Nevertheless the body assumed an unwonted activity in these, its last days. A quorum was had during several of the summer months of 1788. The business of settling accounts between the Confederation and the several States was actively carried on, and further arrangement was made for selling the public lands in the North-West Territory. The form of levying quotas upon the States, amounting to a million and a half dollars, was again gone through with. Since it was unlikely that these assessments would be paid, John Adams borrowed one million guilders in Holland for ten years with which to inaugurate the new Government. A petition for statehood from the settlers in Kentucky, the second in the long list of additions to the Union, reached Congress, accompanied by the consent of Virginia to the severance of her western district. Since the time for the beginning of the new Government was so near at hand, the petition was returned with the suggestion that it be renewed after that event. The principal item of domestic expenditure was found to be that for supporting the United States army of 595 officers and men scattered along the frontier. They were garrisoned in Fort Pitt, at the head of the Ohio River; Fort Franklin and Fort McIntosh, between Pitt and Lake Erie; Fort Harmar, at the mouth of the Muskingum; Fort Steuben, at the falls of the Ohio, now Louisville; and Fort Vincennes, on the Wabash, now in Indiana. Also a force consisting of an officer, one sergeant, and fifteen privates was stationed at West Point. To meet the expenses for these troops, and also those for Indians and pensions, there was available in the domestic treasury the sum total of $22,000. The committee of Congress to whom had been given the arrangement for putting the new Government into motion found that the election of senators and representatives was left by the Constitution to the States; that the creation of the Federal judiciary belonged to the new Congress; and that only the measures necessary for the election of a President were left to them. They therefore set the first Wednesdays of the first three months in the following year for the three steps of appointing presidential electors, having them cast their ballots, and for commencing proceedings under the Constitution. These dates were adjusted to the meetings of the State Legislatures, as Madison explained to a correspondent. No objection was found to this arrangement of time, but the selection of a place in which to begin the new Government aroused the old sectional fear and avarice, and precipitated a two-months' contest, during which New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, Lancaster, and Annapolis were considered. "The present seat of Congress" was finally adopted largely through impossibility of agreeing on another.