The Ohio Company.

These heroes of the blue and buff turned their eyes westward to the fertile lands lying beyond the mountains.  They petitioned Congress to mark out a territory, in what is now the State of Ohio, as the seat of a distinct colony, in time to become one of the confederated States; and they asked that their bounty lands should be set off for them in this territory.  Two hundred and eighty-five officers of the Continental line joined in this petition; one hundred and fifty-five, over half, were from Massachusetts, the State which had furnished more troops than any other to the Revolutionary armies.  The remainder were from Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maryland.

The signers of this petition desired to change the paper obligations of Congress, which they held, into fertile wild lands which they should themselves subdue by their labor; and out of these wild lands they proposed to make a new State.  These two germ ideas remained in their minds, even though their petition bore no fruit.  They kept before their eyes the plan of a company to undertake the work, after getting the proper cession from Congress.  Finally, in the early spring of 1786, some of the New England officers met at the “Bunch of Grapes” tavern in Boston, and organized the Ohio Company of Associates.  They at once sent one of their number as a delegate to New York, where the Continental Congress was in session, to lay their memorial before that body.

    Congress and the Ohio Company.

Congress was considering another ordinance for the government of the Northwest when the memorial was presented, and the former was delayed until the latter could be considered by the committee to which it had been referred.  In July, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, arrived as a second delegate to look after the interests of the company.  He and they were as much concerned in the terms of the governmental ordinance, as in the conditions on which the land grant was to be made.  The orderly, liberty-loving, keen-minded New Englanders who formed the company, would not go to a land where the form of government was hostile to their ideas of righteousness and sound public policy.

    The Prohibition of Slavery.

The one point of difficulty was the slavery question.  Only eight States were at the time represented in the Congress; these were Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—­thus five of the eight States were southern.  But the Federal Congress rose in this, almost its last act, to a lofty pitch of patriotism; and the Southern States showed a marked absence of sectional feeling in the matter.  Indeed, Cutler found that though he was a New England man, with a New England company behind him, many of the Eastern people looked rather coldly at his scheme, fearing lest the settlement of the West might mean a rapid drainage of population from the East.