The other six States based their claims on various charters,
which in reality conferred rights not one whit more substantial.
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.
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