to secede and join the state of Franklin. For the next two years there was something very like civil war, until the North Carolina party grew so strong that Sevier fled, and the state of Franklin ceased to exist. Sevier was arrested on a warrant for high treason, but he effected an escape, and after men's passions had cooled down his great services and strong character brought him again to the front. He sat in the senate of North Carolina, and in 1796, when Tennessee became a state in the Union, Sevier was her first governor. These troubles show how impracticable was the attempt to create a national domain in any part of the country which contained a considerable population. The instinct of self-government was too strong to allow it. Any such population would have refused to submit to ordinances of Congress. To obey the parent state or to set up for one's self,--these were the only alternatives which ordinary men at that time could understand. Experience had not yet ripened their minds for comprehending a temporary condition of semi-independence, such as exists to-day under our territorial governments. The behaviour of these Tennessee backwoodsmen was just what might have been expected. The land on which they were living was not common land: it had been appropriated; it belonged to them, and it was for them to make laws for it. Such is the lesson of the short-lived state of Franklin. It was because she perceived that similar feelings were at work in Kentucky that Virginia did not venture to loosen her grasp upon that state until it was fully organized and ready for admission into the Union. It was in no such partly settled country that Congress could do such a thing as carve out boundaries and prohibit slavery by an act of national sovereignty. There remained the magnificent territory north of the Ohio,--an empire in itself, as large as the German Empire, with the Netherlands thrown in,--in which the collective wisdom of the American people, as represented in Congress, might autocratically shape the future; for it was still a wilderness, watched by frontier garrisons, and save for the Indians and the trappers and a few sleepy old French towns on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, there were no signs of human life in all its vast solitude. Here, where there was nobody to grumble or secede, Congress, in 1787, proceeded to carry out the work which Jefferson had outlined three years before. [Sidenote: Origin of the Ohio company.]