Harvard Men Suggest a Cold Place for Yale
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| Glacial Deposit |
The Colonial disputes with Great Britain were settled in 1783, creating great opportunities for the Colonies to resume their disputes with each other. Because of the unfortunate earlier action of the Penn Proprietors in selling land already occupied by Connecticut settlers, the legislatures of Connecticut and Pennsylvania behaved in ways that do them no credit. The situation could easily lead to more armed conflict, and it could have gone from civil war to fragmentation of the nation. So, although New York was close enough to know better, they joined with Massachusetts in offering consideration of carving a new state out of Pennsylvania's northeast corner. It was rejected, but the geological idea is fascinating.
The northeast corner was once covered by a glacier, and the region is separated from the rest of Pennsylvania by a "terminal moraine", which is the huge pile of rocks and stones left behind when a glacier recedes. There are thirteen counties of rather desolate woods, with five or six more counties of moraine. Even today, some of the upper counties have only five or six thousand residents scattered in little settlements. The whole idea died when people got a chance to look over the region. Although one county is named Wyoming, this was not Wyoming, Fair Wyoming, at all. Moraines were what the Connecticut settlers were trying to escape.
However, their grandchildren might not be so sure. Tremendous deposits of anthracite were discovered in the region, and then oil in Bradford County. Residents of New York City will apparently commute endlessly to escape taxes, so an interstate highway or two would probably quickly make the area into Little Brooklyn.
The central point in all this was beginning to emerge. It simply did not matter what state you were living in, as long as you could trust the legislature and the courts to be reasonably fair. The two combative legislatures and affiliated courts were quite obviously behaving in a manner too obscenely partisan to be tolerated. Everybody involved in this disgusting mess could see the advantages which might be offered by the ability to appeal to a superior power dominated by the other eleven (to forty-eight) states. Carving out a separate state was not a compromise, it was a threat, just as unsatisfactory to one combatant as the other.
Although it was clearly time to put aside the grievances and vengeance of a land dispute which had got out of hand, currents of other wild and headstrong ideas continued to swirl into the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. In April 1786 Ethan Allen himself showed up in the region, wearing full Regimental uniform. He declared he had formed one new state and that with one hundred of his Green Mountain Boys and two hundred riflemen he could establish another one. There is some reason to suppose Allen was responding to an action of the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut, which had held a meeting the previous September where Oliver Wolcott drafted a constitution for a new state named Westmoreland. William Judd was to be governor, John Franklin lieutenant governor and Ethan Allen was to be in command of the militia. The Assemblies of both Connecticut and Pennsylvania reacted with vigor to renounce the whole State of Westmoreland idea, and when John Franklin persisted, he was dragged to Philadelphia and thrown forcibly into jail to subdue his rebellious spirit. Nevertheless, the point was dramatized that -- even five years after the Decision of Trenton had supposedly settled the matter, and after all sensible neighbors wanted this dispute terminated -- something needed to be done to strengthen the Articles of Confederation, or else replace them.
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