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138 one hundred and fifty thousand acres, was required to be granted "to General George Rogers Clarke and the officers and soldiers of his regiment, who marched with him when the post of Kaskaskia and Saint Vincent were reduced, and to the officers and soldiers that have been since incorporated into the said regiment," to be laid off in one tract in such shape as the officers should choose. Also, in case the land reserved by law on the southeast side of the Ohio River for the bounties of the Virginia troops should prove insufficient or of poor quality, then the deficiency should be made up from the lands on the northwest side of that river. All the land within the ceded territory, not reserved or appropriated to the purposes named, was to be a common fund for the use and benefit of such of the United States as had become, or should become, members of the confederation, "according to their respective proportions, in the general charge and expenditure."

In July, 1786, congress recommended to Virginia to revise her act of cession so far as to empower the United States to divide the territory northwest of the Ohio River into not more than five nor less than three states, as the situation of that country and the circumstances might require, which states were to become in the future members of the federal union.

In September of the same year, Connecticut ceded to the union the lands she still claimed west of the State of New York, known as the Western Reserve, extending one hundred and twenty miles west of the western boundary of Pennsylvania. In accepting the gift congress required a deed relinquishing the jurisdictional claim of Connecticut to the Western Reserve to be deposited with the deed of cession in the office of the Department of State of the United States; and provided that nothing contained in the deed of cession should involve the