" France hurried her commanders and garrisons, with
Indian allies, from the posts about the Great Lakes and the upper
Mississippi; but it was in vain. In vain, too, the aftermath of
Pontiac's widespread Indian uprising against the English occupation.
When she came into possession of the lands between the Ohio, the
Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of
the Province of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark left
Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country at the
conclusion of the Revolutionary War; but over all the remainder of the
Old Northwest, England was in control. Although she ceded the region by
the treaty which closed the Revolution, she remained for many years the
mistress of the Indians and the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was
upbraided in parliament for yielding the Northwest to the United States,
the complaint was that he had clothed the Americans "in the warm
covering of our fur trade," and his defense was that the peltry trade of
the ceded tract was not sufficiently profitable to warrant further war.
But the English government became convinced that the Indian trade
demanded the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her
posts there in spite of the treaty of peace. Dundas, the English
secretary for the colonies, expressed the policy, when he declared, in
1792, that the object was to interpose an Indian barrier between Canada
and the United States; and in pursuance of this policy of preserving the
Northwest as an Indian buffer State, the Canadian authorities supported
the Indians in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio.
The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits
England's inability to foresee the future of the region, and to measure
the forces of American expansion.

By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut,
the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public
domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The
significance of this fact in the development of national power is not
likely to be overestimated. The first result was the completion of the
Ordinance of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old
Northwest, with provisions for the admission of States into the Union.
This federal colonial system guaranteed that the new national
possessions should not be governed as dependent provinces, but should
enter as a gr