阅读理解 Political controversy about the public-land policy of the United States began with the American Revolution. In fact, even before independence from Britain was won, it became clear that resolving the dilemmas surrounding the public domain might prove necessary to preserve the Union itself.
At the peace negotiations with Britain, American demanded, and got, a western boundary at the Mississippi River. Thus the new nation secured for its birthright a vast internal empire rich in agricultural and mineral resources. But under their colonial charters, seven states Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia claimed portions of the western wilderness. Virginia's claim was the largest, stretching north and to encompass the later states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The language of the charters was vague sponsoring Colonel George Roger Clark's 1778 expedition 1o Vincennes and Kalkaska, which strengthened America's trans-Appalachian pretensions at the peace table.
The six states holding no claim to the transmittance region doubted whether a confederacy in which territory was so unevenly apportioned would truly prove what it claimed to be, a union of equals. Already New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Maryland were among the smallest and least populous of the states. While they levied heavy taxes to repay states war debts, their larger neighbors might retire debts out of land sale proceeds. Drawn by fresh lands and low taxes, people would desert the small states for the large, leaving the former to fall into bankruptcy and eventually into political subjugation. All the states shared in the war effort, said the New Jersey legislature; how then could half of them "be left to sink under an enormous debt, while others are enabled, in a short period, to replace all their expenditure from the hard earnings of the whole confederacy?'' As the revolution was a common endeavor, so ought its fruits, including the western lands, to be a common property.