NOTES ON JEFFERSON'S DRAFT. 39 



vidual States to the United States .... shall be formed 

 into additional States, bounded .... as nearly as such 

 cessions will admit .... northwardly and southwardly 

 by parallels of latitude, so that each State shall comprehend, 

 from south to north, two degrees of latitude, beginning to 

 count from the completion of thirty-one degrees from the 

 equator; but any territory northwardly of the forty-seventh 

 degree shall make part of the State next below\" (Then are 

 described the north-to-south lines, viz., the Mississippi and the 

 meridians of the Ohio falls and the mouth of the Great 

 Kanawha.) If we were to understand "the territory ceded 

 or to be ceded by individual States"" as an unguarded phrase 

 meaning merely such territory north of the Ohio (a strange 

 oversight when cessions south of the river were under dis- 

 cussion), the expected cessions being those of Massachusetts 

 and Connecticut only, it would be hard to account for the irre- 

 levant mention of the thirty-first degree line, which is about 

 six degrees south of the southernmost jDointof Illinois; and it 

 would be equally hard to see why, in the detailed statement 

 of boundaries further on, a State ("Pelisipia") was made of 

 two small blocks of land between the thirty-ninth degree line 

 and the Ohio east and west of Cincinnati, which should 

 naturally have been attached to the adjoining square State, 

 Saratoga, as the points of the two Michigan peninsulas had 

 been attached to other States. 



The difficulties vanish when we regard the reported Ordi- 

 nance as dealing with the whole Western country, from 31° 

 up, the first paragraph laying an outline of States by drawing 

 east-and-west lines every two degrees up to 45°, and a meri- 

 dian line through the falls of the Ohio (Louisville)* dividing 

 each of these strips into two States, with another meridian 

 line through the mouth of the Kanawha cutting off what is 

 now Eastern Ohio into a State by itself. Here we have two 

 rows of eight States each, and an odd State further east; the 



• Apparently the meridian of LouisviUe was believed to enter Lake Michigan near 

 the southern end. For the Illinois river, i. e., its Kankakee branch, is mentioned in the 

 later paragraph of details as one of the rivers whose sources lie in Metropotamia, east of 

 that meridian. The same is suggested, though less clearly, by the description of Michigania 

 as wholly west of the lake, without remark upon this as a deviation from the meridian 

 system. 



