those who had, as you said, outraged your interests; while I found it best, since it enabled me, not indeed to return to favor with a monster whom I have always detested, but at last to reopen the door of that fair France which I never found elsewhere in my travels.

It is useless for me to recapitulate here all I did to obtain the result which brought you fifty thousand dollars. I sacrificed my existence, all that man holds most sacred. You lent me a sum of some thousand dollars, which it is out of my power to repay, since Vigaroux, who kept rather a large amount for me, died my debtor, and I can obtain none of it. In this situation you set out for Europe, and I remained exposed to all the vexations of the two parties; a mark for all their sarcasms. I had to fight with Willing, with Colonel Roussel, and I was nearly assassinated in New York by an English party.

You were at Paris when I sailed, bringing an order enclosed in Monroe's despatches for Barlow to pay me 84,000 francs; but instead of coming to Paris, I was arrested on landing; all my effects were seized; my properties were sold; and my brother was thrown into prison, whence he came out only a few weeks ago. In this frightful situation, I did not know. to what saint to turn. England could not offer me an asylum; yet I was constrained to go there, after being shipwrecked at Gibraltar; and on my arrival, though I travelled under my own name, I was recognized, and Foster instructed the government of all my movements. I was taken at Abbé Roufigny's, Castle Street, and thrown into the prisons of Tothillfields, where I remained 213 days because I refused to tell what would have irrevocably destroyed you (even at Paris). Returned to my country, deprived of all assistance, I learn that you have complained of me; and of what, I pray? Because I have not destroyed you in England? because I have caused you to get fifty thousand dollars in America? finally, because I still persist in my loyal conduct towards you? Oh, if it is those thousand dollars that you gave me when you were gorged with gold! then I shall say to you: Ad impossibile nemo tenetur, since I have no longer a sous; but if you want the despatches that I had saved with the order of Monroe to count me down that sum, even if you want to return to America, I offer it to you, and, in offering it, I do all I can do, since I have never mixed in your affair except to gain a right to return to my country, which the return of my sovereign has incontestably restored to me.

This is, sir, all I can do in this affair, and you will have the goodness to return me the effects of mine which you have, and my declarations of relinquishment. On my part, I should have crossed the Atlantic only to preserve the most flattering idea of you; but if, contrary to my expectation, you reject this arrangement, do not blame me for taking the step of publishing my situation with all your letters, notably that in which you tell me that I am an extraordinary man since I have decided those wretches, that you have seduced, to keep their word, and that all your ambition is that we may meet in Paris to laugh at the expense of these wretches, who tremble for a bagatelle of ten thousand pounds sterling!-What a govern

ment !!!

I am much of your mind; but I think, too, that nobody will blame me for the course which I should be obliged to take, and which I have till now refused to take, for considerations which were personal to you and were equally repugnant to my delicacy and my honor.

Obliged to quit Paris for some time, I have charged M.

with my

full powers to terminate this affair. When I return to the city, I shall be happy to renew an acquaintance formed under very unfortunate auspices, but such as have always opened for the future the perspective of what one may attain when one is aided by your counsels and your genius. I beg you never to doubt the distinguished sentiments entertained for you during life by

Your very, etc.,

E.

HENRY ADAMS.

WESTERN STATE-MAKING IN THE REVOLU

TIONARY ERA

I

-

Tur term "West "in American history is not limited to a single At first the Atlantic coast was the West, the West of Furope; then the lands between tide-water and the Alleghanies became the West. In the second half of the eighteenth century the territory between these mountains and the Mississippi was occupied, and became the West of the Revolutionary era. In consequence of this steady march of the West across the continent, the term represents not only different areas, it stands also for a stage in American development. Whatever region was most recently reclaimed from the wilderness, was most characteristically Western In other words, the distinctive thing about the West is its relation to tree lands; and it is the influence of her free lands that has determined the larger lines of American development.

The country exhibits three phases of growth. First came the period of the application of Furopean men, institutions, and ideas to the tide water area of America. In this period of colonization, English trars and institutions preponderated, though modifed by But the constant touch of this pet of the oventry with the O2 World prevented the modifying 1ste of Phe new enyngment from having their full effect.

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 wilderess 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 tasi: 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.1 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, protessing 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; Bergeaui, Rise of Modern Denocracy; J. Adams, Works, IV. 110; Jefferson, Works, VII. 427; Wells. Samuel Adams, I. 429.