10. In 1789 Washington and Adams became President and Vice President, and government under the Constitution began.
[Illustration: LIBERTY BELL.]
FOOTNOTES
[1] Both France and Spain had tried to shut us out of the Mississippi valley. Read Fiske's Critical Period of American History, pp. 17-25.
[2] By the treaty of 1783 Congress provided that all debts due British subjects might be recovered by law, and that the states should be asked to pay for confiscated property of the Loyalists. But the states would not permit the recovery of the debts nor pay for the property taken from the Loyalists. Great Britain, by holding the forts along our northern frontier, controlled the fur trade and the Indians, and ruled the country about the forts. These were Dutchman's Point, Point au Fer, Oswegatchie, Oswego, Niagara, Erie, Detroit, Mackinaw.
[3] To understand her conduct we must remember that in 1764, shortly after the French and Indian War, Great Britain made 32° 28' north latitude (through the mouth of the Yazoo, p. 143) the north boundary of West Florida; and although Great Britain in her treaty with us made 31° the boundary between us and West Florida, Spain insisted that it should be 32° 28'. Spain's claim to the Northwest, founded on her occupation of Fort St. Joseph (p. 183), had not been allowed; she was therefore the more determined to expand her claims in the South.
[4] The states claiming such lands by virtue of their colonial charters were Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. New York had acquired the Iroquois title to lands in the West. Her claim conflicted with those of Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The claims of Connecticut and Massachusetts covered lands included in the Virginia claim—Maryland denied the validity of all these claims, for these reasons: (1) the Mississippi valley belonged to France till 1763; (2) when France gave the valley east of the Mississippi to Great Britain in 1763, it became crown land; (3) in 1763 the king drew the line around the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, and forbade the colonists to settle beyond that line (p. 143).
[5] The Articles were not to go into effect till every state signed. Maryland was the thirteenth state to sign.
[6] Virginia reserved ownership of a large tract called the Virginia Military Lands. It lay in what is now Ohio between the Scioto and Little Miami rivers (map, p. 201), and was used to pay bounties to her soldiers of the Revolution.
[7] Connecticut reserved the ownership (and till 1800 the government) of a tract 120 miles long, west of Pennsylvania. Of this "Western Reserve of Connecticut," some 500,000 acres were set apart in 1792 for the relief of persons whose houses and farms had been burned and plundered by the British. The rest was sold and the money used as a school fund.