Part 6 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Conduct of neighbouring states.]
During the autumn similar disturbances had occurred in the states to the northward. At Exeter in New Hamps.h.i.+re and at Windsor and Rutland in Vermont the courts had been broken up by armed mobs, and at Rutland there had been bloodshed. When the Shays rebellion was put down, Governor Bowdoin requested the neighbouring states to lend their aid in bringing the insurgents to justice, and all complied with the request except Vermont and Rhode Island. The legislature of Rhode Island sympathized with the rebels, and refused to allow the governor to issue a warrant for their arrest. On the other hand, the governor of Vermont issued a proclamation out of courtesy toward Ma.s.sachusetts, but he caused it to be understood that this was but an empty form, as the state of Vermont could not afford to discourage immigration! A feeling of compa.s.sion for the insurgents was widely spread in Ma.s.sachusetts. In March the leaders were tried, and fourteen were convicted of treason and sentenced to death; but Governor Bowdoin, whose term was about to expire, granted a reprieve for a few weeks. At the annual election in April the candidates for the governors.h.i.+p were Bowdoin and Hanc.o.c.k, and it was generally believed that the latter would be more likely than the former to pardon the convicted men. So strong was this feeling that, although much grat.i.tude was felt toward Bowdoin, to whose energetic measures the prompt suppression of the rebellion was due, Hanc.o.c.k obtained a large majority. When the question of a pardon came up for discussion, Samuel Adams, who was then president of the senate, was strongly opposed to it, and one of his arguments was very characteristic. ”In monarchies,” he said, ”the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished; but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” This was Adams's sensitive point. He wanted the whole world to realize that the rule of a republic is a rule of law and order, and that liberty does not mean license. But in spite of this view, for which there was much to be said, the clemency of the American temperament prevailed, and Governor Hanc.o.c.k pardoned all the prisoners.
Nothing in the history of these disturbances is more instructive than the light incidentally thrown upon the relations between Congress and the state government. Just before the news of the rout at Petersham, Samuel Adams had proposed in the senate that the governor should be requested to write to Congress and inform that body of what was going on in Ma.s.sachusetts, stating that ”although the legislature are firmly persuaded that ... in all probability they will be able speedily and effectively to suppress the rebellion, yet, if any unforeseen event should take place which may frustrate the measures of government, they rely upon such support from the United States as is expressly and solemnly stipulated by the articles of confederation.” A resolution to this effect was carried in the senate, but defeated in the house through the influence of western county members in sympathy with the insurgents; and incredible as it may seem, the argument was freely used that it was incompatible with the dignity of Ma.s.sachusetts to allow United States troops to set foot upon her soil. When we reflect that the a.r.s.enal at Springfield, where the most considerable disturbance occurred, was itself federal property, the climax of absurdity might seem to have been reached.
[Sidenote: Congress afraid to interfere.]
It was left for Congress itself, however, to cap that climax. The progress of the insurrection in the autumn in Vermont, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Ma.s.sachusetts, as well as the troubles in Rhode Island, had alarmed the whole country. It was feared that the insurgents in these states might join forces, and in some way kindle a flame that would run through the land. Accordingly Congress in October called upon the states for a continental force, but did not dare to declare openly what it was to be used for. It was thought necessary to say that the troops were wanted for an expedition against the northwestern Indians! National humiliation could go no further than such a confession, on the part of our central government, that it dared not use force in defence of those very articles of confederation to which it owed its existence. Things had come to such a pa.s.s that people of all shades of opinion were beginning to agree upon one thing,--that something must be done, and done quickly.
CHAPTER V.
GERMS OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY.
[Sidenote: Creation of a national domain beyond the Alleghanies.]
While the events we have heretofore contemplated seemed to prophesy the speedy dissolution and downfall of the half-formed American Union, a series of causes, obscure enough at first, but emerging gradually into distinctness and then into prominence, were preparing the way for the foundation of a national sovereignty. The growth of this sovereignty proceeded stealthily along such ancient lines of precedent as to take ready hold of people's minds, although few, if any, understood the full purport of what they were doing. Ever since the days when our English forefathers dwelt in village communities in the forests of northern Germany, the idea of a common land or folkland--a territory belonging to the whole community, and upon which new communities might be organized by a process a.n.a.logous to what physiologists call cell-multiplication--had been perfectly familiar to everybody. Towns.h.i.+ps budded from village or parish folkland in Maryland and Ma.s.sachusetts in the seventeenth century, just as they had done in England before the time of Alfred. The critical period of the Revolution witnessed the repet.i.tion of this process on a gigantic scale. It witnessed the creation of a national territory beyond the Alleghanies,--an enormous folkland in which all the thirteen old states had a common interest, and upon which new and derivative communities were already beginning to organize themselves. Questions about public lands are often regarded as the driest of historical deadwood. Discussions about them in newspapers and magazines belong to the cla.s.s of articles which the general reader usually skips. Yet there is a great deal of the philosophy of history wrapped up in this subject, and it now comes to confront us at a most interesting moment; for without studying this creation of a national domain between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, we cannot understand how our Federal Union came to be formed.
[Sidenote: Conflicting claims to the western territory.]
When England began to contend with France and Spain for the possession of North America, she made royal grants of land upon this continent, in royal ignorance of its extent and configuration. But until the Seven Years' War the eastward and westward part.i.tioning of these grants was of little practical consequence; for English dominion was bounded by the Alleghanies, and everything beyond was in the hands of the French. In that most momentous war the genius of the elder Pitt won the region east of the Mississippi for men of English race, while the vast territory of Louisiana, beyond, pa.s.sed under the control of Spain. During the Revolutionary War, in a series of romantic expeditions, the state of Virginia took military possession of a great part of the wilderness east of the Mississippi, founding towns in the Ohio and c.u.mberland valleys, and occupying with garrisons of her state militia the posts at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. We have seen how, through the skill of our commissioners at Paris, this n.o.ble country was secured for the Americans in the treaty of 1783, in spite of the reluctance of France and the hostility of Spain. Throughout the Revolutionary War the Americans claimed the territory as part of the United States; but when once it pa.s.sed from under the control of Great Britain, into whose hands did it go? To whom did it belong? To this question there were various and conflicting answers. North Carolina, indeed, had already taken possession of what was afterward called Tennessee, and at the beginning of the war Virginia had annexed Kentucky. As to these points there could be little or no dispute. But with the territory north of the Ohio River it was very different. Four states laid claim either to the whole or to parts of this territory, and these claims were not simply conflicting, but irreconcilable.
[Sidenote: Claims of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut.]
The charters of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut were framed at a time when people had not got over the notion that this part of the continent was not much wider than Mexico, and accordingly these colonies had received the royal permission to extend from sea to sea. The existence of a foreign colony of Dutchmen in the neighbourhood was a trifle about which these doc.u.ments did not trouble themselves; but when Charles II.
conquered this colony and bestowed it upon his brother, the province of New York became a stubborn fact, which could not be disregarded.
Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut peaceably settled their boundary line with New York, and laid no claims to land within the limits of that state; but they still continued to claim what lay beyond it, as far as the Mississippi River, where the Spanish dominion now began. The regions claimed by Ma.s.sachusetts have since become the southern halves of the states of Michigan and Wisconsin. The region claimed by Connecticut was a narrow strip running over the northern portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and we have seen how much trouble was occasioned in Pennsylvania by this circ.u.mstance.
[Sidenote: Claims of New York.]
But New York laughed to scorn these claims of Connecticut. In the seventeenth century all the Algonquin tribes between Lake Erie and the c.u.mberland Mountains had become tributary to the Iroquois; and during the hundred years' struggle between France and England for the supremacy of this continent the Iroquois had put themselves under the protection of England, which thenceforth always treated them as an appurtenance to New York. For a hundred years before the Revolution, said New York, she had borne the expense of protecting the Iroquois against the French, and by various treaties she had become lawful suzerain over the Six Nations and their lands and the lands of their Algonquin va.s.sals. On such grounds New York claimed pretty much everything north of the Ohio and east of the Miami.
[Sidenote: Virginia's claims.]
But according to Virginia, it made little difference what Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut and New York thought about the matter, for every acre of land, from the Ohio River up to Lake Superior, belonged to her. Was not she the lordly ”Old Dominion,” out of which every one of the states had been carved? Even Cape Cod and Cape Ann were said to be in ”North Virginia,” until, in 1614, Captain John Smith invented the name ”New England.” It was a fair presumption that any uncarved territory belonged to Virginia; and it was further held that the original charter of 1609 used language which implicitly covered the northwestern territory, though, as Thomas Paine showed, in a pamphlet ent.i.tled ”Public Good,”
this was very doubtful. But besides all this, it was Virginia that had actually conquered the disputed territory, and held every military post in it except those which the British had not surrendered; and who could doubt that possession was nine points in the law?
[Sidenote: Maryland's novel and beneficent suggestion, Oct. 15, 1777.]
Of these conflicting claims, those of New York and Virginia were the most grasping and the most formidable, because they concerned a region into which immigration was beginning rapidly to pour. They were regarded with strong disfavour by the small states, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, which were so situated that they never could expand in any direction. They looked forward with dread to a future in which New York and Virginia might wax powerful enough to tyrannize over their smaller neighbours. But of these protesting states it was only Maryland that fairly rose to the occasion, and suggested an idea which seemed startling at first, but from which mighty and unforeseen consequences were soon to follow.[5] It was on the 15th of October, 1777, just two days before Burgoyne's surrender, that this path-breaking idea first found expression in Congress. The articles of confederation were then just about to be presented to the several states to be ratified, and the question arose as to how the conflicting western claims should be settled. A motion was then made that ”the United States in Congress a.s.sembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power to ascertain and fix the western boundary of such states as claim to the Mississippi, ... and lay out the land beyond the boundary so ascertained into separate and independent states, from time to time, as the numbers and circ.u.mstances of the people may require.” To carry out such a motion, it would be necessary for the four claimant states to surrender their claims into the hands of the United States, and thus create a domain which should be owned by the confederacy in common. So bold a step towards centralization found no favour at the time. No other state but Maryland voted for it.
[Sidenote: The several states yield their claims in favour of the United States, 1780-85.]
But Maryland's course was well considered: she pursued it resolutely, and was rewarded with complete success. By February, 1779, all the other states had ratified the articles of confederation. In the following May, Maryland declared that she would not ratify the articles until she should receive some definite a.s.surance that the northwestern territory should become the common property of the United States, ”subject to be parcelled out by Congress into free, convenient, and independent governments.” The question, thus boldly brought into the foreground, was earnestly discussed in Congress and in the state legislatures, until in February, 1780, partly through the influence of General Schuyler, New York decided to cede all her claims to the western lands. This act of New York set things in motion, so that in September Congress recommended to all states having western claims to cede them to the United States.
In October, Congress, still pursuing the Maryland idea, went farther, and declared that all such lands as might be ceded should be sold in lots to immigrants and the money used for federal purposes, and that in due season distinct states should be formed there, to be admitted into the Union, with the same rights of sovereignty as the original thirteen states. As an inducement to Virginia, it was further provided that any state which had incurred expense during the war in defending its western possessions should receive compensation. To this general invitation Connecticut immediately responded by offering to cede everything to which she laid claim, except 3,250,000 acres on the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie, which she wished to reserve for educational purposes.
Was.h.i.+ngton disapproved of this reservation, but it was accepted by Congress, though the business was not completed until 1786. This part of the state of Ohio is still commonly spoken of as the ”Connecticut Reserve.” Half a million acres were given to citizens of Connecticut whose property had been destroyed in the British raids upon her coast towns, and the rest were sold, in 1795, for $1,200,000, in aid of schools and colleges.
In January, 1781, Virginia offered to surrender all the territory northwest of the Ohio, provided that Congress would guarantee her in the possession of Kentucky. This gave rise to a discussion which lasted nearly three years, until Virginia withdrew her proviso and made the cession absolute. It was accepted by Congress on the 1st of March, 1784, and on the 19th of April, in the following year,--the tenth anniversary of Lexington,--Ma.s.sachusetts surrendered her claims; and the whole northwestern territory--the area of the great states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (excepting the Connecticut Reserve)--thus became the common property of the half-formed nation.
Maryland, however, did not wait for this. As soon as New York and Virginia had become thoroughly committed to the movement, she ratified the articles of confederation, which thus went into operation on the 1st of March, 1781.
[Sidenote: Magnanimity of Virginia.]