intervened as a wedge between Georgia and North Carolina, affording for several years a suggestive invitation to cede their western lands.
The example was followed by North Carolina in 1790, when, after her patience was exhausted by the attempt to establish the State of Franklin, she ceded her froward daughter, Tennessee, to the United States; thus making the first cession under the Constitution.
Kentucky anticipated the expected second cession of Virginia, and became a State in 1792, without undergoing the territorial apprenticeship.
This left the full pressure of the demand for western cessions to fall on Georgia. This sturdy state resisted until 1802, when her cession, by no means a free gift, proved to be a shrewd bargain. She then ceded the Territory of Mississippi, nearly all of which was covered by Indian titles, and received in return that portion of the South Carolina cession immediately north of her boundary, $1,250,000 in money from the proceeds of the sale of public lands, and what ultimately proved very costly to the United States, a guarantee for the extinction of all Indian claims in her present limits. The remaining portion of the twelve-mile strip, all of which, after the admission of Tennessee, was styled in legislation the territory of the United States south of the State of Tennessee, was in 1804 added by Congress to Mississippi Territory, and now constitutes the northern portion of the States of Alabama and Mississippi.
Thus, the whole territory west of the Alleghany mountains, embracing the portion north of the Ohio, which had been claimed by Great Britain, and the southern portion which Spain and France had attempted to erect into an Indian reservation, was now ceded to the United States by all claimants except the land companies. These companies continued the struggle until finally repulsed from the Supreme court of the United States.
