spite of their small respect for Congress, sent a delegate to that body, requesting that the new state of Franklin might be admitted into the Union. Before this business had been completed, North Carolina repealed her act of cession, and warned the backwoodsmen to return to their allegiance. This at once split the new state into two factions: one party wished to keep on as they had now started, the other wished for reunion with North Carolina. In 1786 the one party in each county elected members to represent them in the North Carolina legislature, while the other party elected members of the legislature of Franklin.

Everywhere two sets of officers claimed authority, civil dudgeon grew very high, and pistols were freely used. The agitation extended into the neighbouring counties of Virginia, where some discontented people wished to secede and join the state of Franklin. For the next two years there was something very like civil war, until the North Carolina party grew so strong that Sevier fled, and the state of Franklin ceased to exist.

Sevier was arrested on a warrant for high treason, but he effected an escape, and after men's pa.s.sions had cooled down his great services and strong character brought him again to the front. He sat in the senate of North Carolina, and in 1796, when Tennessee became a state in the Union, Sevier was her first governor.

These troubles show how impracticable was the attempt to create a national domain in any part of the country which contained a considerable population. The instinct of self-government was too strong to allow it. Any such population would have refused to submit to ordinances of Congress. To obey the parent state or to set up for one's self,--these were the only alternatives which ordinary men at that time could understand. Experience had not yet ripened their minds for comprehending a temporary condition of semi-independence, such as exists to-day under our territorial governments. The behaviour of these Tennessee backwoodsmen was just what might have been expected. The land on which they were living was not common land: it had been appropriated; it belonged to them, and it was for them to make laws for it. Such is the lesson of the short-lived state of Franklin. It was because she perceived that similar feelings were at work in Kentucky that Virginia did not venture to loosen her grasp upon that state until it was fully organized and ready for admission into the Union. It was in no such partly settled country that Congress could do such a thing as carve out boundaries and prohibit slavery by an act of national sovereignty. There remained the magnificent territory north of the Ohio,--an empire in itself, as large as the German Empire, with the Netherlands thrown in,--in which the collective wisdom of the American people, as represented in Congress, might autocratically shape the future; for it was still a wilderness, watched by frontier garrisons, and save for the Indians and the trappers and a few sleepy old French towns on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, there were no signs of human life in all its vast solitude. Here, where there was n.o.body to grumble or secede, Congress, in 1787, proceeded to carry out the work which Jefferson had outlined three years before.

[Sidenote: Origin of the Ohio company.]

It is interesting to trace the immediate origin of the famous Ordinance of 1787. At the close of the war General Rufus Putnam, from the mountain village of Rutland in Ma.s.sachusetts, sent to Congress an outline of a plan for colonizing the region between Lake Erie and the Ohio with veterans of the army, who were well fitted to protect the border against Indian attacks. The land was to be laid out in townships six miles square, "with large reservations for the ministry and schools;" and by selling it to the soldiers at a merely nominal price, the penniless Congress might obtain an income, and at the same time recognize their services in the only substantial way that seemed practicable. Washington strongly favoured the scheme, but, in order to carry it out, it was necessary to wait until the cession of the territory by the various claimant states should be completed. After this had been done, a series of treaties were made with the Six Nations, as overlords, and their va.s.sal tribes, the Wyandots, Chippewas, Ottawas, Delawares, and Shawnees, whereby all Indian claims to the lands in question were forever renounced. The matter was then formally taken up by Holden Parsons of Connecticut, and Rufus Putnam, Mana.s.seh Cutler, Winthrop Sargent, and others, of Ma.s.sachusetts, and a joint-stock company was formed for the purchase of lands on the Ohio River. A large number of settlers--old soldiers of excellent character, whom the war had impoverished--were ready to go and take possession at once; and in its pet.i.tion the Ohio company asked for nothing better than that its settlers should be "under the immediate government of Congress in such mode and for such time as Congress shall judge proper." Such a proposal, affording a means at once of replenishing the treasury and satisfying the soldiers, could not but be accepted; and thus were laid the foundations of a state destined within a century to equal in population and far surpa.s.s in wealth the whole Union as it was at that time. It became necessary at once to lay down certain general principles of government applicable to the northwestern territory; and the result was the Ordinance of 1787, which was chiefly the work of Edward Carrington and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Nathan Dane of Ma.s.sachusetts, in committee, following the outlines of a draft which is supposed to have been made by Mana.s.seh Cutler. Jefferson was no longer on the ground, having gone on his mission to Paris, but some of the principles of his proposed Ordinance of 1784 were adopted.

[Sidenote: The Ordinance of 1787.]

It was provided that the northwestern territory should ultimately be carved into states, not exceeding five in number, and any one of these might be admitted into the Union as soon as its population should reach 60,000. In the mean time, the whole territory was to be governed by officers appointed by Congress, and required to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Under this government there was to be unqualified freedom of religious worship, and no religious tests should be required of any public official. Intestate property should descend in equal shares to children of both s.e.xes. Public schools were to be established. Suffrage was not yet made universal, as a freehold in fifty acres was required. No law was ever to be made which should impair the obligation of contracts, and it was thoroughly agreed that this provision especially covered and prohibited the issue of paper money.

The future states to be formed from this territory must make their laws conform to these fundamental principles, and under no circ.u.mstances could any one of them ever be separated from the Union. In such wise, the theory of peaceful secession was condemned in advance, so far as it was possible for the federal government to do so. Jefferson's principle, that slavery should not be permitted in the national domain, was also adopted so far as the northwest was concerned; and it is interesting to observe the names of the states which were present in Congress when this clause was added to the ordinance. They were Georgia, the two Carolinas, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Ma.s.sachusetts; and the vote was unanimous. No one was more active in bringing about this result than William Grayson of Virginia, who was earnestly supported by Lee.

The action of Virginia and North Carolina at that time need not surprise us. But the movements in favour of emanc.i.p.ation in these two states, and the emanc.i.p.ation actually effected or going on at the north, had already made Georgia and South Carolina extremely sensitive about slavery; and their action on this occasion can be explained only by supposing that they were willing to yield a point in this remote territory, in order by and by to be able to insist upon an equivalent in the case of the territory lying west of Georgia. Nor would they have yielded at all had not a fugitive slave law been enacted, providing that slaves escaping beyond the Ohio should be arrested and returned to their owners. These arrangements having been made, General St. Clair was appointed governor of the territory; surveys were made; land was put up for sale at sixty cents per acre, payable in certificates of the public debt; and settlers rapidly came in. The westward exodus from New England and Pennsylvania now began, and only fourteen years elapsed before Ohio, the first of the five states, was admitted into the Union.

[Sidenote: Theory of folkland upon which the ordinance was based.]

"I doubt," says Daniel Webster, "whether one single law of any law-giver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787." Nothing could have been more emphatically an exercise of national sovereignty; yet, as Madison said, while warmly commending the act, Congress did it "without the least colour of const.i.tutional authority." The ordinance was never submitted to the states for ratification. The articles of confederation had never contemplated an occasion for such a peculiar a.s.sertion of sovereignty. "A great and independent fund of revenue," said Madison, "is pa.s.sing into the hands of a single body of men, who can raise troops to an indefinite number, and appropriate money to their support for an indefinite period of time.... Yet no blame has been whispered, no alarm has been sounded," even by men most zealous for state rights and most suspicious of Congress. Within a few months this argument was to be cited with telling effect against those who hesitated to accept the Federal Const.i.tution because of the great powers which it conferred upon the general government. Unless you give a government specific powers, commensurate with its objects, it is liable on occasions of public necessity to exercise powers which have not been granted. Avoid the dreadful dilemma between dissolution and usurpation, urged Madison, by clothing the government with powers that are ample but clearly defined.

In a certain sense, the action of Congress in 1787 was a usurpation of authority to meet an emergency which no one had foreseen, as in the cases of Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and Lincoln's emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves. Each of these instances marked, in one way or another, a brilliant epoch in American history, and in each case the public interest was so unmistakable that the people consented and applauded.

The theory upon which the Ordinance of 1787 was based was one which n.o.body could fail to understand, though perhaps no one would then have known just how to put it into words. It was simply the thirteen states, through their delegates in Congress, dealing with the unoccupied national domain as if it were the common land or folkland of a stupendous township.

[Sidenote: Spain, hearing of the secret article in the treaty of 1783, loses her temper and threatens to shut up the Mississippi River.]

The vast importance of the lands between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi was becoming more apparent every year, as the westward movement of population went on. But at this time their value was much more clearly seen by the southern than by the northern states. In the north the westward emigration was only just beginning to pa.s.s the Alleghanies; in the south, as we have seen, it had gone beyond them several years ago. The southern states, accordingly, took a much sounder view than the northern states of the importance to the Union of the free navigation of the Mississippi River. The difference was forcibly ill.u.s.trated in the dispute with Spain, which came to a crisis in the summer of 1786. It will be remembered that by the treaties which closed the Revolutionary War the provinces of East and West Florida were ceded by England to Spain. West Florida was the region lying between the Appalachicola and the Mississippi rivers, including the southernmost portions of the present states of Alabama and Mississippi. By the treaty between Great Britain and the United States, the northern boundary of this province was described by the thirty-first parallel of lat.i.tude; but Spain denied the right of these powers to place the boundary so low.

Her troops still held Natchez, and she maintained that the boundary must be placed a hundred miles farther north, starting from the Mississippi at the mouth of the Yazoo River, near the present site of Vicksburg. Now the treaty between Great Britain and the United States contained a secret article, wherein it was provided that if England could contrive to keep West Florida, instead of surrendering it to Spain, then the boundary should start at the Yazoo. This showed that both England and the United States were willing to yield the one to the other a strip of territory which both agreed in withholding from Spain. Presently the Spanish court got hold of the secret article, and there was great indignation. Here was England giving to the Americans a piece of land which she knew, and the Americans knew, was recently a part of West Florida, and therefore belonged to Spain! Castilian grandees went to bed and dreamed of invincible armadas. Congress was promptly informed that, until this affair should be set right, the Americans need not expect the Spanish government to make any treaty of commerce with them; and furthermore, let no American sloop or barge dare to show itself on the Mississippi below the Yazoo, under penalty of confiscation. When these threats were heard in America, there was great excitement everywhere, but it a.s.sumed opposite phases in the north and in the south. The merchants of New York and Boston cared little more about the Mississippi River than about Timbuctoo, but they were extremely anxious to see a commercial treaty concluded with Spain. On the other hand, the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and the state of Franklin cared nothing for the trade on the ocean, but they would not sit still while their corn and their pork were confiscated on the way to New Orleans. The people of Virginia sympathized with the backwoodsmen, but her great statesmen realized the importance of both interests and the danger of a conflict between them.

[Sidenote: Gardoqui and Jay.]

[Sidenote: Threats of secession in Kentucky and in New England, 1786.]