This body was composed
of New Englanders, mostly veterans of the Revolutionary War, and led by
officers who had stood well in the Continental army.
When, in the fall of 1783, the Continental army was disbanded, the
war-worn and victorious soldiers, who had at last wrung victory from the
reluctant years of defeat, found themselves fronting grim penury. Some
were worn with wounds and sickness; all were poor and unpaid; and
Congress had no means to pay them. Many among them felt that they had
small chance to repair their broken fortunes if they returned to the
homes they had abandoned seven weary years before, when the guns of the
minute-men first called them to battle.
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.
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