state of Franklin, and the proposed greater Franklin of Arthur Campbell. Virginia retained her portion of this tract, and assimilated the descendants of these leaders to the great planter type; but the Tennessee region was organized as the Territory of the United States south of the river Ohio, in 1790, and six years later it became a state. The union of the Cumberland pasture-lands with the mountain tracts of East Tennessee was physiographically unnatural. In the debates at Nashville, preceding the Civil War, the proposition for organizing a union state of Franklin out of the mountain lands received much attention,1 and it was this area that furnished most of the Tennessee soldiers for the Union army in that war, and which to-day holds to the Republican party, while the rest of the state has usually given its votes to the Democratic party. In the Kentucky unit, too, after a decade of struggle, independent statehood was acquired. All of these movements were natural expressions of physiographic influences. They were all led by sons of Virginia, and the same era that saw the downfall of her tobacco-planting aristocracy seemed likely to witness the restriction of Virginia's vast domain to limits narrower than those imposed in the Civil War. But she was able to resist the full effects of these influences.

Another result revealed by this general view, is the variety of the new governmental plans, and the fact that there appeared in this area of vacant lands, as in the colonial area long before, plans of proprietary companies, and social compacts, or associations. The Ordinances of Congress, moreover, provided for a type of government comparable to that of the royal colonies; the idea of close control by the general government was common to both; but the type was revolutionized by the American conditions. The weakness of the proprietary plans, also, shows the influence of the wilderness training in liberty. The theory of the associations was a natural outcome of the combined influences of Puritan political philosophy, in its Scotch-Irish form, the revolutionary spirit, and the forest freedom. All through these compacts runs the doctrine that the people in an unoccupied land have the right to determine their own political institutions. In announcing the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty," therefore, Cass and Douglas merely gave utterance to a time-honored Western idea.2

This idea was, nevertheless, merely an extension of the prin

1 Phelan, Tennessee, 104.

2 A committee of the Wisconsin legislature declared in 1843 that it was a doctrine well understood in this country, that all "political communities have the right of governing themselves in their own way within their lawful boundaries."

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ciples and methods of the Revolution to the West. preting the history of colonial settlement so as to meet the needs of the revolutionary arguments, John Adams had held that the original colonists carried with them only natural rights, and having settled a new country according to the law of nature, were not bound to submit to English law unless they chose it. Jefferson had compared the original colonial migrations to the migrations` of their Saxon ancestors to England; and he had asserted that the colonists "possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of... going in quest of new habitations and of there establishing new societies under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. . . . Settlements having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in the mother country." Such were the theories urged by the revolutionary leaders respecting the political rights of settlers in vacant regions, at the very time when the frontiersmen were occupying the lands beyond the mountains. These doctrines formed convenient bases for the formation of associations, for the assertion of the ownership of their lands by the settlers in defiance of the parent state; for their complaints against the actions of these states and for their demands for independence. The revolutionary states found themselves obliged to repudiate some of their own doctrines in dealing with their western communities. In the Franklin convention the Declaration of Independence was read to show that reasons for separation from England urged in that document applied equally well to the relation of the western counties to the counties of the coast.

It is a noteworthy fact, however, that so many of these associations accepted the laws and constitution of an older state. The frontier did not proceed on the principle of tabula rasa; it modified older forms, and infused into them the spirit of democracy.1

Examining the grievances of the Westerners, one is impressed with the similarity of the reasons for wishing independent statehood, in all the petitions from all the regions. They were chiefly the following: disputed boundaries, uncertain land titles, inefficient organization of justice and military defence, due to the remoteness of the capital; the difficulty of paying taxes in specie; the dislike of paying taxes at all when the pioneers were serving in Indian warfare, and were paying money into the state treasury for their lands; general incompatibility of interests between the frontiers

1

Compare the Exeter covenant where the "liberties of our English Colony of the Massachusetts" were asserted.

men and the planters, and the aggravation of this fact by the control which the East retained in the legislatures.1 Perhaps no factor in the explanation of the new state activity is of more importance than the Westerners' desire to organize states that should own the vacant lands within their bounds. This would enable them to determine the price of the public lands, and this would enable them to reduce taxes while assuming government. But it was just this that Congress could not be expected to permit. The policy of Calhoun to win Western support at a later period by yielding to the states the public lands within their limits, was based on a thorough understanding of Western traits.

Through all these petitions and memorials runs the sentiment that Congress might, or ought to, assume jurisdiction over the West. The frontiersmen exerted a constant pressure on Congress to exalt its powers. The Crown had asserted its control over the lands beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic by the Proclamation of 1763, when it forbade settlement and the patenting of land therein. On the eve of the Revolution it had all but completed a grant to the Vandalia Company, providing for a colonial government in the limits of Virginia's trans-Alleghany claim. This com pany tried to persuade Congress to assert the possession and jurisdiction of the lands beyond the mountains, as the property of the whole Union by devolution from the Crown when independence was declared. To the westerners the theory of Congressional control was attractive. It seemed to exact nothing and to promise much. They looked for organization into independent states of the Union; they looked for deliverance from the rule of the coast counties in the legislatures, the rule of a section radically unlike the West; they looked for lighter taxation and for all the advantages of self-government; they hoped to own the lands within their borders. It is not strange that with these ideals they appealed to the central government for organization into states. But in any case there were strong national tendencies in the West. These communities were made up of settlers from many states, and this mixture of peoples diminished the loyalty to the claimant states, and increased the tendency to appeal to national authority. It was chiefly, however, because the national power could promote the interests of the West that that section was so ready to turn to it. It was ready to abandon this attitude when its interest was threatened, as the Mississippi question clearly shows. But for the

1 Compare Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 127 (1853); Debates in Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1829–1830; Brevard, Digest of S. C. Laws (1814) pp. xiv, ff.; N. C. Colonial Records, VII., pp. xix, ff.

most part it has been for the interest of the national government to legislate in the interest of the West, and so the West has been not only in the era of the Revolution, but ever since, a great nationalizing force in our history.

In fine, we see in these agitations along the Alleghanies the early political efforts of the rude, boisterous West, checked as yet by the tide-water area, but already giving promise of the day when, in the person of Andrew Jackson, its forces of democracy and nationalism should rule the republic.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER.

OFFICE-SEEKING DURING WASHINGTON'S

ADMINISTRATION

WHEN Washington became President under the Constitution, he was without any precedent which he could use with advantage in selecting men for public office. In England and France, the two countries with whose governments he was most familiar, offices were obtained by court favor or by family influence. Their practices were examples to be shunned rather than followed. In this country there had been no system, but there had been a general desire to have meritorious government officials, if meritorious men could be induced to serve. In the states all but the highest officers were named by the governors or elected by the legislatures, and the federal officials were chosen by Congress. But with the adoption of the Constitution there was a great change. Many state offices became federal offices, and the early congresses created a large number of new places, which the change of gov ernment rendered necessary. The fountain head of all appointing power was the President. The advice and consent of the Senate were to be invoked only after he had made the nomination. He was to create no offices, but he was to fill all the offices. Washington, as the executive head of a new government, was confronted with a task of extraordinary magnitude, and not the least of its difficulties was involved in the question of appointments to office. Before his inauguration, even before the requisite number of states had ratified the Constitution, letters from army officers and civilians, asking for appointments under the new government, began pouring in upon him. It was no more possible for him than it has been possible for his successors to make all of the appointments from his personal knowledge of suitable men. He sought out a few for the higher positions, and in a more limited proportion for the lesser offices, but the bulk of the offices he filled by selections from among those who applied for them. It may be presumed that some of the applications were never reduced to writing, and that some never became a part of the President's official papers, but so many are preserved among the government archives that it is safe to say they include a considerable majority of all the applications made. They were sent to the Department