Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853)

283

CESSION ACT OF NORTH-CAROLINA.

to meet expenditures growing out of a protracted conflict. While the country received the news of an honourable and advantageous peace with acclamations of joy and triumph, government felt itself borne down by its heavy public indebtedness, and harassed by the importunate clamour of its public creditors. Among the expedients adopted by Congress to lighten this burden, replenish its treasury and increase its exhausted credit, was the recommendation to such of the states as owned vacant and unappropriated lands, to throw them into the common stock, cede them to the United States, and out of the joint fund thus created, liquidate the common debt. North-Carolina was one of these. She owned a vast amount of unappropriated lands in that portion of her western territory extending from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. Sympathizing with Congress in the distress and difficulty resulting from the embarrassed financial condition of the Union, the General Assembly of North-Carolina, at its April session of this year, at Hillsborough, adopted measures to relieve them. Taxes were laid for this purpose, and authority was given to Congress to collect them, and also to levy a duty on foreign merchandize. Partly for the same reason, and for others which will hereafter be noticed, the Assembly passed an act in June, ceding to the Congress of the United States the western lands, as therein described, and authorized the North Carolina delegates to execute a deed for the same. In this cession thus authorized, was embraced all the territory now constituting the State of Tennessee, and including, of necessity, the trans-montane counties, Washington, Sullivan, Greene and Davidson.*

By an additional act of the same session, it was declared that the sovereignty and jurisdiction of North-Carolina in and over the territory thus ceded, and all its inhabitants, should be and remain the same in all respects, until the United States, in Congress, should accept the cession. It had been provided in the cession act that if Congress should not accept in two years, the act was thenceforward to be of no effect.

The Assembly, at the same session, closed the land office