ime and increasing density of
population the value of the land was increasing. The acquisition of
land was a matter of investment or at least of speculation. In fact, the
purchase of land was one of the favorite get-rich-quick schemes of the
time. George Washington was not the only man who invested largely in
western lands. A list of those who did would read like a political
or social directory of the time. Patrick Henry, James Wilson, Robert
Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Chancellor Kent, Henry Knox, and James Monroe
were among them.*

* Not all the speculators were able to keep what they acquired.
Fifteen million acres of land in Kentucky were offered for sale in 1800
for nonpayment of taxes. Channing, "History of the United States," vol.
IV, p. 91.

It is therefore easy to understand why so much importance attached to
the claims of the several States and to the cession of that western land
by them to the United States. But something more was necessary. If
the land was to attain anything like its real value, settlers must be
induced to occupy it. Of course it was possible to let the people go out
as they pleased and take up land, and to let the Government collect
from them as might be possible at a fixed rate. But experience during
colonial days had shown the weakness of such a method, and Congress was
apparently determined to keep under its own control the region which
it now possessed, to provide for orderly sale, and to permit settlement
only so far as it might not endanger the national interests. The method
of land sales and the question of government for the western country
were recognized as different aspects of the same problem. The Virginia
offer of cession forced the necessity of a decision, and no sooner
was the Virginia offer framed in an acceptable form, in 1783, than two
committees were appointed by Congress to report upon these two questions
of land sales and of government.

Thomas Jefferson was made chairman of both these committees. He was then
forty years old and one of the most remarkable men in the country. Born
on the frontier--his father from the upper middle class, his mother "a
Randolph"--he had been trained to an outdoor life; but he was also
a prodigy in his studies and entered William and Mary College with
advanced standing at the age of eighteen. Many stories are told of his
precocity and ability, all of which tend to forecast the later man of
catholic tastes, omnivorous interest, a