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Show Chapter III State Cessions of Western Land Claims Great Britain's grants of land to the London or Plymouth Companies and, in fact, to most of the Thirteen Colonies, had been loosely described and bounded in language that was far from precise. Considering the vagueness of geographical knowledge of the time, this is understandable. As a result, the numerous overlapping claims of the Colonies created much trouble for the Mother Country and threatened to cause outright warfare in America. Best known of these conflicts were those over the boundaries separating (1) Maryland from Pennsylvania, (2) Maryland from Virginia, (3) Massachusetts from New Hampshire and New York, (4) New Hampshire from New York, (5) New York from Connecticut, and (6) Connecticut from Pennsylvania. These conflicts gave rise to a dispute between Virginia and Maryland over the navigation of the Potomac, caused the Mason -Dixon line to be surveyed, brought about the long squabble over the New Hampshire grants, and the drawing of the famous Preemption Line through western New York. Land Claims of the Original States The original grants to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia gave them land between definite parallels of latitude extending "from sea to sea" or "from the Atlantick and Westerne Sea and Ocean of the Easte Parte, to the South Sea on the West Parte."1 All these sea-to-sea grants were cut off at the Mississippi in 1763 by Great Britain's acquiescence in Spanish ownership of the trans-Mississippi country, but there remained a huge area west of the Appalachians in which seven of the Original Colonies had claims. Great Britain further restricted these claims by the Quebec Act of 1774 which transferred the territory north of the Ohio to the Province of Quebec, thereby depriving Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia of an estimated 176,725,760 acres.2 George Rogers Clark's defeat of the British at Vincennes and Kaskaskia made it possible for the Americans to claim and win the ownership of the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes at the peace of 1783. It also strengthened Virginia's claim to the territory, which had been won by Virginia's troops maintained by Virginia's funds. With the Northwest Territory, as we may now call it, and the region now constituting Kentucky and West Virginia, Virginia-already the largest of all the states- possessed an immense area in which to colonize its rapidly increasing population. This western territory could be divided into eight to 12 daughter states which might be satellites of Virginia and assure her dominance in the affairs of the new Nation. At the conclusion of the war, Georgia was still but slightly developed, though its western 1 Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History (New York, 1944), pp. 11, 17. 2 I arrived at this figure by deducting the acreage of the Georgia cession as given in Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain (Washington, 1884), p. 87, from the acreage of all the state cessions in Bureau of Land Management, U. S. Department of the Interior, Public Land Statistics, 1965, p. 4. 49 |
