The year 1784 brought with it all the anxieties and difficulties consequent on the termination of a struggle, such as that through which America had just passed. The crisis of a great fever was over, and the sufferer was left with prostrated strength, excited nerves, and irritable temperament. Wisdom and prudence, and the vigour of his youthful constitution would, however, restore him to perfect health. In the meantime many a long depression and many a sally of impatience and petulance must be borne. This was precisely the case with America. She had suffered from every calamity of war; her towns had been burned, her country ravaged, her frontiers laid waste by Indians; her citizens had been called out to serve in her army, and to suffer even more than the average miseries of camps, hunger, nakedness, and disease, with insufficient hospital resources. Citizen had been armed against citizen, and even brother against brother. Civil war had here assumed its direst aspect. Agriculture, trade and manufactures, had decayed during the war, and thousands of otherwise industrious and prosperous inhabitants were thrown out of employment, and so totally impoverished as to be nearly destitute of clothing. The once imposing navy was now completely annihilated. Almost every vessel, whether home-built or purchased, had been destroyed or had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The only ship of the line built during these disastrous years, and finished in 1782, was presented to the king of France, to supply the loss of one of his in Boston harbour. Add to all this an immense debt, the natural consequence of war, universal distress and discontent. Congress met; and financial affairs claimed its first attention. Secondly came an important fact. Virginia ceded all her claims to lands lying north-west of the Ohio. New York had already set this example two or three years before, and now prided herself on having been the first to do so. By her act of cession, Virginia stipulated for the security of the French inhabitants already occupying those lands, and that those lands should be erected into republican states, to be admitted into the Union with the same rights as the older states. This led to vast plans for the laying out of states, and the government of the immense territory which the United States expected to acquire by the cession of the claims of the different states. The originators of these plans were Jefferson, who sat in congress as delegate from Virginia; Chase, of Maryland; and Howell, of Rhode Island. Among other proposed conditions for new states was the following: “After the year 1800, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, other than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” But the requisite votes of nine states could not be obtained, and this condition was lost.