The States themselves had already by their actions shown that they admitted this to be the case.  Thus North Carolina, when by the creation of Washington County—­now the State of Tennessee—­she rounded out her boundaries, specified them as running to the Mississippi.  As a matter of fact the royal grant, under which alone she could claim the land in question, extended to the Pacific; and the only difference between her rights to the regions east and west of the river was that her people were settling in one, and could not settle in the other.  The same was true of Kentucky, and of the west generally; if the States could rightfully claim to run to the Mississippi, they could also rightfully claim to run to the Pacific.  The colonial charters were all very well as furnishing color of title; but at bottom the American claim rested on the peculiar kind of colonizing conquest so successfully carried on by the backwoodsmen.  When the English took New Amsterdam they claimed it under old charters; but they very well knew that their real right was only that of the strong hand.  It was precisely so with the Americans and the Ohio valley.  They produced old charters to support their title; but in reality it rested on Clark’s conquests and above all on the advance of the backwoods settlements. [Footnote:  Mr. R. A. Hinsdale, in his excellent work on the “Old Northwest” (New York, 1888), seems to me to lay too much stress on the weight which our charter-claims gave us, and too little on the right we had acquired by actual possession.  The charter-claims were elaborated with the most wearisome prolixity at the time; but so were the English claims to New Amsterdam a century earlier.  Conquest gave the true title in each case; the importance of a claim is often in inverse order to the length at which it is set forth in a diplomatic document.  The west was gained by:  (1) the westward movement of the backwoodsmen during the Revolution; (2) the final success of the Continental armies in the east; (3) the skill of our diplomats at Paris; failure on any one of these three points would have lost us the west.

Mr. Hinsdale seems to think that Clark’s conquest prevented the Illinois from being conquered from the British by the Spaniards; but this is very doubtful.  The British at Detroit would have been far more likely to have conquered the Spaniards at St. Louis; at any rate there is small probability that they would have been seriously troubled by the latter.  The so-called Spanish conquest of St. Joseph was not a conquest at all, but an unimportant plundering raid.

The peace negotiations are best discussed in John Jay’s chapter thereon, in the seventh volume of Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of North America.”  Sparks’ account is fundamentally wrong on several points.  Bancroft largely follows him, and therefore repeats and shares his errors.]