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VI.

boundary in the Lake of the Woods on the one side CHAP. and the Mississippi on the other. This division, so unfavorable to southern influence, was voted for by Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, South Carolina being divided; the North did not give one state in its favor; and the motion was lost. It was then agreed that the district should ultimately be divided at least into three states; the states and individuals being unanimous, except that Grayson adhered to his preference of five.'

The cause which arrested the progress of the ordinance of Monroe was a jealousy of the political power of the western states, and a prevailing desire to im pede their admission into the union. For himself he remained on this point true to the principle of Jefferson; to whom he explained with accurate foresight the policy toward which congress was drifting.

When the inhabitants of the Kaskaskias presented a petition for the organization of a government over their district, Monroe took part in the answer, that congress had under consideration the plan of a temporary government for their district, in which it would manifest a due regard to their interest. This is the last act of congress relating to the West in which Monroe participated. With the first Monday of the coming November the rule of rotation would exclude him from congress.

During the summer Kean was absent from con- 1786 gress, and his place on the committee was taken by

'Journals of Congress, iv. 662,

663.

2 Journals of Congress, iv. 688, 689.

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The

CHAP. Melancthon Smith,' of New York. In September Monroe and King went on a mission from congress 1786. to the legislature of Pennsylvania, and their places were filled by Henry of Maryland and Dane. committee with its new members represented the ruling sentiment of the house; and its report, which was made on the nineteenth of September, required of a western state before its admission into the union a population equal to one thirteenth part of the citi zens of the thirteen original states according to the last preceding enumeration. Had this report been adopted, and had the decennial census of the popula tion of territories and states alone furnished the rule, Ohio must have waited twenty years longer for admission into the union; Indiana would have been received only after 1850; Illinois only after 1860; Michigan could not have asked admittance till after the census of 1880; and Wisconsin must still have remained, and hopelessly, a colonial dependency.

Sept. 30.

Feb.

The last day of September, 1786, was given to the consideration of the report; but before anything was decided the seventh congress expired.

Nov. The new congress, to which Madison and Richard Henry Lee, as well as Grayson and Edward Carring1787. ton, were sent by Virginia, had no quorum till February, 1787, and then was occupied with preparations for the federal convention and with the late insurrection in Massachusetts. But the necessity of provid ing for a territorial government was urgent; and near the end of April the committee of the late con

1 The name of Smith as one of the committee occurs in Aug., 1786. Journals of Congress, iv. 688.

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gress revived its project of the preceding September. CHAP. On the ninth of May it was read a second time; the clause which would have indefinitely delayed the 1787 admission of a western state was cancelled;' a new draft of the bill as amended was directed to be transcribed, and its third reading was made the order of the next day,' when of a sudden the further progress of the ordinance was arrested.

Rufus Putnam, of Worcester County, Massachu- 1788 setts, who had drawn to himself the friendly esteem of the commander-in-chief, and before the breaking up of the army received the commission of brigadier-general, was foremost in promoting a petition to congress of officers and soldiers of the revolution for leave to plant a colony of the veterans of the army between Lake Erie and the Ohio, in townships of six miles square, with large reservations "for the ministry and schools." For himself and his associates June he entreated Washington to represent to congress the strength of the grounds on which their petition rested.' Their unpaid services in the war had saved the independence and the unity of the land; their settlement would protect the frontiers of the old states against alarms of the savages; their power would give safety along the boundary line on the north; under their shelter the endless procession of emigrants would take up its march to fill the country from Lake Erie to the Ohio.

With congress while it was at Princeton, and again

This appears from the erasures on the printed bill, which is still preserved.

* Journals of Congress, iv. 747.

3

S. P. Hildreth, Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, 88. Walker, 29. Letter of Rufus Putnam, 16 June, 1783.

16

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CHAP. after its adjournment to Annapolis, Washington exerted every power of which he was master to bring 1783. about a speedy decision. The members with whom he conversed acquiesced in the reasonableness of the petition and approved its policy, but they excused their inertness by the want of a cession of the northwestern lands.

1784.

When in March, 1784, the lands were ceded by March. Virginia, Rufus Putnam again appeals to Washington: "You are sensible of the necessity as well as the possibility of both officers and soldiers fixing themselves in business somewhere as soon as possible; many of them are unable to lie long on their oars; 1785. but congress did not mind the spur. In the next

year, under the land ordinance of Grayson, Rufus Putnam was elected a surveyor of land in the western territory for Massachusetts; and on his declining the service, another brigadier-general, Benjamin Tupper, of Chesterfield, in the same state, was ap pointed in his stead.' Tupper repaired to the West to superintend the work confided to him; but disorderly Indians prevented the survey; without having advanced farther west than Pittsburgh, he returned home; and, like almost every one who caught glimpses of the West, he returned with a mind filled with the brightness of its promise.

Toward the end of 1785, Samuel Holden Parsons, the son of a clergyman in Lyme, Connecticut, a graduate of Harvard, an early and a wise and resolute patriot, in the war a brigadier-general of the regular army, travelled to the West on public business, de1 Journals of Congress, iv. 520, 527, 547.

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scended the Ohio as far as its falls, and, full of CHAP. the idea of a settlement in that western country,~~~ wrote, before the year went out, that on his 1785. way he had seen no place which pleased him so much for a settlement as the country on the Muskingum.'

Jan.

31.

In the treaty at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, the Six 1784. Nations renounced to the United States all claims to the country west of the Ohio. A treaty of January, 1785, with the Wyandotte, Delaware, Chippewa, and 1785. Ottawa nations, released the country east of the Cuyahoga, and all the lands on the Ohio, south of the line of portages from that river to the Great Miami and the Maumee. On the last day of January, 1786, 1786. George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest, Richard Butler, late a colonel in the army, and Samuel Holden Parsons, acting under commissions from the United States, met the Shawnees at the mouth of the Great Miami, and concluded with them a treaty by which they acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States over all their territory as described in the treaty of peace with Great Britain, 1787. and for themselves renounced all claim to property in any land east of the main branch of the Great Miami. In this way the Indian title to southern Ohio, and all Ohio to the east of the Cuyahoga, was quieted.

25.

Six days before the signature of the treaty with Jan. the Shawnees, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, after a careful consultation at the house of Putnam,

1 William Frederick Poole in N. A. Review, liii. 331.

U. S. Statutes at Large, vii. 15, 16-18, 26.

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