ment the free lands are gone, and with conditions comparable to those of Europe, we have to reshape the ideals and institutions. fashioned in the age of wilderness-winning to the new conditions. of an occupied country.

Not only is our own development best understood in connection with the occupation of the West; it is the fact of unoccupied territory in America that sets the evolution of American and European institutions in contrast. In the Old World, such institutions were gradually evolved in relation to successive stages of social development, or they were the outcome of a struggle for existence by the older forms against the newer creations of the statesman, or against the institutions of rival peoples. There was in the Old World no virgin soil on which political gardeners might experiment with new varieties. This America furnished at each successive area of Western advance. Men who had lived under developed institutions were transplanted into the wilderness with the opportunity and the necessity of adapting their old institutions to their new environment, or of creating new ones capable of meeting the changed conditions.1

It is this that makes the study of Western state-making in the Revolutionary period of peculiar interest. In the colonial era the task of forming governments in vacuis locis fell to Europeans; in the Revolution the task was undertaken by Americans on a new frontier. The question at once arises, How would they go about this, and on what principles? Would they strike boldly out regardless of inherited institutions? Would the work be done by the general government; by the separate states that claimed the jurisdiction of these unoccupied lands; or by the settlers themselves? To collect the principal instances of attempts at the formation of states in the West in this era, and briefly to consider the relations of the movement as a whole, is the purpose of this paper. An attempt will be made to interpret the movement from the point of view of the backwoodsmen.

Three types of colonial government are usually mentioned as having flourished on the Atlantic coast: the charter colonies, outgrowths of the trading company organization; the proprietary, modelled on the English palatinate; and the provincial colonies, which, having been established under one of the forms just mentioned, were taken under the government of the crown, and obliged to seek the constitutional law of their organization in the instructions and commissions given to the royal governor. In all

1"The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Report of the American Historical Association, 1893, p. 199.

these types the transformations due to the American conditions. were profound. Colonial political growth was not achieved by imitating English forms, but by reshaping English institutions, bit by bit, as occasion required, to American needs. The product had many of the features of an original creation. But in one type of colonial organizations, which has usually been left out of the classification, the influence of the wilderness conditions was especially plain. The Plymouth compact is the earliest and best known example of the organization of a colony by a social compact, but it is by no means exceptional. In Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Haven, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, the Puritan settlers, finding themselves without legal rights on vacant lands, signed compacts of government, or plantation covenants, suggested no doubt by their church governments, agreeing to submit to the common will. We shall have to recur to this important type of organization later on in our study.

When the tide-water colonial organization had been perfected and lands taken up, population flowed into the region beyond the "fall line," and here again vacant lands continued to influence the form of American institutions. They brought about expansion, which, in itself, meant a transformation of old institutions; they broke down social distinctions in the West, and by causing economic equality, they promoted political equality and democracy. Offering the freedom of the unexploited wilderness, they promoted individualism. One of the most important results of the rush of population into these vacant lands, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was the settlement of non-English stocks in the West. All along the frontier the Palatine Germans (Pennsylvania Dutch) and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians ascended the rivers that flowed into the Atlantic, and followed the southward trend of the valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. These pioneers were of different type from the planters of the South, or the merchants and seamen of the New England coast. The

1 The covenant of the settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1639, is typical. "Wee, his [Charles I] loyall subjects bretheren of the church of Exeter, situate and lying upon the river of Piscataquacke, with other inhabitants there considering with ourselves the holy will of god and our owne necessity, that wee should not live without wholesome laws & government amongst us, of wch we are altogether destitute doe in the name of Christ & in the sight of god, combine ourselves together to erect and set up amongst us such government as shall be to our best discerning agreeable to the will of god, professing ourselves subject to our sovereign Lord King Charles, according to the liberties of our English colony of the Massachusetts," etc. N. H. Provincial Papers, I. 132. Compare Osgood, in Political Science Quarterly, March, 1891; Borgeaud, Rise of Modern Democracy; J. Adams, Works, IV. 110; Jefferson, Works, VII. 467; Wells, Samuel Adams, I. 429.

Scotch-Irish element was ascendent, and this contentious, selfreliant, hardy, backwoods stock, with its rude and vigorous forest life, gave the tone to Western thought in the Revolutionary era. A log hut, a little clearing, edged by the primeval forest, with the palisaded fort near by, - this was the type of home they made. As they pushed the frontier on, they held their lands at the price. of their blood shed in incessant struggles with the Indians. Descendants of men who had fought James II., they were the heirs. of the political philosophy of Knox and Andrew Melville. Their preachers, with rifle at the pulpit's edge, preached not only the theology of Calvin, but the gospel of the freedom of the individual, and the compact theory of the state. They constituted a new order of Americans. From the social conditions thus created came Patrick Henry, and at a later time, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln. These social conditions gave us the heroes of border warfare, and the men who, in the Revolutionary times, demanded independent statehood for their settlements.

By the middle of the eighteenth century it had become evident that the engrossing of the eastern lands would induce the rising. tide of population to flow across the Alleghanies. As the Old World had produced the tide-water area with its modified English institutions, so the thirteen colonies were now to produce states on the Western Waters, and a political life still more transformed. A multitude of propositions for great land companies, and for new colonial governments in the trans-Alleghany lands, showed a consciousness that the advance was at hand. Fearful of arousing the Indians, and apprehensive that the advance of settlements would withdraw the colonists beyond the reach of British government and trade, the king issued a proclamation in 1763, forbidding the granting of lands or the making of settlements beyond the sources of the rivers that fall into the Atlantic. But neither crown officers nor colonists acted on the theory that settlement was to be permanently excluded. In 1768, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Six Nations ceded to the crown whatever title they had to lands between the Ohio and the Tennessee. At the same time they conveyed to Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan, a firm that traded with the Indians around Pittsburgh and in the Illinois. country, a tract comprising about one-fourth of the State of West Virginia, as now constituted. This tract lay between the Little Kanawha and the Monongahela, and was named Indiana. basis of this grant a more extensive and ambitious company was formed, which absorbed the Indiana company and the former Ohio company and included such men as Franklin in its list of members.

After a persistent effort it gained from the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations a report in 1773, recommending the grant of an immense tract, comprising nearly the present state of West Virginia together with that part of Kentucky east of a line from the Scioto to Cumberland Gap.1

All of this area was to be erected into a new colony and to bear the name of Vandalia. It was reported in the American newspapers that the seat of the government was to be at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, and that Mr. Wharton, of Philadelphia, was to be the first governor. Although all of the process of transfer, excepting a few formalities, had been effected, the outbreak of the American Revolution put a stop to the grant. The company soon appealed to Congress, urging that body to assert its right to the crown lands as the property of the whole Union, and to confirm the Vandalia grant. The intrigues of this company had a marked effect on the actions of Congress, and of the Western settlers; and its career is also interesting as illustrating the English policy. At the time when settlement was beginning to cross the Alleghanies, and on the eve of American independence, England had announced her intention to govern the West through great proprietary companies, headed by wealthy or influential men in that country and America.

The treaty of Fort Stanwix had an additional effect in the impetus it gave to the advance of the frontiersmen by affording them a right to enter these Indian lands. The pioneers had their own ideas of liberty and of government, and were not to have their political destiny shaped without a part in the movement. Already they had reached the mountain wall that separated East and West. Before them lay the "Western Waters." From the mountains the backwoodsman, looking to the East, could see, through the forbidding mountain masses, the broken chasms along which flowed the sources of the far-stretching rivers, on whose lower courses the tide-water planters dwelt. Turning away from the rented lands of the old provinces, he saw other rivers cutting their way to the West to join the Mississippi. These river systems constituted four natural areas.

1. The New River, rising in North Carolina near the head springs of rivers that flowed to the Atlantic, tore a defiant course through the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies to join the Great Kanawha in West Virginia. Another tributary of the Great Kanawha, the Greenbrier, rising near the sources of the Mononga

1 See map accompanying this paper. The boundaries are described in Franklin, Works, X. 348, 349.

hela, skirted the western edge of the Alleghanies in its southward flow. Here on the upper waters of the Ohio, was the physiographic basis for a state, a natural unit, rudely cut by the Pennsylvania boundary line, and apportioned between that state and Virginia, in spite of the veto of the Alleghanies.

2. Near to the springs of the New River were the many streams that flowed between the ridges of the Cumberland Mountains and the Alleghanies to join the Tennessee. These affluents of the Tennessee, Powell's River, the Clinch, the Holston, the French Broad, the Nolichucky, and the Watauga, walled in to east and west by mountains, made another natural unit. Here Virginia's southern line ran right across these river courses, and left the settlements at the head of the Holston in Virginia, while their neighbors lower on the river were under the jurisdiction of North Carolina;. and between these settlements and the parent States ran the Alleghany wall. It would be strange if these physiographic facts did not produce their natural result.

3. Passing through Cumberland Gap at Virginia's southwest corner, the pioneer reached another area of Virginia's back lands, the greenswards of Kentucky. This land was bounded on the north by the Ohio, while to the south was the Cumberland, forming a natural boundary, but severed for the most part from the political bounds of the region by the same unreasonable Virginia line that had cut in two the settlements on the Tennessee. These Kentucky fields constituted another natural economic area.

4. Across the Ohio lay the wide Northwest, between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, its ownership in dispute between Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, under their charter bounds, and New York, through her protectorate over the Six Nations.

As the pioneer on his mountain height looked eastward and westward, the conviction was forced upon him that he had come to the parting of ways. Not long could he be held by the political reins of the Atlantic coast; even England had recognized and feared this. But not only did these "Western Waters," as the pioneer called them, reveal the separation of East from West, they insured the unity of the "Western World," to use another of his phrases. The waters of the West Virginia region interlocked with the waters of eastern Tennessee; on the borders of the same settlements, Cumberland Gap opened like a door to Kentucky; and all these winding rivers poured their flood into the Mississippi, the indispensable highway of commerce for the Western lands.

Hardly was the treaty of Fort Stanwix made, when Daniel Boone was on his way from his cabin on the Yadkin, "in quest of