Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

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Acquisition of Territory.

The original territory of the United States as acknowledged by the treaty with Great Britain, in 1783, consisted of the following thirteen States: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The boundaries of many of these States, as constituted by their charters, extended to the Pacific Ocean; but in practice they ceased at the Mississippi. Beyond that river the territory belonged, by discovery and settlement, to the-King of Spain. All the territory west of the present boundaries of the States was ceded by them to the United States in the order named: Virginia, 1784: Massachusetts, 1785; Connecticut, 1786 and 1800; South Carolina, 1787; North Carolina, 1790: Georgia, 1802. This ceded territory comprised part of Minnesota, all of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio (see Northwest Territory), Tennessee, and a great part of Alabama and Mississippi. Vermont was admitted as a separate State in 1791; Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, in 1792; and Maine, till that time claimed by Massachusetts, in 1820.