Plans for the development of the Western lands were hotly debated by Congress. Virginia ’s decision to cede its Western land claims in 1781 prompted other states to follow suit this process turned Western lands -which once divided the states -into a force for national unity. After months of wrangling, Congress was able to persuade states with Western claims to cede them to the United States. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, Britain ignored the claims of its Indian allies and ceded all the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi to the United States. On paper the United States was a huge country. One of the new nation ’s earliest political battles was over whether the old Western land claims fell under state or federal control. Of course the lands in question were already occupied by various tribes of American Indians, and until the Revolution the charter claims represented little more than the wishful thinking of would-be colonial developers, but the Revolutionary War and the waves of westward settlement launched by land-hungry pioneers forever changed the political economy of the Trans-Appalachian West. While under British rule, the colonies of North America jealously guarded their paper claims to land north and west of the Ohio River. American Expansion: The Great Land OrdinancesĬolonial Land Claims.
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