I. THE LAND CLAIMS.

Having indicated the historic place and territorial situation of the western lands in question, we shall now turn to the specific claims of Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, the only States, which after the separation of the colonies from the mother-country, had any legal title to lands northwest of the Ohio.

The charter granted by James I. to South Virginia, in 1609, was the most comprehensive of all the colonial charters, for it embraced the entire northwest of North America and, within certain limits, all the islands along the coast of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. It is not very surprising that the ideas and language of the privy council should have been somewhat hazy as to the exact whereabouts of the South Sea, for Stith, one of the early historians of Virginia, tells us that in 1608, when the London Company were soliciting their patent, an expedition was organized under Captain Newport to sail up the James river and find a passage to the South Sea. Captain John Smith also was once commissioned to seek a new route to China by ascending the Chickahominy. This charter of 1609 is the only one which we shall cite in this paper, for it was especially against the enormous claims of Virginia that Maryland raised so just and effective a protest. The following is the grant:

"All those lands, countries and territories situate, lying and being in that part of America called Virginia, from the point of land called Cape or Point Comfort, all along the sea-coast to the northward two hundred miles and from the said Point or Cape Comfort, all along the sea-coast to the southward two hundred miles; and all that space and circuit of land lying from the sea-coast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land throughout, from sea to sea, west and

1 Stith's History of the first discovery and settlement of Virginia. Reprinted for Joseph Sabin, 1865, p. 77.

northwest; and also all the islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of both seas of the precinct aforesaid."

The extraordinary ambiguity of this grant of 1609, which was always appealed to as a legal title by Virginia, was first shown by Thomas Paine, the great publicist of the American and French Revolutions, in a pamphlet called "Public Good," written in 1780, and containing, as the author says upon his title-page, “an investigation of the claims of Virginia to the vacant western territory, and of the right of the United States to the same; with some outlines of a plan for laying out a new State, to be applied as a fund, for carrying on the war, or redeeming the national debt." Paine shows how the words of the charter of 1609 could be interpreted in different ways; for example, the words "all along the seacoast" might signify a straight line or the indented line of the coast. The chief ambiguity, however, lay in the interpretation of the words "up into the land throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest." From which point was the northwest line to be drawn, from the point on the sea-coast two hundred miles above, or from the point two hundred miles below Cape Comfort? The charter does not state distinctly. The logical order of terms would imply that the lower point below Cape Comfort should be taken as the starting-point for the northwestern line. In that case, Virginia would have a triangular boundary and a definite area something larger than Pennsylvania.

1 Laws of the United States respecting the Public Lands, (Washington, 1828,) p. 81. See also Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, etc., Part II., p. 1897. (Poore's ed., 1877).

-Works of Thomas Paine, I., p. 267.

The more favorable interpretation for Virginia and, perhaps, in view of the expression "from sea to sea," more natural interpretation, was to draw the northwestern line from the point on the sea-coast two hundred miles above Point Comfort and the western line from the southern limit below Point Comfort. This gave Virginia the greater part, at least, of the entire northwest, for the lines diverged continually, thus:

In 1624, the London Company was dissolved, and Virginia became a royal province, the Governor being appointed by the King, but the people elected a House of Burgesses. No alteration appears to have been made at that time in the boundaries established by the charter of 1609, but the northern limits of Virginia were afterwards curtailed by grants to Lord Baltimore and William Penn, and the southern limits by a grant to the proprietors of Carolina.' From a letter

1 The charter of Maryland was granted in 1632, and may be found in Bacon's Laws of Maryland at Large, or in Hazard, I., pp. 327-36. The charter of Pennsylvania bears the date of 1681, and is contained in Proud's History of Pennsylvania, I., pp. 171-87. The original charter of Carolina (1663), for which Locke's famous constitution was written, is said to have been copied from the charter

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of Edmund Burke to the General Assembly of New York, for which province he was employed as agent, it is clear that, in questions concerning the boundary of royal provinces, it was the uniform doctrine and practice of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, to regard "no rule but the king's will." A royal proclamation was issued in 1763, prohibiting colonial governors from granting patents for land beyond the sources of any of the rivers which flow into the Atlantic ocean from the west or northwest. ton regarded this proclamation as a temporary expedient for quieting the minds of the Indians, and he proceeded therefore, with the greatest tranquillity, to seek out and survey good lands for future speculation.*

Washing

But efforts were being made to establish a new colony back of Virginia. The so-called "Ohio Company" had been founded as early as 1748, by Thomas Lee, Lawrence Washington, Augustine Washington and others, for the colonization of the western country. A grant had been obtained, from the crown, of five hundred thousand acres of land in the region of the Ohio, and the efforts of this company to open up a road into the western valleys precipitated the French and Indian War. Probably the proclamation of 1763 was partly designed to pacify the Indians by reserving for their use, under the sovereign protection of England, the lands back of the Alleghanies and beyond the Ohio, but

of Maryland. See Lucas' Charters of the Old English Colonies, London, 1850, p. 97. See also Poore's ed. of Constitutions, Charters, etc.

1 Burke's letter, which is most interesting for its exposition of the Quebec Bill of 1774, annexing to Canada the country northwest of the Ohio, was first published in the New York Historical Society Collections, 2d Series, II., pp. 219-25.

2 This proclamation is to be found in the Land Laws of the United States, pp. 84-88, or in Franklin's Works, IV., p. 374, at the conclusion of his famous paper on Ohio Settlement."

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3 See letter to Crawford, September 21, 1767. Sparks' Life and Writings of Washington, II., p. 346.

4

Sparks' Life and Writings of Washington, II., p. 479.

schemes for a new government in that region were being discussed in England as well as in America.'

In 1766, Benjamin Franklin' was laying plans for a second great land company, which was finally organized and called the Vandalia or Walpole Company. It was composed of thirty-two Americans and two Londoners. Benjamin Franklin was really the moving spirit in the enterprise, but he persuaded Thomas Walpole, a London banker of eminence, to serve as the figure-head. The company petitioned, in 1769, for a grant of two and a half million acres of western land, lying between the thirty-eighth and forty-second parallels of latitude and to the east of the river Scioto. Franklin was in London and labored hard with Cabinet officers and the Board of Trade for the success of Walpole's petition. It was urged that the company offered more for this grant than the whole region back of the mountains had cost the British government, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Indians, in 1768. The claims of the Ohio Company were also merged in this new scheme, but the report thereon was long delayed through the influence of Lord Hillsborough. A "new colony back of Virginia" was much talked of, however, about the year 1770. Lord Hillsborough himself had some correspondence that year with the Governor of Virginia on this subject. From a letter of George Washington to Lord Botetourt, and from subsequent correspondence between Washington and Lord Dunmore, Botetourt's successor as Governor of Virginia, it is perfectly clear that a new and independent colony was in prospect back of the Alleghanies.

Indeed, a rival scheme, under the name of the Mississippi Company, seems to have been organized by gentlemen of

1A pamphlet was published in London, in 1763, entitled "The Advantages of a settlement upon the Ohio in North America." * Works of Franklin, IV., p. 233.

3 See Works of Thomas Paine, I., 290.

'Writings of Washington, II., pp. 356, 360.