Jefferson Territory

Jefferson Territory

The Provisional Government of the Territory of Jefferson was an extralegal and unrecognized United States territory that existed from October 24, 1859 until the creation of the Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861. The Jefferson Territory included land officially part of the Kansas Territory, the Nebraska Territory, the New Mexico Territory, the Utah Territory, and the Washington Territory, but remote from the governments of those five territories. The government of the Jefferson Territory, while democratically elected, was never legally recognized by the United States Government, although it managed the territory with relatively free rein for 16 months. Many of the laws enacted by the Jefferson Territorial Legislature were reenacted and given official sanction by the new Colorado General Assembly in 1861.

Read more about Jefferson Territory:  Origins, Establishment, Counties, Capitals, Dissolution

Famous quotes containing the words jefferson and/or territory:

    [F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive.With one foot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood—never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn—like pioneers.
    Erica Jong (20th century)