maintain the State. The colonial idea that had been strongest in the proprietaries spread over all the States, and carried the social clash of the colonial period over into the Union.

A second clash, rooted in the confiscated lands, and serving to disturb the spirit of unity, followed independence, as the States realized that some had great holdings or claims, and some small. The landless States resented the lack of a land endowment, and were jealous of the acreage of the former sea-to-sea colonies. In New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland,' the established boundaries of the States were narrow and more nearly filled than in New York or Pennsylvania where the admitted limits were still far beyond the line of population; or in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia, where the sea-to-sea limits of the old charters founded hopes of tracts of land beyond the Alleghanies.

In every State, and in the Continental Congress, the two controversies based upon the future of the lands provided an enduring basis for political division. In Pennsylvania the agrarian leaders from the Susquehanna and Juniata valleys fought the Philadelphia aristocrats, and the comfortable farmers of Bucks and Delaware at every turn. In Massachusetts, before the end of the seventeeneighties, the farmers of the Connecticut Valley challenged the General Court and defied the law of the State. The piedmont farmers of Virginia and Carolina realized instinctively the difference beween their interests and those of the farmers of the coast. And in addition to the wrangle visible in the delegation of nearly every State, the smaller States bluntly refused to go ahead with Union until their safety was assured, and their aspirations recognized.

The first Continental Congress was a revolutionary body, pure and simple, deriving its right to exist from the sanction of common consent and force. From the earliest meeting in 1774 until nearly the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781, it remained a voluntary body, without formal authorization or a deliberate constitution. The States wanted independence, but were jealous of their complete freedom of action. The Congress proposed the adoption of Articles of Confederation, but saw the weary years roll round with

'The Johns Hopkins University Studies, edited by Herbert B. Adams, opened a new era in American historical writing; his own monograph in vol. III, "Maryland's Influence upon the Land Cessions to the United States," was among the earliest critical studies of the Confederacy.

out the unanimous concurrence that was necessary to turn the revolutionary basis into one of law.

The Articles of Confederation were weak and inadequate at best. They provided only a meeting place for debate and recommendation, without power to enforce a decision or to protect the majority will. No State was bound to coöperate. No executive was maintained. All revenue was based on quotas paid through good will. No important acts could be taken without a two-thirds vote of States. But inferior as the Articles were, they hung in suspense from the moment of their submission to the States in 1777, until the end of 1780. The States were both dilatory, which was overcome by time, and suspicious, which was overcome by compromise. The menace of unsettled boundaries was everywhere. New York was vexed by the aspirations of Vermont to independence. Connecticut and Pennsylvania had bitter litigation over conflicting claims. The northern boundary of New Jersey was too important to be left to chance. South Carolina and Georgia were at odds over the location of the source of the Savannah River, upon which their boundaries depended. Maryland became the spokesman of the smaller States, and a proper spokesman since she had suffered curtailment and compression at the hands of wealthy and influential neighbors.

The background of the Maryland unwillingness to bind herself in advance of a satisfactory land settlement begins with the original charter of 1632 granting to the Calverts the tract of Virginia lying between the south bank of the Potomac River and the fortieth parallel of north latitude. The crown had at this date taken back the original company charter of Virginia, and had thus acquired the right to readjust the limits of that province.

The Maryland provincials had constant friction with their wellestablished neighbors, the Virginia planters. The peculiarity of the charter that made the boundary not the usual channel of the river, but the southern bank, was an outrage in Virginia eyes, for no Virginian could wet his feet in Potomac water without committing a trespass upon Maryland. But the western end of Maryland was described as a line drawn north from the source of the Potomac River, and Virginia set about finding as easterly a source as topography and interpretation would allow. Lord Fairfax, the proprietary owner of the Northern Neck of Virginia, which was bounded by the Rappahannock and the Potomac, planted a stone in 1745 at what he claimed on his own survey to be the "first fountain of

the Pattowmack." It was not so far west as Maryland thought the source ought to be; nor yet so far east as Virginia once insisted when she advanced the claim that the real Potomac begins at Harper's Ferry where the Shenandoah enters. Maryland felt defrauded, but was as impotent to better herself on the west as she was on the north where the impressive colony of William Penn bore down upon her.

The Penn contention to a southern boundary at the thirty-ninth parallel, because the charter of 1681 read from the "beginning of the fortieth degree," threatened to deprive Maryland of a sixty mile strip along her greatest length. The tardy settlement of this contest, and the survey of Mason and Dixon's line, stilled the dispute but cost Maryland much of the debated strip. She had long before lost the three counties on the Delaware, below Philadelphia, that became the State of Delaware.

Basing her opposition on her fear of the western lands in hostile hands, and the claim that having been won by the common effort they ought to be used for common purposes, Maryland did not ratify the Articles of Confederation until Congress had taken up her cause and the larger States had yielded. In 1780 Congress, with the Articles still ineffective, and with only a revolutionary basis of authority, invited the States claiming western lands to cede them to the United States for common use. It pledged a fair distribution, and application of the proceeds to the common purpose, and the ultimate creation of new States as the ceded lands filled up.

New York led the larger States in accepting the condition of union, perhaps because the validity of her title was slighter than that of the others. Connecticut followed, with a partial surrender that Congress could not at first accept. Virginia agreed to give up the lands north of the Ohio River, and upon this evidence of good will and common spirit, Maryland avowed herself satisfied. Every State but Maryland had ratified the Articles before the end of 1780. On March 1, 1781, by the direction of the legislature of Maryland, her delegates in Congress signed the Articles, which became effective at once. A Union was established, but, more important perhaps, the Union had a definite task for which its authority was adequate. The Articles of Confederation did not create a sufficient Union to govern the United States; but the Congress as trustee had a property problem that kept it from vanishing into nothingness.

CHAPTER VI

CREATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

In the dark autumn of 1780, with Carolina and Virginia overrun by British troops, and with the gleam of hope that came from the inspiring news of King's Mountain not yet visible, Congress made its desperate effort to procure at least an act of government. On September 6 it urged the States with western lands to cede them to the Union; and on October 10 it repeated the urging, promising that they should "be disposed of for the common benefit of the United States." It pledged its faith that as the lands were occupied they should be divided into new commonwealths, with admission to the Union as a natural goal. With Vermont maintaining an independent though not recognized government, with the settlers along the Watauga now eight years old in their aspirations, and with James Robertson and his Cumberland pioneers in the act of formulating their Nashboro agreement, it was evident that the number of the States would not long remain thirteen. The world has few earlier glimpses than this of a growing federal commonwealth, with increasing members, and with no desire for permanent dependents. The fate of the Articles hinged upon the response to this appeal; and with it perhaps the fate of the Union itself, and the world's most promising experiment in federalism. The suggestion of an appeal had been made by New York for the sake of harmony. Connecticut welcomed it as "an Event most desirable and important to the Liberty and Independence of the rising Empire."

The legal basis of the claims, whose surrender was asked by the nervous little States, was in the series of charters issued by the English crown to various companies, proprietors, or colonies. The list begins with the first Virginia charter of 1606. The last colony charter was that of Georgia in 1732. After this time there were numerous proclamations and orders of the king in council that affected the boundaries, but the period was one of detailed adjustment rather than of new creation. The English law permitted the king to treat the overseas lands as dependencies of himself, and Parliament had not meddled with colonial limits. In general the crown reserved to itself the right to alter boundaries that it had

The proprietaries

fixed. The latest grant was the effective one. were a partial exception to this, for the crown regarded the gift of land to a lord proprietor as a closed transaction, not subject to modification more than the property rights of any other subject. The Proclamation of 1763 did not change the ultimate legal right of any of the various claimants to colonial lands. It merely deferred their enjoyment; and in the absence of any new colonial creations after 1763, except Quebec, which was based on act of Parliament in 1774, the independent States retained whatever claims they had. None of the States treated the Quebec Act as legally changing their status, and the United States did not advance the claim that it might well have pushed, that the country north of the Ohio River having been cut off by English law had become national property, with succession to the Union rather than to the original claimant States. The Quebec Act was regarded by the United States as an act of war and not of law.

The New York proposal for a general cession was embodied in a tender, dated February 19, 1780, "to facilitate the Completion of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union among the United States of America." When Charles II granted the New Netherlands to the Duke of York, the charters of 1664 and 1674 conveyed a tract of land between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers and dominated by the settlements already planted along the Hudson. In spite of the assertion of the charters that the Connecticut River was to be the eastern limit, it was never practicable for New York to establish it. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut were already in possession, with groups of settlers in the valley that could be neither dispossessed nor displaced. It was convenient to compromise. In 1731 a definite agreement was reached with Connecticut, and in 1783 with Massachusetts, by which irregular lines some twenty miles east of the Hudson were established in provincial law. They had been reached de facto many years earlier, when the contesting jurisdictions there took a state of practical equilibrium.1

But north of Massachusetts, New York pressed the claim to extend to the Connecticut, with a logic that increased in weight after England separated and delimited New Hampshire. It took an

1 Henry Gannett, Boundaries of the United States and of the Several States and Territories (3d ed., 1904), was printed as Bulletin, No. 226, of the United States Geological Survey. It is the most convenien, summary of boundary matters, and contains valuable maps which are generally accurate.