=Ohio.=—­The door of the union had hardly opened for Tennessee when another appeal was made to Congress, this time from the pioneers in Ohio.  The little posts founded at Marietta and Cincinnati had grown into flourishing centers of trade.  The stream of immigrants, flowing down the river, added daily to their numbers and the growing settlements all around poured produce into their markets to be exchanged for “store goods.”  After the Indians were disposed of in 1794 and the last British soldier left the frontier forts under the terms of the Jay treaty of 1795, tiny settlements of families appeared on Lake Erie in the “Western Reserve,” a region that had been retained by Connecticut when she surrendered her other rights in the Northwest.

At the close of the century, Ohio, claiming a population of more than 50,000, grew discontented with its territorial status.  Indeed, two years before the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, squatters in that region had been invited by one John Emerson to hold a convention after the fashion of the men of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield in old Connecticut and draft a frame of government for themselves.  This true son of New England declared that men “have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country and there to form their constitution and that from the confederation of the whole United States Congress is not empowered to forbid them.”  This grand convention was never held because the heavy hand of the government fell upon the leaders; but the spirit of John Emerson did not perish.  In November, 1802, a convention chosen by voters, assembled under the authority of Congress at Chillicothe, drew up a constitution.  It went into force after a popular ratification.  The roll of the convention bore such names as Abbot, Baldwin, Cutler, Huntington, Putnam, and Sargent, and the list of counties from which they came included Adams, Fairfield, Hamilton, Jefferson, Trumbull, and Washington, showing that the new America in the West was peopled and led by the old stock.  In 1803 Ohio was admitted to the union.

=Indiana and Illinois.=—­As in the neighboring state, the frontier in Indiana advanced northward from the Ohio, mainly under the leadership, however, of settlers from the South—­restless Kentuckians hoping for better luck in a newer country and pioneers from the far frontiers of Virginia and North Carolina.  As soon as a tier of counties swinging upward like the horns of the moon against Ohio on the east and in the Wabash Valley on the west was fairly settled, a clamor went up for statehood.  Under the authority of an act of Congress in 1816 the Indianians drafted a constitution and inaugurated their government at Corydon.  “The majority of the members of the convention,” we are told by a local historian, “were frontier farmers who had a general idea of what they wanted and had sense enough to let their more erudite colleagues put it into shape.”