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.
Nathan Dane, a Massachusetts delegate, favored it, in part because he
hoped that planting such a colony in the West might keep at least that
part of it true to "Eastern politics.
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