The Federal forts were built first; it was only afterwards that the small towns sprang up in their shadow.

The Federal troops formed the vanguard of the white advance.

They were the mainstay of the force behind which, as behind a shield, the founders of the commonwealths did their work.
Unquestionably many of the settlers did their full share in the fighting; and they and their descendants, on many a stricken field, and through many a long campaign, proved that no people stood above them in hardihood and courage; but the land on which they settled was won less by themselves than by the statesmen who met in the national capital, and the scarred soldiers who on the frontier upbore the national colors.
Moreover, instead of being absolutely free to choose their own form of government, and shape their own laws and social conditions untrammelled by restrictions, the Northwesterners were allowed to take the land only upon certain definite conditions.

The National Government ceded to settlers part of its own domain, and provided the terms upon which states of the Union should afterwards be made out of this domain; and with a wisdom and love of righteousness which have been of incalculable consequence to the whole nation, it stipulated that slavery should never exist in the States thus formed.

This condition alone profoundly affected the whole development of the Northwest, and sundered it by a sharp line from those portions of the new country which, for their own ill fortune, were left free from all restriction of the kind.