tion for the organization of a government over their district, Monroe took part in the answer, that congress had under consideration the plan of a temporary government for their district in which it would manifest a due regard to their interest.* This is the last act of congress relating to the West in which Monroe participated. With the first Monday of the coming November the rule of rotation would exclude him from congress.

During the summer Kean was absent from congress, and his place on the committee was taken by Melancthon Smith + of New York. In September, Monroe and King went on a mission from Congress to the legislature of Pennsylvania, and their places were filled by Henry of Maryland and Dane. The committee with its new members represented the ruling sentiment of the house; and its report, which was made on the nineteenth of September, required of a western state before its admission into the union a population equal to one thirteenth part of the citizens of the thirteen original states according to the last preceding enumeration. Had this report been adopted, and had the decennial census of the population of territories and states alone furnished the rule, Ohio must have waited twenty years longer for admission into the union; Indiana would have been received only after 1850; Illinois only after 1860; Michigan could not have asked admittance till after the census of 1880; and after that census Wisconsin must still have remained a colonial dependency.

The last day of September 1786 was given to the consideration of the report; but before anything was decided the seventh congress expired.

The new congress, to which Madison and Richard Henry Lee, as well as Grayson and Edward Carrington, were sent by Virginia, had no quorum till February 1787, and then was occupied with preparations for the federal convention and with the late insurrection in Massachusetts. But the necessity of providing for a territorial government was urgent; and near the end of April the committee of the late congress revived

* Journals of Congress, iv., 688, 689.

The name of Smith as one of the committee occurs in August 1786. Journals of Congress, iv., 688.

its project of the preceding September. On the ninth of May it was read a second time; the clause which would have indefinitely delayed the admission of a western state was cancelled; * a new draft of the bill as amended was directed to be transcribed, and its third reading was made the order of the next day, † when of a sudden the further progress of the ordinance was arrested.

Rufus Putnam, of Worcester county, Massachusetts, who had drawn to himself the friendly esteem of the commanderin-chief, and before the breaking up of the army received the commission of brigadier-general, was foremost in promoting a petition to congress of officers and soldiers of the revolution for leave to plant a colony of the veterans of the army between Lake Erie and the Ohio, in townships of six miles square, with large reservations "for the ministry and schools." For himself and his associates he entreated Washington to represent to congress the strength of the grounds on which their petition rested. Their unpaid services in the war had saved the independence and the unity of the land; their settlement would protect the frontiers of the old states against alarms of the savages; their power would give safety along the boundary line on the north; under their shelter the endless procession of emigrants would take up its march to fill the country from Lake Erie to the Ohio.

With congress while it was at Princeton, and again after its adjournment to Annapolis, Washington exerted every power of which he was master to bring about a speedy decision. The members with whom he conversed acquiesced in the reasonableness of the petition and approved its policy, but they excused their inertness by the want of a cession of the north-western lands.

When, in March 1784, the lands were ceded by Virginia, Rufus Putnam again appeals to Washington: "You are sensible of the necessity as well as the possibility of both officers and soldiers fixing themselves in business somewhere as soon as

* This appears from the erasures on the printed bill, which is still preserved. Journals of Congress, iv., 747.

S. P. Hildreth, Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, 88. Walker, 29. Letter of Rufus Putnam, 16 June 1783.

possible; many of them are unable to lie long on their oars; but congress did not mind the spur. In the next year, under the land ordinance of Grayson, Rufus Putnam was elected a surveyor of land in the western territory for Massachusetts; and as he could not at once enter on the service, another brigadier-general, Benjamin Tupper of Chesterfield, in the same state, was appointed for the time in his stead.* Tupper repaired to the West to superintend the work confided to him; but disorderly Indians prevented the survey; without having advanced farther west than Pittsburgh, he returned home; and, like almost every one who caught glimpses of the West, he returned with a mind filled with the brightness of its promise.

Toward the end of 1785, Samuel Holden Parsons, the son of a clergyman in Lyme, Connecticut, a graduate of Harvard, an early and a wise and resolute patriot, in the war a brigadiergeneral of the regular army, travelled to the West on public business, descended the Ohio as far as its falls, and, full of the idea of a settlement in that western country, wrote, before the year went out, that on his way he had seen no place which pleased him so much for a settlement as the country on the Muskingum.+

In the treaty at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, the Six Nations renounced to the United States all claims to the country west of the Ohio. A treaty of January 1785, with the Wyandotte, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa nations, released the country east of the Cuyahoga, and all the lands on the Ohio, south of the line of portages from that river to the Great Miami and the Maumee. On the last day of January 1786, George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the North-west, Richard Butler, late a colonel in the army, and Samuel Holden Parsons, acting under commissions from the United States, met the Shawnees at the mouth of the Great Miami, and concluded with them a treaty by which they acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States over all their territory as described in the treaty of peace with Great Britain, and for themselves renounced all claim to property in any land east of the main branch of * Journals of Congress, iv., 520, 527, 547.

+ William Frederick Poole in N. A. Review, liii., 331.

the Great Miami.* In this way the Indian title to southern Ohio, and all Ohio to the east of the Cuyahoga, was quieted.

Six days before the signature of the treaty with the Shawnees, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, after a careful consultation at the house of Putnam, in Rutland, published in the newspapers of Massachusetts an invitation to form "the Ohio Company" for purchasing and colonizing a large tract of land between the Ohio and Lake Erie. The men chiefly engaged in this enterprise were husbandmen of New England, nurtured in its schools and churches, laborious and methodical, patriots who had been further trained in a seven years' war for freedom. Have these men the creative power to plant a commonwealth? And is a republic the government under which political organization for great ends is the most easy and the most perfect?

To bring the Ohio company into formal existence, all persons in Massachusetts who wished to promote the scheme were invited to meet in their respective counties on Wednesday, the fifteenth day of the next February, and choose delegates to meet in Boston on Wednesday, the first day of March 1786, at ten of the clock, then and there to consider and determine on a general plan of association for the company. On the appointed day and hour, representatives of eight counties of Massachusetts came together; among others, from Worcester county, Rufus Putnam; from Suffolk, Winthrop Sargent; from Essex, Manasseh Cutler, lately a chaplain in the army, then minister at Ipswich; from Middlesex, John Brooks; from Hampshire, Benjamin Tupper. Rufus Putnam was chosen chairman of the meeting, Winthrop Sargent its secretary. On the third of March, Putnam, Cutler, Brooks, Sargent, and Cushing, its regularly appointed committee, reported an association of a thousand shares, each of one thousand dollars in continental certificates, which were then the equivalent of one hundred and twenty-five dollars in gold, with a further liability to pay ten dollars in specie to meet the expenses of the agencies. Men might join together and subscribe for one share.

A year was allowed for subscription. At its end, on the eighth of March 1787, a meeting of the subscribers was held at Boston, and Samuel Holden Parsons, Rufus Putnam, and * U. S. Statutes at Large, vii., 15, 16–18, 26.

Manasseh Cutler were chosen directors to make application to congress for a purchase of lands adequate to the purposes of the company.

*

The basis for the acquisition of a vast domain was settled by the directors, and Parsons repaired to New York to bring the subject before congress. On the ninth of May 1787, the same day on which the act for the government of the North-west was ordered to a third reading on the morrow, the memorial of Samuel Holden Parsons, agent of the associators of the Ohio company, bearing date only of the preceding day, was presented.* It interested every one. For vague hopes of colonization, here stood a body of hardy pioneers; ready to lead the way to the rapid absorption of the domestic debt of the United States; selected from the choicest regiments of the army; capable of selfdefence; the protectors of all who should follow them; men skilled in the labors of the field and of artisans; enterprising and laborious; trained in the severe morality and strict orthodoxy of the New England villages of that day. All was changed. There was the same difference as between sending out recruiting officers and giving marching orders to a regular corps present with music and arms and banners. On the instant the memorial was referred to a committee consisting of Edward Carrington, Rufus King, Nathan Dane, Madison, and Egbert Benson-a great committee: its older members of congress having worthy associates in Carrington and Benson, of whom nothing was spoken but in praise of their faultless integrity and rightness of intention.

On the fourth day of July 1787, for the first time since the eleventh of May, congress had a quorum. There were present from the North, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey; from the South, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, soon to be joined by Delaware. The South had all in its own way. The president of congress being absent, William Grayson of Virginia was elected the temporary president.

* The memorial of Parsons is in his own handwriting. It is contained in vol. xli. of Papers of the Old Congress, vol. viii., 226, of the Memorials. It is indorsed in the handwriting of Roger Alden, "Memorial of Samuel H. Parsons, agent of the associators for the purchase of lands on the Ohio. Read May ninth 1787. Referred to Mr. Carrington, Mr. King, Mr. Dane, Mr. Madison, Mr. Benson. Acted on July 23, 1787. See committee book."