CHAPTER X

THE FIRST NEW STATES

GEORGE WASHINGTON laid down the office of President of the United States in 1797 with the new government a going institution. He had secured possession of the whole American territory, sketched a policy of international relationship, proved that it was possible to enforce the laws as well as to make them, and breathed into the dry bones of constitutional provision the spark of life. He had as well carried out the novel policy of imperial development sketched in the Ordinance of 1787, and signed the bills admitting to full brotherhood in the Union the three new States of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. No one of these was a public land State, for in none did the United States own the title to any of the soil. Only one, the last, had even been a territory in the sense of the Ordinance. But their admission was an earnest of the adherence of the Republic to the principle of free selfgovernment. What the old Congress promised in the Ordinance and described as an eternal compact among the States, the new Congress reenacted August 7, 1791, when it adopted the Ordinance as a statute under the Constitution.

Vermont is associated with the western frontier only by a conscious effort of imagination, but its course of development, like the later course of Maine, ran true to the typical process of the border. It was a frontier of the Revolutionary period, and possessed a de facto independence as old as that of the thirteen States that were inside the Confederation. The long refusal of Congress, or rather inability, to admit Vermont helps to explain many strains of thought that pervaded the rest of the frontier and filled the hearts of Washington and Jefferson with a fear that the Union might not be maintained. From 1777 until 1791 Vermont maintained a republican form of government under a constitution, and asked without response for admittance.

The reasons for both the birth of Vermont and the reluctance to admit it as a State are to be found in the conflict of jurisdiction among Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York. The northern boundary of the Massachusetts settlement, fixed at the Merrimac River, was subject to a dispute in which that province

claimed to run the line from the source of the river, and New Hampshire contended for a line of demarcation leaving the Merrimac at Pawtucket Falls, where is its most southern bend. There was involved the southern half of both New Hampshire and Vermont. While the matter was still in controversy both colonies granted lands to settlers in the area of contest. Their dispute was settled by the crown in 1741, when New Hampshire was given the whole region north of the present boundary of Massachusetts.

The award to New Hampshire left undetermined the old claim of New York to extend to the Connecticut River in the country north of Massachusetts, and New York took the aggressive as claimant against New Hampshire now that Massachusetts was eliminated. The governor of New Hampshire encouraged the settlement of the area beyond the Connecticut, and sold freely rectangular townships six miles square, for the purpose of strengthening his title to the land by actual occupation. The New Hampshire grants thus became a community whose peaceful existence depended upon a victory of New Hampshire over New York. In 1764 this hope faded, for the king recognized the title of New York as extending to the Connecticut River. The victor province invited the occupants of the soil, who had bought their titles from the illegal claimant, New Hampshire, to buy them again from it. It was hard enough to make frontier farmers buy their land once; to make them do it twice was beyond the possible. The New Hampshire Grants denied the claim of New York, set up an independence that New York was not able to break down before the Revolution began, and made a constitution under the name of Vermont when the other States made theirs. Whether Vermont was a State or not, the "Green Mountain Boys" played a useful part on the northern frontier during the Revolution.

The appeal of Vermont for admission came before Congress not far from the time when the settlements of the Blue Grass region of Kentucky were being planted by Judge Henderson's Transylvania Company, and were asking similar treatment. The Vermont constitution of 1777 copied a Pennsylvania provision for a council of censors and periodic revision. Neither New York nor Virginia was yet ready for partition, however, and the life of Congress was too precarious to make it wise to run the risk of alienating either or both of these great constituents. In 1786 a second constitution was made; but still the requisite nine States could not be got to vote for admission. In 1790, New York at last gave consent to the

alteration of its boundaries, and released the land between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut. Congress thereupon, by act of February 18, 1791, declared that after the following March 4, Vermont should be a member of the United States. It had a few days earlier given a like permission to Kentucky.

The Kentucky settlements sprang to life along the middle border on the eve of the Revolution. Lord Dunmore's War, with its decisive victory in 1774 stimulated the advance out of Pennsylvania and Virginia into the West and gave new zest to speculation in land titles and colonial projects. In the following year Henderson made his attempt to buy lands directly from the Indian owners, and was sharply rebuffed by Virginia. At the time of the Henderson settlement there were already a few Virginians on the ground with prior claims as squatters. James Harrod brought in a group by way of the Ohio River and the Falls, and settled in the Kentucky Valley in 1774. Harrodsburg was the center of Virginia influence over the Blue Grass country before Daniel Boone established Boonesboro for Henderson's associates in 1775. The Boonesboro Convention that appealed to Congress for independent statehood was matched by a Harrodsburg Convention that memorialized Virginia for an extension of government by that State. Congress was inactive, but Virginia, at the end of 1776, organized a Kentucky County covering the whole area that she was already disposed to consider as a future State. Clark gave peace to the new county in the following years, and protected with his expedition the planting of Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio.

The new western settlements that were made in the ten years after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis were mostly directed to Kentucky County, with the Ohio River on its northern side, and the Cumberland near its southern. The great gateways at the Ohio Forks and Cumberland Gap let the settlers through. The hostility of the Indian tribes on the right bank of the Ohio retarded settlement there and repelled the pioneer invader. The opposition of the Cherokee, and the violent altercation between North Carolina and the followers of John Sevier concerning the State of Franklin, discouraged much emigration to the country south of the Cumberland. The friendly limestone soil of the Blue Grass invited occupation, and the parent State, Virginia, held out hopes of freedom and opportunity.

Here came James Wilkinson in 1784, with experience earned in the Revolution and with an eager mind roving over all the pos

sibilities of the future for the Ohio Valley. Permanent attachment to Virginia was only one of the solutions; admission as a State was second; an inland confederacy linked together by the Mississippi River was a third; and there may have been another that contemplated an alliance with some foreign power that might secure both personal prestige and a market for the surplus produce of the farms.

Kentucky assumed self-consciousness at the moment when Congress was debating the question of a Spanish treaty and an agreement to close the Mississippi for a term of years. The garbled report of this that reached the West strengthened the suspicion that Congress might neither admit the West nor treat it fairly. The long-denied claims of Vermont provided ammunition for the advocate of a more local self-determination. The illicit profits of the river trade, that the compliant Spanish administrators allowed to Wilkinson and many of his friends, kept them interested in their immediate gains. The statehood movement ripened, but ripened slowly even after Virginia in 1786 stated the terms upon which she was ready to recognize Kentucky independence.

Three times more, before the decade ended, Virginia repeated her tender of freedom to her colony. Each time something occurred to keep Kentucky from taking effective action under it. In 1789 the Federal Constitution added a new safeguard to the State whose section aspired to separate autonomy. Under the Articles of Confederation, admission was authorized by vote of nine States, with no further requirement. Under the Constitution admission was based upon simple act of Congress, with the proviso that no State should be forced to contribute of its land to any new State without its consent. Even Congress added its authorization and fixed a date at which Kentucky should become a State before the tenth of the Kentucky conventions in her statehood series met at Danville and framed a constitution.

There were plenty of guides for the craftsmen of the new State.1 Both Delaware and New Hampshire had just completed revisions of their revolutionary constitutions, and in Pennsylvania an uprising of the newer counties had dominated in a constitutional con

1 Archibald Henderson, "Creative Forces in American Expansion," in American His torical Review, vol. xiv. Francis Newton Thorpe, A Constitutional History of the American People, 1776-1850 (1898), fully appreciates the meaning of the American process of constitution making; the texts of the various constitutions are most easily available in his Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters and other Organic Laws of the States, Ter ritories, and Colonies now or heretofore forming the United States of America (1909).

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vention of elected delegates. The Virginia constitution of 1776 was still foremost in western minds as representing an advanced view of democratic right. The men who counted for most in the Kentucky convention were Virginia born; and in the constitution they made, may be seen the flowering of the Virginia spirit in a frontier soil. It was different from the Virginia bloom, as that of Virginia differed from that of Old England. It founded its electorate on manhood suffrage. George Nicholas, who probably drafted the document, showed his belief in direct representation by resigning his seat when he changed his mind upon a basic point, and by returning to his constituents for a fresh election. Most of the Kentucky delegates, when in the Virginia convention, had voted against the ratification of the Constitution of the United States; now that they had in sight a full participation in that Union, the spirit of national pride began to grip them. Before the date June 1, 1792, had arrived, at which Kentucky was to become a State, the constitution was in force, the State government had been installed, and senators and representatives were ready to take up their work at Philadelphia in the national Congress. They had perhaps one hundred thousand constituents with homes in or near the Blue Grass.

Tennessee became the sixteenth State in 1796, after a vexatious period of youth and adolescence. Its earliest settlements went back to the Watauga district, and the exodus from North Carolina after the Battle of the Alamance. The parallel tributaries that flow southwest and make up the Tennessee River drain a series of fertile valleys that attracted a small but consistent immigration in spite of the adverse claims of the Cherokee Indians and the attitude of North Carolina. So many of the newcomers came from the Virginia valleys, bringing with them a preconceived distrust of North Carolina that the heroes of the winning of this West had a special aversion to the state of dependence that the parent State maintained. In 1784 North Carolina ceded the western country to Congress, withdrawing the cession before the year expired. In 1789, after silencing the aspirations of the State of Franklin, the cession was repeated on terms that Congress could accept.

There were no public lands to be transferred to Congress, but the temporary jurisdiction over the people made necessary an act for their government. North Carolina specified in the cession that the guarantees spread over the Northwest by the Ordinance of 1787 should be allowed to her dependents. Congress, therefore,