of that inland realm and took for granted an immense commerce
therein that was certain to yield enormous profits. In faraway
Paris, the ingenious diplomat, Silas Deane, writing to the Secret
Committee of Congress in 1776, pictured the Old Northwest--
bounded by the Ohio, the Alleghanies, the Great Lakes, and the
Mississippi--as paying the whole expense of the Revolutionary
War.* Thomas Paine in 1780 drew specifications for a State of
from twenty to thirty millions of acres lying west of Virginia
and south of the Ohio River, the sale of which land would pay the
cost of three years of the war.** On the other hand, Pelatiah
Webster, patriotic economist that he was, decried in 1781 all
schemes to "pawn" this vast westward region; he likened such
plans to "killing the goose that laid an egg every day, in order
to tear out at once all that was in her belly." He advocated the
township system of compact and regular settlement; and he argued
that any State making a cession of land would reap great benefit
"from the produce and trade" of the newly created settlements.

* Deane's plan was to grant a tract two hundred miles square at
the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi to a company on the
condition that a thousand families should be settled on it within
seven years. He added that, as this company would be in a great
degree commercial, the establishing of commerce at the junction
of those large rivers would immediately give a value to all the
lands situated on or near them.

** Paine thought that while the new State could send its exports
southward down the Mississippi, its imports must necessarily come
from the East through Chesapeake Bay because the current of the
Mississippi was too strong to be overcome by any means of