[8] When the settlers on the Watauga (pp. 181, 182) heard of this, they became alarmed lest Congress should not accept the cession, and forming a new state which they called Franklin, applied to Congress for admission into the Union. No attention was given to the application. North Carolina repealed the act of cession, arranged matters with the settlers, and in 1787 the Franklin government dissolved.
[9] The favorite time for the river trip was from February to May, when there was high water in the Ohio and its tributaries the Allegheny and Monongahela. Then the voyage from Pittsburg to Louisville could be made in eight or ten days. An observer at Pittsburg in 1787 saw 50 flatboats depart in six weeks. Another man at Fort Finney counted 177 passing boats with 2700 people in eight months.
[10] In order to encourage enlistment in the army, Congress had offered to give a tract of land to each officer and man who served through the war. The premium in land, or gift, over and above pay, was known as land bounty.
[11] Read McMaster's History of the People of the U. S., Vol. I, pp. 505- 519. All the land bought by the Ohio Company was not for its use. A large part was for another, known as the Scioto Company, which sent an agent to Paris and sold the land to a French company. This, in turn, sold in small pieces to Frenchmen eager to leave a country then in a state of revolution. In 1790, accordingly, several hundred emigrants reached Alexandria, Virginia, and came on to the little square of log huts, with a blockhouse at each corner, which the company had built for them and named Gallipolis. Most of them were city-bred artisans, unfit for frontier life, who suffered greatly in the wilderness.
[12] The land was included in the limits laid down in the charter of Massachusetts; but that charter was granted after the Dutch were in actual possession of the upper Hudson. In 1786 a north and south line was drawn 82 miles west of the Delaware. Ownership of the land west of that line went to Massachusetts; but jurisdiction over the land, the right to govern, was given to New York.
[13] Connecticut, under her sea-to-sea grant from the crown, claimed a strip across northern Pennsylvania, bought some land there from the Indians (1754), and some of her people settled on the Susquehanna in what was known as the Wyoming Valley (1762 and 1769). The dispute which followed, first with the Penns and then with the state of Pennsylvania, dragged on till a court of arbitration appointed by the Continental Congress decided in favor of Pennsylvania.
[14] Because of Champlain's discovery of the lake which now bears his name (p. 115), the French claimed most of Vermont; on their early maps it appears as part of New France, and as late as 1739 they made settlements in it. About 1750 the governor of New Hampshire granted land in Vermont to settlers, and the country began to be known as "New Hampshire Grants"; but in 1763 New York claimed it as part of the region given to the Duke of York in 1664. This brought on a bitter dispute which was still raging when, in 1777, the settlers declared New Hampshire Grants "a free and independent state to be called New Connecticut." Later the name was changed to Vermont. But the Continental Congress, for fear of displeasing New York, never recognized Vermont as a state.
[15] Each state was bound to pay its share of the annual expenses; but they failed or were unable to do so.
[16] Why would not Great Britain make a trade treaty with us? Read Fiske's Critical Period, pp. 136-142; also pp. 142-147, about difficulties between the states.
[17] Congress asked for authority to do three things: (1) to levy taxes on imported goods, and use the money so obtained to discharge the debts due to France, Holland, and Spain; (2) to lay and collect a special tax, and use the money to meet the annual expenses of government; and (3) to regulate trade with foreign countries.