resign his commission; but even so
notable an occasion as this brought together delegates from only seven
of the States. The best talent in America was drafted into the service of
the several States. Men had ceased to think continentally. "A selfish
habitude of thinking and reasoning," wrote one who styled himself
Yorick, in the New York Packet, "leads us into a fatal error the moment
we begin to talk of the interests of America. The fact is, by the interests
of America we mean only the interests of that State to which property
or accident has attached us." "Of the affairs of Georgia," Madison
confessed in 1786, "I know as little as those of Kamskatska."
On all sides intelligent men agreed that the return of prosperity
depended upon the opening-up of foreign trade. Their immediate
concern was the recovery of old markets. When John Adams went to
London in 1785 as the first representative of the United States, he bent
all his energies to the task of securing a commercial treaty which would
provide for unrestricted intercourse between the countries. It was an
impossible task. At every turn he encountered the hostility of the
mercantile classes, of whom Lord Sheffield was the most conspicuous
representative. "What have you to give us in exchange for this and
that?" "What have you to give us as reciprocity for the benefit of going
to our islands?" "What assurance can you give that the States will agree
to a treaty?" These were the embarrassing questions which Adams had
to encounter. Baffled by the cool indifference of the English Ministry,
Adams wrote home in despair that there was not the slightest prospect
of relief for American commerce unless the States would confer the
power of passing navigation laws upon Congress or themselves pass
retaliatory acts against Great Britain.
Congress had, indeed, already urged upon the States the necessity of
yielding the power to enact navigation laws; but they had replied with
such deliberation and with so many conditions that Congress was as
powerless as ever. Meantime, each State struck blindly at the common
enemy with little or no regard for its neighbors. "The States are every
day giving proofs," wrote Madison, "that separate regulations are more
likely to set them by the ears than to attain the common object." When
the other New England States closed their ports to British shipping,
Connecticut hastened to profit at their expense by throwing her ports
wide open. New Jersey, with New York on one side and Pennsylvania
on the other, was likened to a cask tapped at both ends. To find a
historical parallel to the annals of this period, one must go back to the
bickerings and jealousies of the states of ancient Greece.
In this dark picture, however, there are cheering rays of light. One by
one the States were redeeming their promises and ceding their western
lands. It seemed as though the Confederation, hitherto a disembodied
spirit, was about to tenant a body. By the year 1786 the United States
were in joint possession of the greater part of the vast region between
the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes--a domain of imperial
dimensions. In anticipation of these cessions, Congress took under
consideration an ordinance reported by a committee of which Thomas
Jefferson was chairman. This ordinance contemplated the division of
the land north of the thirty-first parallel into fourteen or sixteen States.
The settlers in these rectangular areas were not to form state
governments at once, but for their temporary government were to
borrow such constitutions as they thought best from the older States.
When a State had twenty thousand inhabitants, it might frame a
permanent constitution and send a delegate to Congress. Admission to
the Union was to be granted only when a State had as many free
inhabitants as "the least numerous of the thirteen original States." Two
features of Jefferson's report do not appear in the Ordinance of 1784;
the fantastic names which Jefferson had selected and the fifth of the
fundamental conditions which were to be a charter of compact between
the old States and the new. It is perhaps no misfortune that the names
Assenisipia, Polypotamia, Pelisipia, do not appear on the map; the
article prohibiting slavery after the year 1800 might well have been
retained.
[Map: State-Making In the West 1783-1787]
More important than the Ordinance of 1784, which indeed is interesting
chiefly because it was the forerunner of the final ordinance for the
Northwest Territory, is that adopted by Congress in the following year.
The so-called Land Ordinance of 1785 provided in general for the
survey of a series of townships six miles square in the region
immediately west of Pennsylvania, and for the further division of each
township into thirty-six lots, or, as they were later
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