The foreign claimants were Great Britain and Spain. Spain proposed as the price of alliance with the United States, that the region from the Alleghany mountains to the Mississippi river, and from Florida to the Ohio river, should constitute an Indian reservation, of which the western half should be under the protection of Spain and the eastern half under the protection of the United States; that Spain should be permitted to occupy this country with her troops, so that she could claim it from Great Britain under the principle of uti possidctis. This reservation would have covered the present States of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky. France sustained Spain in this demand and urged it upon Congress.
Great Britain, in addition to her ancient title to the entire territory of the colonies, laid especial claim to the country northwest of the Ohio river, by virtue of her act of parliament in 1774, commonly known as the "Quebec Act," by which she had annexed all that region to Canada. In assertion of this claim, she took possession of the country early in the war, and occupied it with British troops. At the suggestion and under the guidance of her illustrious citizen, General George Rogers Clarke, Virginia organized an expedition composed of Virginia soldiers, in Virginia pay, without assistance from the United States, expelled the British from the territory, and held it at the close of the war, in the name of the State.
These foreign claims came up for settlement, not be fore Congress, but by treaty with foreign nations; yet the uncertainty served to render the whole question still more complicated. The two charter claimants, Virginia and North Carolina, were the only States who supported their titles by actual settlement, and by civil and military occupation. The settlements along the Mississippi, the Wabash and the Ohio, and in Kentucky, and the military occupation by George Rogers Clarke, on the part of
