These different claims were not of a kind to which any outside power would have paid heed.  Their usefulness came in when the States bargained among themselves.  In the bargaining, both among the claimant States, and between the claimant and the non-claimant States, the charter titles were treated as of importance, and substantial concessions were exacted in return for their surrender.  But their value was really inchoate until the land was reduced to possession by some act of the States or the Nation.

    Virginia and North Carolina.

At the close of the Revolutionary War there existed wide differences between the various States as to the actual ownership and possession of the lands they claimed.  Virginia and North Carolina were the only two who had reduced to some kind of occupation a large part of the territory to which they asserted title.  Their backwoodsmen had settled in the lands so that they already held a certain population.  Moreover, these same backwoodsmen, organized as part of the militia of the parent States, had made good their claim by successful warfare.  The laws of the two States were executed by State officials in communities scattered over much of the country claimed.  The soldier-settlers of Virginia and North Carolina had actually built houses and forts, tilled the soil, and exercised the functions of civil government, on the banks of the Wabash and the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee.  Counties and districts had been erected by the two States on the western waters; and representatives of the civil divisions thus constituted sat in the State Legislatures.  The claims of Virginia and North Carolina to much of the territory had behind them the substantial element of armed possession.  The settlement and conquest of the lands had been achieved without direct intervention by the Federal Government; though of course it was only the ultimate success of the nation in its contest with the foreign foe that gave the settlement and conquest any value.

    Georgia.

As much could not be said for the claims of the other States.  South Carolina’s claim was to a mere ribbon of land south of the North Carolina territory, and need not be considered; ceded to the Government about the time the Northwest was organized. [Footnote:  For an account of this cession see Mr. Garrett’s excellent paper in the publications of the Tennessee Historical Society.] Georgia asserted that her boundaries extended due west to the Mississippi, and that all between was hers.  But the entire western portion of the territory was actually held by the Spaniards and by the Indian tribes tributary to the Spaniards.  No subjects of Georgia lived on it, or were allowed to live on it.  The few white inhabitants were subjects of the King of Spain, and lived under Spanish law; the Creeks and Choctaws were his subsidized allies; and he held the country by right of conquest.  Georgia, a weak and turbulent, though a growing State,