nd 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. The remainder were from Connecticut,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maryland.

The signers of this petition desired to change the paper obligations of
Congress, which they held, into fertile wild lands which they should
themselves subdue by their labor; and out of these wild lands they
proposed to make a new State. These two germ ideas remained in their
minds, even though their petition bore no fruit. They kept before their
eyes the plan of a company to undertake the work, after getting the
proper cession from Congress. Finally, in the early spring of 1786, some
of the New England officers met at the "Bunch of Grapes" tavern in
Boston, and organized the Ohio Company of Associates. They at once sent
one of their number as a delegate to New York, where the Continental
Congress was in session, to lay their memorial before that body.

Congress and the Ohio Company.

Congress was considering another ordinance for the government of the
Northwest when the memorial was presented, and the former was delayed
until the latter could be considered by the committee to which it had
been referred. In July, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Ipswich, Massachusetts,
arrived as a second delegate to look after the interests of the company.
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 pol