rocess, for the annexation of
Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an aftermath
of the same movement of expansion.

While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building of a greater
nation, it was also the field wherein was formed an important
contribution of the United States to political institutions. By this I
mean what George Bancroft has well called "federal colonial system,"
that is, our system of territories and new States. It is a mistake to
attribute this system to the Ordinance of 1787 and to the leadership of
New England. It was in large measure the work of the communities of the
Ohio Valley who wrought out the essentials of the system for themselves,
and by their attitude imposed it, of necessity, upon the nation. The
great Ordinance only perfected the system.[168:1]

Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to
shape their own political institutions, the riflemen of western
Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, during the
Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the
mountains, and asserted with manly independence their right to
self-government. But it is significant that in making this assertion,
they at the same time petitioned congress to admit them to the
sisterhood of States. Even when leaders like Wilkinson were attempting
to induce Kentucky to act as an independent nation, the national spirit
of the people as a whole led them to delay until at last they found
themselves a State of the new Union. This recognition of the paramount
authority of congress and this demand for self-government under that
authority, constitute the foundations of the federal territorial system,
as expressed in congressional resolutions, worked out tentatively in
Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, and finally shaped in the Ordinance of
1787.

Thus the Ohio Valley was not only the area to which this system was
applied, but it was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own
demands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion of either State
or national power over these remote communities might result in their
loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be
overestimated. It insured the peaceful and free development of the great
West and gave it political organization not as the outcome of wars of
hostile States, nor by arbitrary government by distant powers, but by
territorial government combined with large local