between Lake Erie
and the Wabash, and between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, and a
complete and perfect map made of the country at least as far west as the
Miamis, which run into the Ohio and Lake Erie," and he pointed out the
Miami village as the place for a very important post for the Union. The
expense attending such an undertaking could not be great; the advantages
would be unbounded. "Nature," he said, "has made such a display of her
bounty in these regions that the more the country is explored the more
it will rise in estimation. The spirit of emigration is great; people
have got impatient; and, though you cannot stop the road, it is yet in
your power to mark the way. A little while and you will not be able to
do either." Such were the enlightened and fatherly hopes that Washington
thus early entertained of the great west and its struggling pioneers,
who were trying to carve out their destinies in a remote wilderness.

No less enlightened were the views of Jefferson. He may be said in truth
to be the father of the northwest. When a member of the legislature of
Virginia, he had promoted the expedition under George Rogers Clark,
which resulted in the conquest of the northwest, and its subsequent
cession to the United States under the treaty of 1783. As governor of
Virginia he had taken part in its cession to the general government on
March first, 1784. "On that same day," says Bancroft, "before the deed
could be recorded and enrolled among the acts of the United States,
Jefferson, as chairman of a committee, presented a plan for the
temporary government of the western territory from the southern boundary
of the United States in the latitude of thirty-one degrees to the Lake
of the Woods. It is still preserved in the national archives in his own
handwriting, and is as completely his own work as the Declaration of
Independence." As the profoundest advocate of human rights of his day or
time, freeing himself from the narrow spirit of sectionalism, and
despising human slavery and its contamination of the institutions of a
free people, he proposed the ultimate establishment of ten new states in
the territory northwest of the Ohio, a republican form of government for
each of them, and no property qualification for either the electors or
the elected. "Following an impulse of his own mind," he proposed the
everlasting dedication of the northwest to free men and free labor, by
providing that after the year 1800 there shou