Note 1475 — Chapter IX

In this interval between 1765 and 1774 there was a revival of the purpose of settlements in the country watered by the Ohio and its tributaries. The breaking up by the war of the earlier enterprise of the Ohio Company (see Vol. V., ante; Sparks in his Washington, ii. 483, says its papers were entrusted to him fifty years ago by Charles Fenton Mercer, of Virginia) had led to a plan to buy out the French settlers in Illinois (Sparks's Franklin, vii. 356; Bigelow's Franklin, i. 537, 547; ii. 112); and this being abandoned, the earlier project had been merged in the scheme known at first as Walpole's Grant, and subsequently as the Colony of Vandalia, which had derived some impetus immediately after the conclusion of peace in 1763 by the publication in London of The Advantages of a Settlement upon the Ohio (now rare; copies in Harvard College library; in Carter-Brown Catal., iii. 1363; Thomson's Bibliog. of Ohio, no. 7), and in Edinburgh of The Expediency of securing our American Colonies by settling the Country adjoining the Mississippi River and the Country upon the Ohio Considered (Harvard College library, 6373. 33). The scheme had the countenance of Lord Shelburne, and the Shelburne MSS., as calendared in the Hist. MSS. Com. Report, v. p. 218 (vol. 50), show various papers appertaining. Professor H. B. Adams, in the Maryland Fund Publications, no. xi. p. 27, has marked the growth of the perception of the importance of these lands.