George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

[413] under congress, but perhaps mistook its impor-

Chap. XIX.} 1780.

tance as ‘a solid basis of authority and consequence.’ The precedent of the Bank of England, of which he over-estimated the influence on public credit, led him to place too much reliance on a bank of the United States.

The advice which Hamilton offered from his tent in the midst of an unpaid, half-fed, and half-clad army, was the more remarkable from the hopefulness which beamed through his words. No doubt crossed his mind, or, indeed, that of any of his countrymen, that a republic of united states could be formed over a widely extended territory.

Two days later, Washington, with Duane at his side, gazed from Weehawken heights on the half-ruined city of New York in her bondage. He may not have fully foreseen how the wealth and commercial representatives of all the nations of the world would be gathered on that island and the neighboring shores; but he, too, never doubted of the coming prosperity and greatness of his country.

Congress toiled as before, and, if for the moment it toiled in vain, it secured the future. It urged on the states a liberal surrender of their territorial claims in the west, ‘to accelerate the federal alliance and lead to the happy establishment of the federal union;’ and, as if its eye had pierced the glories of the coming century, it provided ‘that the western lands which might be ceded to the United States should be settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become members of that federal union, and have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and independence as the other states.’ In October,