But it was in the provisions of the Ordinance relative to the admission into the Union of the new States to be formed upon this territory, that the relation between the existing government of the United States and its great dependency was afterwards found to involve serious difficulties. The Union was at that time a confederacy of thirteen States, originally formed mainly with reference to the exigencies of the war; and, although the Articles of Confederation had been ratified under circumstances which gave to the United States the authority to acquire this property, they had vested in Congress no power to enlarge the Confederacy by the admission of new States. Yet the Ordinance undertook to declare that new States should be admitted into the Congress of the United States on an equal footing with the existing States in all respects whatever, without proposing to submit that question to the original parties to the Confederacy.
It does not appear from contemporary evidence that this difficulty attracted public attention, at the time of the passage of the Ordinance. In the year 1787, the Confederation was laboring under far more pressing and alarming defects than the want of strict constitutional power to create new States. Public attention was consequently more engaged with the consideration of evils which affected the prosperity of the original States themselves, than with the destiny of the new communities, or the method by which they were to be brought into the Union. It was not immediately perceived, also, that a property, capable at no distant day of becoming a vast mine of wealth to the United States, as a great and independent revenue, had come under the management of a single body of men, constituted originally without reference to such a trust, and with no declared constitutional provisions for its administration. When, however, the Constitution was in the process of formation, the necessity for provisions under which Congress could dispose of the public lands, and by which new States could be admitted into the Union, was at once felt and conceded on all sides.[322]
Far more serious difficulties, however, attended the management by the Confederation of the interests of the Western country;--difficulties which commenced immediately after the Peace, and continued to increase, until the course taken by Congress had nearly lost to the Union the whole of that immense region which now pours its commerce down the Mississippi and its great tributary waters. These difficulties sprang from the inherent weakness of the federal government,--from the absolute incapacity of Congress, constituted as it was, to deal wisely, safely, and efficiently with the foreign relations of the country and its internal affairs, under the delicate and critical circumstances in which it was then placed. After the Treaty of Peace, the Western settlements, flanked by the dependencies of Great Britain at the north and of Spain at the south, and rapidly filling with a bold, adventurous, and somewhat lawless population, whose ties of connection with the Eastern States were almost sundered by the remoteness of their position and the difficulties of communication, stood upon a pivot, where accident might have thrown them out of the Union. This population found themselves seated in a luxuriant and fertile country, capable of a threefold greater production than the States eastward of the Alleghany and Appalachian Mountains, and intersected by natural water communications of the most ample character, all tending to the great highway of the Mississippi. A soil richer than any over which the Anglo-Saxon race had hitherto spread itself upon this continent, in any of its temperate climes; large plains and meadows, capable, without labor, of supporting millions of cattle; and fields destined to vie with the most favored lands on the globe in the production of wheat, were already accumulating upon the banks of their great rivers a weight of produce far beyond the necessities of subsistence, and loudly demanding the means of reaching the markets of the world. The people of the Atlantic States knew little of the resources or situation of this country. They valued it chiefly as a means of paying the public debts by the sale of its lands; but until they were in imminent danger of losing it, from the inefficiency of the national government, they had little idea of the supreme necessity of securing for it an outlet to the sea, if they would preserve it to the Union.