the public domain, required him to put up only fifty cents an acre in advance and took its chance with him as to the success or failure of the enterprise. In four years, if successful, the settler expected to earn his farm out of its produce. Whether it was a good system for the country, or a vicious inducement to speculation and evasion of obligations, remained to be seen as the law directed the flow of settlers into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. It opens a fresh chapter in settlement, coincident with the other new chapters of 1800.

CHAPTER XIV

OHIO: THE CLASH OF PRINCIPLES

WHILE the legislature of Kentucky, under the master hand of Jefferson, was avowing that the United States "are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government," and was bringing to a focus the personal antipathies and sectional points of view that had arisen under the Federalist régime, the great and undenied principle that it asserted was receiving a concrete embodiment north of the Ohio, in the Northwest Territory. Here, for ten years, General Arthur St. Clair had governed as viceroy of Congress. That he was called governor instead of viceroy failed to hide the fact of autocratic control. In the scheme of things embraced in the Ordinance of 1787 there was no place for popular influence in territorial government during the first phase of the latter; and St. Clair belonged to the age and school that tended to distrust the popular influence in any form. By law and by temperament he represented the distasteful idea of "unlimited submission"; but his reign came to an end when the growth of numbers among his subjects entitled them in 1798 to elect members for a general assembly. In the meetings of this body in 1799 there was revealed the distance that the frontier had traveled since the Revolution. In Kentucky the constitution of 1792 was already outworn and replaced by a more generous basic law in this same year.

Even if there had not been a growth of national parties, there would still have developed many grounds for controversy in the Northwest Territory under St. Clair. The various little groups that planted themselves along the Ohio wanted to push into the interior faster than the Indians receded. The outlying districts were ever in danger of destruction and massacre, and the government never had at its disposal a force capable of policing the border. The wars of the early nineties were only aggravations of the situation until Wayne secured a victory. And it was but natural that the people should hold St. Clair responsible for the inconveniences they suffered.1

1 Emilius O. Randall and Daniel J. Ryan, History of Ohio (1912), enlarges upon and replaces Rufus King, Ohio: First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787 (1888).

There was the constant factor of life under control, a situation annoying to Americans wherever they have found it. For over a decade they were thus suppressed, and in every section of the territory there was discontent. The criticism gained leadership and focus from the settlements in the Scioto Valley, where there were the special unities that came from a common KentuckyVirginia origin and the Virginia land warrants with which they bought their land. Chillicothe was the very center of this, and a forceful personality showed itself in one Dr. Edward Tiffin, their leader. As Jeffersonian democracy gained within the States, the Jeffersonians here became ambitious for a new State dominated by his doctrines, and waited impatiently the time when it could be cut away from the Northwest. The first meeting of the legislature in 1799 started the movement that hereafter gained in speed and weight until it was successful.

The procedure of getting self-government under way was defined by the Ordinance. In December, 1798, representatives were chosen for the legislature, at the rate of one for each five hundred free male inhabitants in the population. These convened on call of St. Clair at Cincinnati, in February, 1799, to complete the work by nominating the members of council. They elected ten "residents of the district," each possessed of a "freehold in five hundred acres of land"; and from this list, the President of the United States caused the selection of five, to constitute the council of the territory. In September, 1799, the whole legislature met at Cincinnati, already indignant at the fact that St. Clair had of his own will determined their place of meeting. That he had presumed to provide a seal for the territory without consulting the will of the people added fuel to the flames. The session was one of denunciation and dispute. When it was over, St. Clair made the breach between himself and the Jeffersonians complete by vetoing every important statute that the territorial legislature had enacted.

With the beginning of self-government, came also the first step in federal relations. The territory was entitled to a delegate to sit in Washington. St. Clair desired the post for himself, but was beaten by Harrison, who proceeded to Philadelphia to sit in the last session held by Congress in that capital. Before the session ended and Congress packed up to move the seat of Government to Washington in the summer of 1800, two significant laws had been enacted upon Harrison's leadership. One, on May 10, laid the foundation for twenty years of land administration; the other,

on May 7, divided the Northwest Territory and created the Territory of Indiana from its western half. Early in 1801, Harrison was back in Indiana, as its first governor, while his former fellow citizens were at work at statehood.

The division of the Northwest Territory was a concrete issue upon which the factions could express their views. Underneath the discussion lay the motive of Federalists, who feared that the new State would be Jeffersonian, and therefore urged such a division as would long defer its admission. St. Clair advocated the Scioto River as the western boundary of the projected State, and his friends advanced arguments against unwieldly extent for any State. The solemn agreement in the Ordinance of 1787 that the line of division should be the mouth of the Great Miami, weighed little with the men who saw in statehood a means of advancing or retarding party power. It had as little weight with Jeffersonians, who wished as soon as possible to get the requisite sixty thousand population in order to qualify for admission. They wanted generous boundaries, to get it the more quickly. The line of the Great Miami was a little too far east for them, because the drift of settlement had carried the population somewhat below Cincinnati, on the Ohio. The Miami region lay in a semi circle, with Cincinnati as its center; if the boundary started at the Miami mouth, it would not only cut off the people living further west, but would deprive the new State of needed numbers. They had the votes to prevent any reduction of the State. The eastern boundary of Indiana, as sketched in the division act of May 7, 1800, was a line starting on the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River (and leaving the whole Miami settlement to its east). The boundary ran thence somewhat east of north to the post that Wayne had built in 1793, and named Fort Recovery; thence it ran north to the Canadian line.

The Eastern Division of the Northwest Territory was started towards statehood by this partition. It was not yet called Ohio, and it still embraced the settlements around Detroit, later to become Michigan. But St. Clair's dominance was over, even though he was allowed to linger in his post as governor for more than a year after Jefferson became President of the United States. Congress was listening to the radical population, and this element was drawing the lines of successful partisanship. To the special humiliation of St. Clair, the seat of government for the Eastern Division was shifted from Cincinnati, where his friends were most

numerous, to Chillicothe, where he was a lonely and discarded figure.

In the two years after the division, the drift of settlement removed the necessity to worry over aggregate population. All the river towns became ports of arrival and centers of distribution for the interior. Nearly every town dreamed dreams of future greatness as a western metropolis, on the common border of East and West, with the surrounding country lying in economic dependence upon it. Wheeling, next to Pittsburgh, became the gateway, though neither of these towns lay in the Northwest Territory. From Wheeling, Ebenezer Zane had marked his southwest trace after 1796; and along Zane's Trace arose the first group of interior landlocked settlements. The land already on sale under the old grants of Congress became inadequate, and entries poured in upon the new land offices, opened under Harrison's law of 1800. It was an incentive that Congress under this law became a three-fourths partner in every venture. When in 1802 Congress took the next step, and authorized the Eastern Division to become a State, it was safe and convenient to draw in the western boundary, from the temporary line of the Kentucky River to the one originally designated in 1787: the meridian of the mouth of the Great Miami.

In no new State ahead of Ohio had it been possible for Congress to imagine that it was the real parent, with a controlling hand upon the acts of the people. Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee had made constitutions at their own convenience, and Congress had only had to name the day at which the fact of participation in the Union should begin. But in Ohio it was different, with the parentage of Congress completely established, and with a national administration desirous of shaping the result. On April 30, 1802, the people of the Eastern Division were authorized, or "enabled" by law to hold a convention, frame a constitution, and become a State. For more than a century thereafter Congress made a general practice of passing enabling acts when in its judgment a territory was ripe for statehood, and these laws became convenient places for the expression of opinion as to the character of government that the new State should assume. Once in the Union, the State was a free agent as to its internal organization, so long as it refrained from violating the Federal Constitution or laws of Congress, and maintained a republican form of government. But it could not get into the Union without the consent of Congress and the power to withhold this consent gave leverage to Congress