Congress had, indeed, already urged upon the States the necessity of yielding the power to enact navigation laws; but they had replied with such deliberation and with so many conditions that Congress was as powerless as ever. Meantime, each State struck blindly at the common enemy with little or no regard for its neighbors. "The States are every day giving proofs," wrote Madison, "that separate regulations are more likely to set them by the ears than to attain the common object." When the other New England States closed their ports to British shipping, Connecticut hastened to profit at their expense by throwing her ports wide open. New Jersey, with New York on one side and Pennsylvania on the other, was likened to a cask tapped at both ends. To find a historical parallel to the annals of this period, one must go back to the bickerings and jealousies of the states of ancient Greece. In this dark picture, however, there are cheering rays of light. One by one the States were redeeming their promises and ceding their western lands. It seemed as though the Confederation, hitherto a disembodied spirit, was about to tenant a body. By the year 1786 the United States were in joint possession of the greater part of the vast region between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes--a domain of imperial dimensions. In anticipation of these cessions, Congress took under consideration an ordinance reported by a committee of which Thomas Jefferson was chairman. This ordinance contemplated the division of the land north of the thirty-first parallel into fourteen or sixteen States. The settlers in these rectangular areas were not to form state governments at once, but for their temporary government were to borrow such constitutions as they thought best from the older States. When a State had twenty thousand inhabitants, it might frame a permanent constitution and send a delegate to Congress. Admission to the Union was to be granted only when a State had as many free inhabitants as "the least numerous of the thirteen original States." Two features of Jefferson's report do not appear in the Ordinance of 1784; the fantastic names which Jefferson had selected and the fifth of the fundamental conditions which were to be a charter of compact between the old States and the new. It is perhaps no misfortune that the names Assenisipia, Polypotamia, Pelisipia, do not appear on the map; the article prohibiting slavery after the year 1800 might well have been retained. [Map: State-Making In the West 1783-1787]