Union and Democracy | Page 6

the ordinance, which
were to remain forever unalterable except by the common consent of
the parties thereto--"the original States and the people and States in the
said territory." Freedom of worship, the usual rights of person and
property, and the obligation of private contracts were guaranteed.
Religion, morality, and education were to be forever encouraged.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude was to be permitted. In
imposing these conditions Congress undoubtedly exceeded its powers
under the Articles of Confederation, for that document nowhere confers
upon Congress the power to make binding contracts, nor for that matter
to legislate in any wise for the government of the common domain.
The Ohio Company hastened to colonize its broad acres on the
Muskingum. Before the end of the year 1787, the vanguard of the first
colony was on the march through Pennsylvania to the upper waters of
the Ohio. There they spent the winter constructing the craft which was
to carry them to their destination. As soon as the ice broke up in the
spring, they embarked on the Mayflower,--for so they had christened
the craft,--and within five days set foot on the soil of Ohio. Other bands
joined them, and by midsummer their rude huts and a blockhouse
marked the site of what was to be the town of Marietta, the first New
England settlement in the West. Across the Muskingum, at Fort Harmar,
the new governor, General St. Clair, had already taken up his official
residence. Farther down the river, Symmes planted a colony from New
Jersey on the tract which he had purchased; and within the next few
years settlements were made in the adjoining district, which Virginia
had reserved as bounty land for her soldiers. The vision of virgin lands
in the Ohio country was beginning to dawn upon the small farmer of
the East. Emigration grew apace. Between February and June, 1788, an
observer noted not less than forty-five hundred settlers drifting past
Fort Harmar in their flatboats, in search of new homes in the
wilderness.
While the colonization of the Northwest was going on under the eye of
Governor St. Clair, hardy pioneers were laying the foundations of a
new society in the Southwest, without the protecting arm of the
Government. Before the war Daniel Boone had made his famous trace
to "the country of Kentucke" through the Cumberland Gap; and
Robertson had led his colony from North Carolina to the upper waters
of the Tennessee. Settlers had followed the long-rangers; and numerous
communities sprang up by salt lick and water course. In all these
settlements there was much local independence. For a time the people
on the Watauga had established a government of their own. Upon the

cession by North Carolina of her western lands, the settlers of eastern
Tennessee took matters into their own hands and prepared to organize
as a State. Congress had just adopted the Ordinance of 1784, and one of
Jefferson's prospective States included most of the land already
appropriated by these pioneers. They nourished, too, long-standing
grievances. They were taxed for the support of a government which
treated them with contumely and ignored their administrative needs.
The movement toward independence acquired such headway that not
even the repeal of the act of cession by North Carolina could stay its
course. With a confidence born of frontier conditions these "modern
Franks, the hardy mountain men," as a contemporary called them,
drafted a constitution, organized a government, and appealed to
Congress for recognition as a State of the Confederation. For three
years the State of Franklin, as it was officially christened, under the
able leadership of Governor John Sovier, refused to recognize the
authority of North Carolina, even to the point of resisting the militia by
arms. But Congress turned a deaf ear to the petitions of the insurgents;
and in the year 1788, diplomacy succeeding where coercion had failed,
the people of Franklin returned to their first allegiance.
Much the same centrifugal forces were at work in northwestern
Virginia and western Pennsylvania, a region which felt its isolation
keenly. "Separated by a vast, extensive and almost impassible Tract of
Mountains, by Nature itself formed and pointed out as a Boundary
between this Country and those below it," the settlers of this
trans-Alleghany region besought Congress to recognize them as a
"sister colony and fourteenth province of the American Confederacy."
More menacing to the integrity of Virginia was a movement for
independent statehood among the people of Kentucky. Rivers were the
highways of their commerce and the current of all bore their flatboats
away from the parent State. New Orleans was their inevitable entrepôt.
The forces of nature seemed to conspire to throw these western
settlements into the hands of Spain. Washington was deeply impressed
by the necessity of connecting the headwaters of the James and