With regard to the powers of Congress, under the Confederation, to erect new States in the Northwestern Territory, and to admit them into the Union, the truth seems to be this. There is no part of the Articles of Confederation which can be said to confer such a power; and, in fact, when the Articles were framed, the Union, although it then existed by an imperfect bond, not only possessed no such territory, but it did not then appear likely to become the proprietor of lands, claimed by certain of the States as the successors of the crown of Great Britain, and lying within what they regarded as their original chartered limits. The refusal of those States to allow the United States to determine their boundaries, made it unnecessary to provide for the exercise of authority over a public domain. But in the interval between the preparation of the Articles and their final ratification, a great change took place in the position of the Union. It was found that certain of the smaller States would not become parties to the Confederation, if the great States were to persist in their refusal to cede to the Union their claims to the unoccupied Western lands; and although the States which thus held themselves back, for a long time, from the ratification of the Articles, finally adopted them, before the cessions of Western territory were made, they did so upon the most solemn assertion that they expected and confided in a future relinquishment of their claims by the other States. Those just expectations were fulfilled. By the acts of cession, and by the proceedings of Congress which invited them, the United States not only became the proprietors of a great public domain, but they received that domain upon the express trust that its lands should be disposed of for the common benefit, and that the country should be settled and formed into republican States, and that those States should be admitted into the Union. In these conveyances, made and accepted upon these trusts, there was a unanimous acquiescence by the States.