With such examples in mind, we may see that the names of the proposed ten states, from which the failure of Jefferson's ordinance has delivered us, illustrated the prevalent taste of the time rather than any idiosyncrasy of the man. The proposed names were Sylvania, Michigania, Chersonesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia. [Sidenote: He wishes to prohibit slavery in the national domain.] It was not the nomenclature that stood in the way of Jefferson's scheme, but the wholesale way in which he tried to deal with the slavery question. He wished to hem in the probable extension of slavery by an impassable barrier, and accordingly he not only provided that it should be extinguished in the northwestern territory after the year 1800, but at the same time his anti-slavery ardour led him to try to extend the national dominion southward. He did his best to persuade the legislature of Virginia to crown its work by giving up Kentucky to the United States, and he urged that North Carolina and Georgia should also cede their western territories. As for South Carolina, she was shut in between the two neighbouring states in such wise that her western claims were vague and barren. Jefferson would thus have drawn a north-and-south line from Lake Erie down to the Spanish border of the Floridas, and west of this line he would have had all negro slavery end with the eighteenth century. The policy of restricting slavery, so as to let it die a natural death within a narrowly confined area,--the policy to sustain which Mr. Lincoln was elected president in 1860,--was thus first definitely outlined by Jefferson in 1784. It was the policy of forbidding slavery in the national territory. Had this policy succeeded then, it would have been an ounce of prevention worth many a pound of cure. But it failed because of its largeness, because it had too many elements to deal with. For the moment, the proposal to exclude slavery from the northwestern territory was defeated, because of the two thirds vote required in Congress for any important measure. It got only seven states in its favour, where it needed nine. This defeat, however, was retrieved three years later, when the famous Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery forever from the national territory north of the Ohio River. But Jefferson's scheme had not only to deal with the national domain as it was, but also to extend that domain southward to Florida; and in this it failed. Virginia could not be persuaded to give up Kentucky until too late. When Kentucky came into the Union, after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, she came as a sovereign state, with all her domestic institutions in her own hands. With the western districts of North Carolina the case was somewhat different, and the story of this region throws a curious light upon the affairs of that disorderly time. [Sidenote: John Sevier, and the state of Franklin, 1784-87.]