While the convention at Philadelphia occupied themselves with the new constitution, the vast territory north of the Ohio River was formed, by the congress at New York, into a territorial government under the name of the North-Western Territory. Among other provisions of the government of this new territory was the carrying out of an important republican principle which some of the older states had not yet adopted; this was the equal division of all landed as well as personal property between the children of persons dying intestate. The fullest religious freedom was also insured; provision made for schools and for justice and humanity towards the Indians, and a strong protest entered against slavery, inasmuch as it was declared that there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than as punishment of crimes of which the party shall have been duly convicted. Seventeen millions of acres on the northern bank of the Ohio were now in possession of the United States, in consequence of the already mentioned treaties with the Six Nations. These formerly powerful and warlike tribes now retained but a small hold upon the lands which had once been their own. They were beginning, like their more feeble eastern brethren, to pass away from before the white man. The entire Mohawk nation emigrated in a body into Canada, and other Indian nations followed their example. The pressure of war being removed from the eastern states, their restless and adventurous sons now went forth to explore and establish peaceable settlements, with all the amenities of domestic life and civilisation, in the wilderness. The State of New York located her disbanded soldiers on the land-bounties which she had promised them, upon such western lands as she retained after resigning her larger claims to the Union; Pennsylvania followed this example. Occupation was thus given to the unemployed, and a source of vast wealth opened to the impoverished. In July of this same busy year, the Ohio Company was formed, for the settlement of portions of this great territory, with the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, Winthrop Sargeant, and other citizens of New England, at its head. In September, the Kentuckians, now holding their fourth convention at Danville, once more applied to congress for admission into the Union; but though they had now advanced so far as to have a spokesman in congress, in the person of one of the Virginian delegates, a Kentucky lawyer, and were possessed of a newspaper, the “Kentucky Gazette,” printed and published at Lexington, they were again unsuccessful in their application.