Articles of Confederation via Wikimedia Commons.

The Treaty of Paris may have resolved the conflict between America and Great Britain, but it left unaddressed the conflicts between America’s new states. United in their struggle for independence, they were far less united in determining where one state’s claims ended and another’s began.

King George no longer ruled the former colonies. The legacy of the colonial charters, however, continued to shape the thinking of the individual states. For more than a century, English monarchs had granted overlapping charters across North America, often with only the vaguest understanding of the geography involved. The Treaty of Paris transferred vast stretches of Britain’s former frontier to the United States, but it also revived old questions those charters had never fully answered.

America had overthrown the king. It had not escaped the king’s paperwork.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Greater Western New York. Although some colonial Continue Reading “How Colonial Charters Continued To Haunt The New Republic”