During this period the English were not only acquiring but were parcelling out their new territory. It was always a serious question how far west the coast colonies extended; some of them--Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, the Carolinas--had bounds nominally reaching to the Pacific Ocean. To silence this controversy, in 1763 a royal proclamation directed that the colonial governors should not exercise jurisdiction west of the heads of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, leaving in a kind of territorial limbo the region between the summit of the Appalachians and the Mississippi.[5] These numerous territorial grants gave rise to many internal controversies; but by the time of the Revolution most of the lines starting at the sea-coast and leading inward had been adjusted. The idea of territorial solidarity among the English colonies was disturbed by the addition of Nova Scotia and Quebec on the north, and East and West Florida on the south. Intercolonial jealousy was heightened in 1774 by the Quebec act, under which the almost unpeopled region north of the Ohio River was added to the French-speaking province. When the Revolution broke out in 1775, that jealousy was reflected in the refusal of Quebec and Nova Scotia and the distant Floridas to join in it. Almost the first campaign of the war, however, showed the purpose of territorial enlargement, for in 1775 the Arnold-Montgomery expedition to Canada vainly attempted to persuade the Frenchmen by force to enter the union. Two years later George Rogers Clark lopped off the southern half of the British western country. The Southwest, into which settlers had begun to penetrate in 1769, was, during the Revolution, laid hold of by the adventurous frontiersman; and in 1782 the negotiators of Paris thought best to leave that, as well as the whole Northwest, in the hands of the new United States.[6] The result of the Revolutionary War was the entrance into the American continent of a third territorial power, the United States, which was divided into two nearly equal portions: between the sea and the mountains lay the original thirteen states; between the mountains and the Mississippi was an area destined to be organized into separate states and immediately opened for settlement.[7] This destiny was solemnly announced by votes of Congress in 1780, and by the territorial ordinance of 1784, the land ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which, taken together, were virtually a charter for the western country, very similar in import to the old colonial charters.[8]