Had not the
Constitution been adopted, and a more perfect union been thus called
into being, the history of the state of Franklin would have been
repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies to the Pacific coast;
only these little states, instead of dying in the bud, would have gone
through a rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revolutions, of
silly and ferocious warfare against their neighbors, and of degrading
alliance with the foreigner. From these and a hundred other woes the
West no less than the East was saved by the knitting together of the
States into a Nation.
This knitting process passed through its first and most critical stage,
in the West, during the period intervening between the close of the war
for independence, and the year which saw the organization of the
Southwest into a territory ruled under the laws, and by the agent, of
the National Government. During this time no step was taken towards
settling the question of boundary lines with our British and Spanish
neighbors; that remained as it had been, the Americans never abandoning
claims which they had not yet the power to enforce, and which their
antagonists declined to yield.
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