western end of the Reserve to compensate her citizens for 1
losses occasioned by British incursions into the state in
the Revolution-the "Sufferers' Lands" of Connecticut
history; the "Fire Lands" of Ohio history. In 1795,
the state quitclaimed the remainder of the lands of the
Reserve, without survey or measurement and on credit,
to a land syndicate later known as the Connecticut land
company, for twelve hundred thousand dollars. The
proceeds of the sale were set aside as a perpetual fund,
the interest of which should be appropriated for the
support of schools. The Connecticut school fund of to-
day, amounting to more than two million dollars, consists
wholly of the money paid for these lands; the dividends
thereon paid for school purposes since 1797 aggregated
more than eleven million dollars in 1909. In the spring
of 1796, the syndicate sent out surveyors under Moses
Cleaveland as agent in charge. On the twenty-second of
July, the party was at the mouth of the Cuyahoga in
"New Connecticut" where they laid out a town to which
the agent gave his name—a town that he prophesied
would have, in time, as many inhabitants as Windham
(now Willimantic). Connecticut had sold the soil, but
trouble soon arose concerning the jurisdiction. In 1797,
the Connecticut assembly authorized its senators in con-
gress to execute a deed releasing to the United States the
jurisdiction of the Reserve, but there were objections and
delay at Philadelphia. In February, 1800, the house of rep-
resentatives created a committee, of which John Marshall
was chairman, to consider the expediency of accepting
the offer of Connecticut. On the report of this com-
mittee, an act was passed accepting the jurisdiction and
confirming the titles of syndicate and purchasers "to the
soil of said tract of land." The bill passed both houses
of congress and was signed by President Adams on the
twenty-eighth of April, 1800.

The treaty of 1783 made the thirty-first parallel of north Territorial latitude the southern boundary of the United States. Changes When West Florida was given to Spain, that power claimed that it extended to the parallel of thirty-two

A W

M I S S I SIP PI

S

TERRITORY,

Publ fad at a S.hon of the Legislature began in the
Tova of Natchez, in the County of Adams, and
Territory aforefaid, upon the aad Day of Jinuity,
Anno Domini 1799, and in the 234 Year of
the Independance of the United States

of America: and continued by
Afjournments to the 25 h Day
of May, in the

fame Year.

ގ

degrees and twenty-eight minutes, the latitude of the 1 8 0 0 mouth of the Yazoo, but the special treaty of 1795 established the thirty-first parallel as the dividing line. In 1798, the section between these two parallels from the Chattahoochee to the Mississippi was organized as the Mississippi Territory to be governed like the Territory Northwest of the Ohio with the single exception that there was no prohibition of slavery. Winthrop Sargent, late secretary of the Northwest Territory, was appointed governor. On the fifth of May, 1799, the substitution of American for Spanish rule in the territory was marked by.....----the surrender of the post at Saint Stephens, in what is Washington County, Alabama, and, a year later, an act of congress gave the territory an assembly and a delegate in congress. The population of the territory at that time was about ten thousand. In the same year, the North- May 7 west Territory was divided preparatory to the admission of Ohio as a state. The smaller part, including what is now Ohio and the eastern part of Michigan, retained the old name; the western portion was called Indiana Territory. Chillicothe and Vincennes were named as the respective capitals.

BY AUTHORITY.

NATCHEZ:

PRINTED BY A MARSCHALI,

And Sold at the Store of M. I. HUNTS, & Co.

$799.

Title-page of The Laws of the Mississippi
Territory

May 10

For a time, public lands in the Northwest were sold The Sale of only at Philadelphia. This made it almost impossible Public Lands for individual settlers to deal directly with the government and put them at the mercy of land speculators. In 1796, Albert Gallatin had secured the passage of a law

BEGINNING AND ENDING OF THE ARTICLES OF CESSION OF GEORGIA, APRIL 24, 1802

that established offices at Pittsburg and Cincinnati. The 1 800 act also defined the township system and authorized the

65432

I

7 8 9 10 11 12

「9 「 1。

18 17 16 15

18 17 16 15 14 13

19 20 21 22 23 24

30 29 28 27 26 25
292

31 32 33 34 35 36

bered according to Present System
(For method of numbering previous to
1796, see vol. 6, p. 404, and map of
Seven Ranges at page 406)

May 10

portation

sale of land in sections of six hundred and forty acres, the price to be not less than two dollars per acre. One-twentieth of the purchase price was to be paid down and a moiety (including the onetwentieth) within thirty days; the remainder within a year. A new act established offices at Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, provided for the sale of half-sec- A Township with Sections Numtions, and extended the time. allowed for payment to four years. Methods of communication had improved but little. Highways “The same bad roads and difficult rivers, connecting the and Transsame small towns, stretched into the same forests in 1800 as when the armies of Braddock and Amherst pierced the western and northern wilderness, except that these roads extended a few miles farther from the seacoast. Nature was rather man's master than his servant, and the five million Americans struggling with the untamed continent seemed hardly more competent to their task than the beavers and buffalo which had for countless generations made bridges and roads of their own." Even along the seaboard, travel was slow and irregular. Between New York and Albany, there was no regular packetboat; between New York and Boston, there was a tolerable road along which thrice a week light stage-coaches passed. Every week-day, a stage-coach set out from New York for Philadelphia; the journey took two days. The average speed of coach between Bangor and Baltimore was only four miles an hour. South of Petersburg, the mails were carried on horseback and the stage-coach that ran between Charleston and Savannah appears to have been the only public conveyance in the three southern states. “Of eight rivers between here and Washington," wrote Jefferson from Monticello in 1801, "five have