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If any feeling has been displayed on my part it has been indulged with a view of eliciting results which it was believed would be salutary and acceptable. At the same time there has been no intention to abandon those prudential considerations entirely consistent with a free assertion of what it might be supposed the people, through their representative, would eventually approve and sustain. At the period of forming the treaty of 1783. Massachusetts and the other colonies were independent of each other, as to territorial rights The United States as such did not exist. Altho, the colonies constituted common agents to form treaty, the territorial rights secured did not by virtue of that instrument accrue to the nation, but were were merit acknowledged and confirmed by it not the existing individual corporations, according to preexisting grants. Crownlands only being excepted.

  When the Union of the States was framed, in that happy arrangement we are still permitted to witness, and which created a general guardianship, without extinguishing a particular independence, the compact left Massachusetts the proprietor, as one party, in severally of all her soil. The held it fully with undiminished interest and has conceded her jurisdictional control only by that magnanimous act, usually called the separation, which received validity from the concurrence of Congress.