North Carolina continued to let her Western children shift for themselves, until at last for their own defense and safety they organized as a separate State, and called the new State Franklin, in honor of Benjamin Franklin. John Sevier, the greatest of the early leaders in Tennessee, was elected governor of Franklin, and Greenville was made the capital of the State. But the State of Franklin had only a short life. North Carolina came forward promptly and asserted her rights, and by 1788 the officers of Franklin were all driven from power, the new State was dead, and North Carolina was again in full control of Tennessee.
[Illustration: Kentucky, Tennessee, and Early Ohio.]
In the rapid and wonderful growth of Kentucky and Tennessee we see the first-fruits of the Westward Movement. Here out of the wilderness south of the Ohio had sprung up, almost overnight, two prosperous, populous, well-organized commonwealths, States that almost at once could hold their heads as high as the oldest and proudest of their sisters.
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; THE ORDINANCE OF 1787.
While pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina were moving into Kentucky and Tennessee, emigrants from the Northern States were moving into western New York, or were crossing the Alleghanies and settling the upper valleys of the Ohio. The settlement of western Pennsylvania began even before the Revolution. In 1770 Washington revisited the scenes of his early youth and found Pittsburgh a village of twenty houses. Fourteen years later he would have found it a town of two hundred houses and a thousand inhabitants. Western Pennsylvania filled rapidly with settlers, and soon pioneers began to float down the Ohio in flatboats and build their homes on the soil of the Northwest Territory. In a few years so many white people were living in this Western domain that it became necessary for them to have some form of government. So Congress (in 1787) passed the law known as the Ordinance of 1787, the most important law ever passed by a lawmaking body in America.
[Illustration: Emigrants descending the Tennessee River.]
The great law of 1787 provided that, as the Northwest Territory filled up with people, it should be divided into States--not fewer than three and not more than five. Each State was to be governed according to the will of its voters; there was to be no slavery; religious liberty was guaranteed; education was to be encouraged; Indians were to be justly treated. When a community came to have as many as 60,000 inhabitants it was to be admitted into the Union as a State, with all the rights of the older States; during the time in which a community was too small for statehood it was to be governed as a Territory.