State Cessions - Background

Background

Most of the British colonies on the east coast of North America were established in the 17th and early 18th century, when geographical knowledge of North America was incomplete. Many of these colonies were established by royal proclamation or charter that defined their boundaries as stretching "from sea to sea"; others did not have western boundaries established at all. These colonies thus ended up with theoretical extents that overlapped each other, and conflicted with the claims and settlements established by other European powers.

By the time of the American Revolution, the boundaries between the various colonies had been for the most part surveyed and agreed upon in the eastern part of the country, where European settlement was densest. (The one notable exception to this trend was the ongoing dispute between New York, New Hampshire, and indepent Vermonters over the land that would eventually become Vermont.) The British government's Royal Proclamation of 1763, while not resolving the disputes over the colonies' trans-Appalachian claims, sought to cool them by placing significant restrictions on white settlement in the region. The proclamation was largely ignored on the ground, however, and various frontier settlement enterprises, owing allegiance to conflicting colonial governments, continued.

The claims of the colonies corresponded in varying degrees to the actual reality on the ground in the west at the eve of the Revolution. Kentucky, for instance, was organized into a county of Virginia in 1776, with Virginia serving as practical sovereign over the area right up until its admission into the Union as a separate state in 1792. Massachusetts' claims to land in modern-day Michigan and Wisconsin, by contrast, amounted to little more than lines drawn on a map.