There are many things that link the capital city of financial and commercial America, to the State of Ohio, that New England enterprise, and New York encouragement, and Virginian patriotism, did so much to build beyond the Alleghenies. It is not merely in the associations and connections of to-day that New York and Ohio are bound together. A pregnant era of the early past, was disposed toward good results forever, by the patriotic generosity of the Empire State, at a time when Ohio was but a name in the far off wilderness; a promise that many things must nurture, before it could be realized.
Historians will recall, when this much has been said, the events that were pressed close upon each other, before the soil upon which Ohio now stands, was declared the property of the nation, disentangled from the conflicting claims of jealous States, and how New York by her self-renunciation, led the way to harmony. For a century had Virginia and Connecticut made their claims to the vast westward territory; vaster than the imagination of any living man then conceived. When the French were driven from the lands west of the bounds of Pennsylvania, the contention commenced, and claims were urged from time to time, until both voices of dispute were temporarily silenced by the war in which the rivals fought side by side for the freedom of both. When that conflict was ended, the question again arose; not, this time, with the English Crown as the greater power, but with the loose jointed Confederation, under which America endeavored to work out a national salvation. Virginia, made her demand under the grant of James, in 1609, which gave her: “All those lands, countries and territories, situated, lying, and being in that part of America called Virginia, from the point of the eastern land called Cape or Point Comfort, all that space and circuit of land lying, from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land, throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest, and also all the islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of the both seas of the precinct aforesaid.”
This generous King, who was giving away so much that did not belong to him, was really giving more than he dreamed of; for the writer of the grant evidently believed that the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean, was but little westward of the Atlantic, and never dreamed that he was extending his line so as to take in the magnificent Western and Northwestern empire of to-day.
Connecticut made her claim under Charles the II, who in 1662, gave to the colony “All that part of our dominion in New England, in America, bounded on the east by the Narragansett River, commonly called Narragansett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and on the north by the line of the Massachusetts plantation, and on the south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts colony, running from east to west; that is to say, from the said Narragansett Bay, on the east to the South Sea on the west part, with the islands thereto adjoining.”
It was under this very vague, but very extensive grant, that Connecticut laid claim to, and maintained that claim, for that part of Ohio known the world over, as the “Connecticut Western Reserve.”
While Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were warring in the courts, in the legislatures, and before the people over their various claims, there were many others who virtually assumed that the whole unoccupied and unorganized land to the west, belonged to the nation at large, and that no state had a right to exclusive jurisdiction. This discussion threatened all sorts of difficulties, at a time when peace and prosperity could only come through a mutual helpfulness and internal harmony, and the wisest and most patriotic declared themselves willing to waive all personal claims, and allow the national government to administer the general estate for the general good. Congress so viewed it, and appealed to the States to yield their claims. The first response came from New York, which conceded all her possible ownership to western territory, to the general government, and the other States followed in her wake. Virginia followed New York; and Massachusetts Virginia; and eventually Connecticut came into line.
In the appeal of Congress to the States there was no ambiguity as to the purpose to which these lands were to be devoted. The act of October 10, 1780, resolved that “the unappropriated lands that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States by any particular State,” should be disposed of “for the common benefit of the United States, and shall be settled and formed into distinct republican States, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and have the same right of sovereignty, freedom and independence as the other States; that each which shall be so formed shall contain a suitable extent of territory not less than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as circumstances will admit, that the necessary and reasonable expense which any particular State shall have incurred since the commencement of the present war, in subduing any part of the territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, shall be reimbursed.” It was further agreed that said lands should be “granted or settled at such times and under such regulations” as should be thereafter agreed upon by the United States, or any nine or more of them.
In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation, New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States, which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of 1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the Mississippi.
With these cessions, the territorial system of our government came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory; and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared, forever to the cause of human liberty.
It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests, and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The most important legislative act in American History”—there came into existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent peril.