etrieved three years later, when the famous Ordinance of 1787
prohibited slavery forever from the national territory north of the Ohio
River. But Jefferson's scheme had not only to deal with the national
domain as it was, but also to extend that domain southward to Florida;
and in this it failed. Virginia could not be persuaded to give up
Kentucky until too late. When Kentucky came into the Union, after the
adoption of the Federal Constitution, she came as a sovereign state,
with all her domestic institutions in her own hands. With the western
districts of North Carolina the case was somewhat different, and the
story of this region throws a curious light upon the affairs of that
disorderly time.

[Sidenote: John Sevier, and the state of Franklin, 1784-87.]

In surrendering her western territory, North Carolina showed
praiseworthy generosity. But the frontier settlers were too numerous to
be handed about from one dominion to another, without saying something
about it themselves; and their action complicated the matter, until it
was too late for Jefferson's scheme to operate upon them. In June, 1784,
North Carolina ceded the region since known as Tennessee, and allowed
Congress two years in which to accept the grant. Meanwhile, her own
authority was to remain supreme there. But the settlers grumbled and
protested. Some of them were sturdy pioneers of the finest type, but
along with these there was a lawless population of "white trash,"
ancestors of the peculiar race of men we find to-day in rural districts
of Missouri and Arkansas. They were the refuse of North Carolina,
gradually pushed westward by the advance of an orderly civilization.
Crime was rife in the settlements, and, in the absence of courts, a
rough-and-ready justice was administered by vigilance committees. The
Cherokees, moreover, were troublesome neighbours, and people lived in
dread of their tomahawks. Petitions had again and again gone up to the
legislature, urging the establishment of courts and a militia, but had
passed unheeded, and now it seemed that the state had withdrawn her
protection entirely. The settlers did not wish to have their country
made a national domain. If their own state could not protect them, it
was quite clear to them that Congress could not. What was Congress, any
way, but a roomful of men whom nobody heeded? So these backwoodsmen held
a convention in a log-cabin at Jonesborough, and seceded from North
Carolina. They declared tha