Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV TRAVELS AND EFFORTS FOR COPYRIGHT In January 1785 Webster had again entered the lists of political debate in a series of papers on the claims of Connecticut to lands west of the Delaware. The assertion of those claims at that time had respect, immediately, to certain lands lying within the present limits of the State of Pennsylvania where settlements had been made by emigrants from Connecticut before the Revolution, and where towns and a county had been organized which were duly represented in the semi-annual sessions of the Legislature at Hartford and New Haven.1 These towns were attached to the county of Litchfield. In the controversy with Pennsylvania, the arguments of Connecticut were 'The original patent granted in 1631 by the Earl of Warwick to Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brook and others, gave to Connecticut one hundred and twenty miles of seacoast, beginning at the Narragansett River, and made 'the South Sea' or the Pacific Ocean its western boundary. The charter afterward given to the Colony by Charles II. in 1662, defined the territory in the same terms as the original patent. The claim was, that the grant in this charter was good against all subsequent grants of the same territory from the crown of England, except where those grants, as in the case of New York, were validated by the express consent of Connecticut. overruled, and the settlers on the banks of the Susquehanna and in the vale of Wyoming, were constrained to submit to the law as it came from Philadelphia. But the resoluteness and strength of argument with which the State and the men of Connecticut then insisted on the boundaries assigned to that colony by their ancient charters, secured to them at last, when the western lands were ceded to the Union, that...
