alist votes. In 1812, indeed, Clinton received eighty-nine votes to
Madison's one hundred and twenty-eight; but in 1816 again only
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware were federalist. In 1820 not a
State had a federalist majority. State elections in Maryland, North
Carolina, Delaware, and Connecticut commonly went federalist till 1820,
and in Massachusetts till 1823, when the Republicans swept this
commonwealth too, Essex County and all.

Yet Federalism did not die without fixing its stamp indelibly upon our
institutions. Not to mention the Whig and the modern Republican Parties,
close reproductions of it, or the public credit, its child, methods of
administration passed with little change from Adams to Jefferson and his
successors, and federalist principles modified the entire temper, and
directed in no small degree the action, of the Democratic Party while in
power. The nation was exalted more, state rights subordinated, and the
Constitution construed ever more broadly. Thus there was silently and
gradually imparted to our governmental fabric a consistency and a
solidity which were of incalculable worth against storms to come.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WEST

[1787]

A simple resolution of the Continental Congress in 1780 has proved of
the highest consequence for the subsequent development of our country.
It declared that all territorial land should be national domain, to be
disposed of for the common benefit of the States, with the high
privilege of itself growing into States coequal with the old Thirteen.
The treaty of 1783 carried this domain north to the Lakes, west to the
Mississippi. The Ohio divided it into a northwestern and a southwestern
part. The land to the west of themselves Virginia and North Carolina
claimed, and it became Kentucky and Tennessee, respectively, erected
into statehood, the one June 1, 1792, the other June 1, 1796, these
being the fifteenth and sixteenth States in order. Vermont, admitted in
1791, was the fourteenth. Virginia never released Kentucky till it
became a State. The Tennessee country, ceded to the United States by
North Carolina in 1784, the cession revoked and afterward repeated, had
already, under the name of Frankland, enjoyed for some time a separate
administration. The nucleus of Kentucky civilization was on the northern
or Ohio River border, that of Tennessee in the Cumberland Valley about
Nashville; but by 1800 the borders of these two oases had joined.

United St