184. The First Inauguration. As soon as Washington received the news of his election, he left Mount Vernon and started for New York. His journey was one continuous triumphal march. The population of every town through which he passed turned out to meet him. Men, women, and children stood for hours by the roadside waiting for him to go by. At New York his reception was most imposing, and there, on April 30, 1789, standing on the balcony in front of Federal Hall (p. 171), he took the oath of office in the presence of Congress and a great multitude of people that filled the streets, and crowded the windows, and sat on the roofs of the neighboring houses.1

SUMMARY

1. When independence was about decided on, Congress appointed a committee to draft a general plan of federal government.

2. This plan, called Articles of Confederation, Maryland absolutely refused to ratify till the states claiming land west of the Alleghany Mountains ceded their claims to Congress.

3. New York and Virginia having ceded their claims, Maryland ratified in March, 1781.

4. These cessions were followed by others from Massachusetts and Connecticut; and from them all, Congress formed the public domain to be sold to pay the debt.

5. The sale of this land led to the land ordinance of 1785 and the ordinance of 1787, for the government of the domain and the new political organism called the territory.

6. The defects of the Articles made revision necessary, and produced such distress that two conventions were called to consider the state

of the country. That at Annapolis attempted nothing. That at Philadelphia framed the Constitution of the United States.

7. The Constitution was then passed to the Continental Congress, which sent it to the legislatures of the states to be by them referred to conventions elected by the people for acceptance or rejection.

8. Eleven having ratified, Congress in 1788 fixed a day in 1789 (which happened to be March 4), when the First Congress under the Constitution was to assemble.

9. The date of the first presidential election was also fixed, and George Washington was made our first President.

1 Full accounts of the inauguration of Washington may be found in Harper's Magazine, and also in the Century Magazine, for April, 1889.

185. The States.

CHAPTER XIV

OUR COUNTRY IN 1790

What sort of a country, and what sort of people, was Washington thus chosen to rule over? When he was elected, the Union was composed of eleven states, for neither Rhode Island nor North Carolina had accepted the

Constitution.1

Vermont had never been a member of the Union, because the Continental Congress would not recognize her as a state.

186. Only a Part inhabited. Three fourths of our country was then uninhabited by white men, and almost all the people lived near the seaboard. Had a line been drawn along what was then the frontier, it would (as the map on p. 177 shows) have run along the shore of Maine, across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain, then south to the Mohawk valley, then down the Hudson River, and southwestward across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, then south along the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Altamaha River in Georgia, and by it to the sea. How many people lived here was never known till 1790. The Constitution of the United States requires that the people shall be counted once in each ten years, in order that it may be determined how many representatives each state shall have in the House of Representatives; and for this purpose Congress ordered the first census to be taken in 1790. It then appeared that, excluding Indians, there were living in the eleven United States 3,380,000 human beings, or not much more than half the number of people who now live in Pennsylvania or New York.

187. How the People were scattered. - More were in the Southern than in the Eastern states. Virginia, then the most populous, contained one fifth. Pennsylvania had a ninth, while in the five states of Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia were almost one half of the English-speaking people of the United States. These were the planting states, and, populous as they were, they had but two cities-Baltimore and Charleston. Savannah, Wilmington, Alexandria, Norfolk, and

1 The states ratified the Constitution on the dates given below: