ssissippi, we cannot understand
how our Federal Union came to be formed.

[Sidenote: Conflicting claims to the western territory.]

When England began to contend with France and Spain for the possession
of North America, she made royal grants of land upon this continent, in
royal ignorance of its extent and configuration. But until the Seven
Years' War the eastward and westward partitioning of these grants was of
little practical consequence; for English dominion was bounded by the
Alleghanies, and everything beyond was in the hands of the French. In
that most momentous war the genius of the elder Pitt won the region east
of the Mississippi for men of English race, while the vast territory of
Louisiana, beyond, passed under the control of Spain. During the
Revolutionary War, in a series of romantic expeditions, the state of
Virginia took military possession of a great part of the wilderness east
of the Mississippi, founding towns in the Ohio and Cumberland valleys,
and occupying with garrisons of her state militia the posts at Cahokia,
Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. We have seen how, through the skill of our
commissioners at Paris, this noble country was secured for the Americans
in the treaty of 1783, in spite of the reluctance of France and the
hostility of Spain. Throughout the Revolutionary War the Americans
claimed the territory as part of the United States; but when once it
passed from under the control of Great Britain, into whose hands did it
go? To whom did it belong? To this question there were various and
conflicting answers. North Carolina, indeed, had already taken
possession of what was afterward called Tennessee, and at the beginning
of the war Virginia had annexed Kentucky. As to these points there could
be little or no dispute. But with the territory north of the Ohio River
it was very different. Four states laid claim either to the whole or to
parts of this territory, and these claims were not simply conflicting,
but irreconcilable.

[Sidenote: Claims of Massachusetts and Connecticut.]

The charters of Massachusetts and Connecticut were framed at a time when
people had not got over the notion that this part of the continent was
not much wider than Mexico, and accordingly these colonies had received
the royal permission to extend from sea to sea. The existence of a
foreign colony of Dutchmen in the neighbourhood was a trifle about which
these documents did not trouble themselves; but when Charles II.
con