Northwest Ordinance

12 Key excerpts on "Northwest Ordinance"

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  Slavery in the United States

  A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]

  • Junius P. Rodriguez(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The ordinance also provided a means by which a territory could become a state on the basis of equality with the existing states, laid the foundation for a na- tional system of free public education, and outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude north and west of the Ohio River. The ordinance supplied the govern- mental structure for the Northwest Territory and the process by which the territories would become states. 402  Northwest Ordinance (1787) A governor, secretary, and three judges made up the governmental structure of the territory. When the ter- ritory consisted of 5,000 free male inhabitants, they could elect representatives to a general assembly. After the territory claimed 60,000 free inhabitants, it could be admitted to the Union as a state on equal footing with the original states. The ordinance created the states of Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837) and Wisconsin (1848). The Northwest Ordinance set the basic pattern of settlement and statehood throughout the United States. The ordinance also maintained that “Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good gov- ernment and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” This article of the Northwest Ordinance reinforced the Land Ordinance (1785), which had set aside funds in each township for the establishment of schools. The Ohio General Assembly established Ohio University (1804) and Miami University (1809) as land-grant col- leges, which became the cornerstones for higher educa- tion across the nation. These provisions laid the foun- dation for the nationwide system of public education. Nathan Dane and Rufus King from Massachusetts proposed Article Six of the ordinance, which excluded slavery and involuntary servitude in the territories. It also stated that fugitive slaves “may be lawfully re- claimed and conveyed to the person claiming” them.

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  Settling Ohio

  First Peoples and Beyond

  • Timothy G. Anderson, Brian Schoen, Timothy G. Anderson, Brian Schoen(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Ohio University Press

    (Publisher)

  14

  The Northwest Ordinance, then, was the second transformative event that summer. From the beginning, it acted as a constitutional document. It was not the federal Constitution that dealt with the future growth of the American union; that was the work of the Northwest Ordinance. It answered two pressing sets of questions. First, who could set up new polities in the new American union and upon what basis? And, second, what kind of a union would these new United States be? The framers of the Northwest Ordinance, paying attention to the unruly and worrisome experiments in settler-sovereignty in the Tennessee Valley, Kentucky, Vermont, and Ohio, determined who has the right to set up new polities, and that is Congress. Self-determination proved too chaotic, too antithetical to entrenched economic interests, too contrary to the good of the United States as a whole. The governments established under the terms of the Ordinance of 1787 were explicitly not self-initiated, not sovereign, and not participatory. Even once the first population threshold had been passed to form a legislature, the governor retained an indefinite absolute veto, empowering him, if anything, still more. Pause a moment and imagine how Samuel Adams would have responded had King George III tried that in Massachusetts! Or Patrick Henry in Virginia! Think about this too: in 1803, the year Ohio became a state and passed out of territorial status, a full 40 percent of the United States was governed under territorial government. Nonparticipatory government extended over a wide geography, and in some places over a long chronology. This form of colonial governance could extend significantly in time too. Wisconsin remained under territorial government for sixty-one years, becoming a state only in 1848.15 Moreover, the reach of the Northwest Ordinance extended beyond the Northwest Territory for which it was originally written. As Congress organized new territories—the Southwest (1790), Mississippi (1798), and Indiana (1800) Territories—it did not write new laws, or even copy and paste the bulk of the 1787 law into the new ones: it merely stipulated in each new territory that the inhabitants “shall enjoy all the privileges, benefits, and advantages set forth in the ordinance . . . for the government of the territory . . . northwest of the river Ohio” with the exception of the prohibition of slavery, which remained legal in the Southwest and Mississippi.16

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  The Laws That Shaped America

  Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact

  • Dennis W. Johnson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  37

  Highlights of the Northwest Ordinance

  The Ordinance in its fourteen sections outlawed primogeniture, and set the governmental structure for the Northwest Territory, mechanisms for the formation of a permanent government, the enforcement of civil and criminal laws, and a means by which the territories could apply for statehood.

  It contained six articles of compact between the original states and the people and states of the Northwest Territory.

  • The first article provided freedom of religion.
  • The second article provided basic rights, many lifted from the English Bill of Rights in 1689: benefit from the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, proportionate representation in the legislature; no excessive fines; no cruel and unusual punishment; and the protection of private contracts.
  • The third article encouraged schools and education (“Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged”), and “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent …”
  • The fourth article proclaimed that the new states would be forever a part of the Union, and when admitted to the Union would be on equal footing with the original states in all respects.
  • The fifth article determined that no fewer than three and no more than five states would be created out of the Northwest Territory.
  • The sixth article prohibited slavery and required the return of fugitive slaves.

  Aftermath

  It took nearly four months after approval of the Northwest Ordinance before the territorial officers were selected. Agents from the Ohio Company negotiated with Congress, trying to get favorable terms for land sales. They also tried to influence Congress in the selection of new territorial leaders. The Rev. Dr. Cutler recommended Arthur St. Clair, the current president of the Confederation Congress, to become the new governor of the Northwest Territory. St. Clair, a major general in the Revolutionary War, was an able choice: unlike other territorial officers, he was honest and never got involved in land speculation.38 Not so his second in command. Winthrop Sargent, the second-ranking territorial officer, described as arrogant and selfish, however, saw money to be made. He had been a former major general in the Revolutionary Army and a land surveyor. When the Ohio Company on October 26, 1787, bought 1.5 million acres for a million dollars, Cutler and Sargent each purchased 750,000 acres for half a million dollars, payable over a three-year period.39

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  Ohio

  A History of the Buckeye State

  • Kevin F. Kern, Gregory S. Wilson(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Even close to 240 years after Congress passed the Ordinance, travelers flying over the Midwest can still see the gridwork pattern it laid on the landscape by looking down at the county road systems. In fact, the Land Ordinance of 1785 would probably have no rival for the distinction of being the most important act ever 36 (a) 30 24 18 12 6 35 29 23 17 11 5 34 28 22 16 10 4 33 27 21 15 9 3 32 26 20 14 8 2 31 25 19 13 7 1 (b) 6 5 4 3 2 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 18 17 16 15 14 13 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 29 28 27 26 25 31 32 33 34 35 36 Figure 5.2 Numbering under the Land Ordinance of 1785 (a, left). Numbering under the Land Ordinance of 1796 (b, right). Formation of Territory, Settlements, and Statehood 105 passed by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation were it not for the Northwest Ordinance passed two years later. The Northwest Ordinance was a sweeping law that attempted to regularize the settlement, government, and eventual admission of territories in the Northwest Territory (those lands north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River) as states. This law set up an orderly process for dividing the territory and providing stages of government for each division. In the first stage, Congress would appoint a governor, a secretary, and three judges to administer the territory by choosing and implementing civil and criminal laws from existing states. The governor had a great deal of power during this stage, with the ability to make most local government appointments, create new counties and townships, and serve as commander-in-chief of the militia. After the territory reached a population of 5,000 free males, a second stage would begin in which the population could elect a representative assembly. This was a sort of “training wheels” stage of self-government, one in which the assembly could initiate and pass legislation but had only limited powers otherwise.

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  Student's Guide to Landmark Congressional Laws on Civil Rights

  • Marcus D. Pohlmann, Linda Vallar Whisenhunt(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Having declared a prohibition against slavery in the Northwest Territories, however, this law was far from self-implementing in a region whose governmental structures were just taking form. By the 1830 census, for instance, 16,000 blacks were officially residing in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Yet, despite the Northwest Ordinance, there were also 788 officially listed "slaves." THE LAW The Northwest Ordinance 1 addressed a myriad of issues related to the governance of this newly acquired region. The law provided that the new territory would be deemed one district and that Con- gress would appoint a governor, a secretary, and a court consisting of three judges. The governing officials of the new territory were directed to adopt the laws of the original United States as needed. Once the population of the area had increased to 5,000 free male residents, the ordinance provided for the means to establish a gen- eral assembly for the district. All legislation produced was never- Northwest Ordinance 15 theless subject to the governor's absolute veto. The governor was given other powers under the ordinance to ensure peace and order. The Ordinance set forth six articles of "compact," or agreement, between the original United States and the new territory. The ar- ticles of agreement mandated that territories guarantee to respect such principles as religious freedoms, trial by jury, and educational opportunity. Further, the articles set forth the requirements and procedures for portions of the territory to apply for formal state- hood. The most relevant article regarding the rights of blacks was Article 6. This article prohibited slavery or involuntary servitude, except in the case of convicted criminals. The law specifically pro- vided, however, that any enslaved person escaping into the new territory from one of the original United States could be reclaimed by the owner.

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  A Slaveholders' Union

  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

  • George William Van Cleve(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The ostensible reasons given for the Northern state shift were wholly unpersuasive, be-cause they did not represent any significant change in conditions from the year before when the North’s position had been just the reverse. But the political world had indeed changed: in the interim, the Northwest Ordi-nance had been passed and the Constitution had been adopted. The actual reason why this Northern about-face happened is hinted at in a July 10, 1787, letter from Congressman (and Philadelphia Convention delegate) Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina, reporting to the governor of North Carolina on continental affairs. Writing three days before passage of the Northwest Ordinance, Hawkins described the right of Mississippi River navigation as a pressing concern for the “Western citizens of the southern States” and said that as a result of recent decisions in the Conti-nental Congress that treaty had “at length, from a variety of circumstances unnecessary as well perhaps as improper to relate been put in a better situa-tion than heretofore.” 78 To put things more plainly, it seems reasonable to think from the phrasing as well as the timing of Hawkins’s letter that the Southern states had proffered their support for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 in return for the abandonment of the treaty by the Northern states (in the event that the Constitution was ratified), in effect compensating the Northern states for their loss. The political heart of that bargain was an understanding that each sec-tion would be able to pursue western expansion on its own terms to maxi-mize its economic development. For the Northern states, this meant that the Northwest Ordinance could include a series of “colonialist” gover-nance provisions restricting territorial freedom of action, such as a pre-decessor of the Constitution’s contracts clause and restrictions on slavery, provisions that they believed would encourage northern and white immi-grant settlement.

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  Slavery and the Founders

  Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Two ————

   

  Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance, 1787

  A Study in Ambiguity     For many antebellum northerners, the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibition of slavery was almost a sacred text. Article VI of the Ordinance stated:

  There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labour or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original states, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labour or service as aforesaid.1

  In the early 1830s, a young Salmon P. Chase, who would become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1864, described the provision as a “remarkable instrument … the last gift of the congress of the old confederation to the country … a fit consummation of their glorious labors.” Writing in the 1850s, when sectional tensions over slavery in the territories were at their height, Edward Coles, the antislavery former governor of Illinois, declared that the Ordinance of 1787 was “marvellous” and showed “the profound wisdom of those who framed such an efficacious measure for our country.” Coles contrasted the debate over slavery in Kansas and Nebraska in 1854 to the earlier period, when “the Territories subject to it [the Ordinance] were quiet, happy, and prosperous.” Coles believed that if American politicians had followed the pattern set by the Ordinance of 1787, the turmoil of the 1850s might have been avoided. Men like Chase and Coles praised the Ordinance for creating the free states along the Ohio River. Many antebellum northerners had no doubt that without the Ordinance the Midwest would have become a bastion of slavery.2

  In spite of the praise that Article VI received in the nineteenth century, modern scholars have, for the most part, ignored it. Although Ulrich B. Phillips described it as “the first and last antislavery achievement by the central government” in this period, a careful examination of the provisions and its implementation suggests that it is unclear exactly what the article was intended to accomplish. At the time of its passage the Ordinance did not threaten slavery in the South. It may even have strengthened slavery there. Nor did the Ordinance immediately or directly affect slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River. Slavery continued in the region for decades. Thus in the nineteenth-century usage of the term, the Ordinance was not abolitionist and was only barely “antislavery.”3

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  The Origins of the Federal Republic

  Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787

  • Peter S. Onuf(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  105 But, Grayson counseled, Monroe should support the new ordinance, be-cause it was consistent with the essential interests of Virginia and the other southern states. What were the most important innovations in the new system? The articulation of a neo-colonial scheme of government in the pre-statehood period may have been most striking to contemporaries. The form of this government, Lee was satisfied to say, is much more tonic than our demo-cratic forms on the Atlantic are. 106 The self-designated compact provi-sions, securing settlers' legal rights and outlawing slavery, also raised eyebrows. These provisions doubtless were designed to appeal to potential emigrants, particularly to the many New Englanders waiting impatiently in the wings. Southerners accepted the ban on slavery in order to curb New States and the New Nation 171 competition in labor-intensive staple production; perhaps they expected even nonslaveholding new states to be drawn into their orbit. The most important result, whether the southerners who supported the ordinance intended it or not, was to encourage expansionist sentiment in the North and to commit the United States as a whole to the creation of new states. Unlike the 1784 ordinance, the Northwest Ordinance took effect imme-diately, providing at last for the West's easy passage into permanent State Governments. 108 The Northwest Ordinance also broke out of the consti-tutional straitjacket in which the earlier ordinance had confined itself. In a crucial change of wording during the drafting process, the proviso that the consent of so many states in Congress is first obtained, as may at that time be competent to such admission, was dropped. 109 Statehood auto-matically followed, once a population of 60,000 was attained, and the en-larged new states were likely to reach that figure at an early date. Congress defined a central role for itself in the government of national territory.

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  Statehood and Union

  A History of the Northwest Ordinance

  • Peter S. Onuf(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet to establish new state boundaries over a vast, uncharted wilderness domain was an elusive goal. American policy makers hoped to avoid the confusion of overlapping charter lines characteristic of the British empire in America. But the imperfect state of geographical knowledge (most notably concerning the precise location of Lake Michigan) and unpredictable patterns of settlement and development meant that the Ordinance’s projected boundaries were inevitably arbitrary and ambiguous. Northwesterners who stood to benefit from boundary changes often led the attack against these “unnatural” boundaries. But the resulting uncertainty jeopardized territorial rights. The Ordinance was supposed to control development over space and time, and these spatial and temporal dimensions were interdependent. If boundaries were not fixed in advance, the other compact promises would be meaningless: Congress could change a territory’s boundaries whenever it threatened to grow large enough to claim membership in the union.

  I. Territorial Boundaries

  The boundaries set down in the Ordinance were only the latest in a series of proposals for new colonies and new states dating from before the Revolution.2 A leading feature of these proposals was the emphasis on determinate boundary lines. A remarkable proposal set forth by British radical John Cartwright in the 1775 edition of his American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain reflected this concern, anticipating many of the provisions of the later Northwest Ordinance. Cartwright’s objective was to preserve “the future balance of power” among the Anglo-American “states.” “Might it not be expedient,” he asked, “that the limits and boundaries of each, which they should never hereafter pass, should be newly defined by the Grand British League and Confederacy.” Cartwright proposed nineteen new colonies, specifying their precise boundaries and giving each a name. When any of these colonies achieved a population of fifty thousand, “they should be entitled and free to erect themselves into an independent political state” on terms of full equality with the other American colonies.3

  Cartwright’s goals and assumptions became familiar ones over the next decade when independent Americans grappled with the western problem. Fixed boundaries were particularly important to the American states as they sought to resolve the many jurisdictional controversies that threatened to undermine their union. Reflecting on the divisive western lands controversy, Congress resolved in 1784 that the time had come when the Confederation should at last “assume its ultimate and permanent form.”4 American statesmen also shared Cartwright’s concern that none of the new states “should be too large or too small.” State equality was thought to be critical to a “balance of power”: the imbalance among the large and small states already in the union was one of its leading liabilities.5 The balance of power idea was apparent in Congress’s 1784 Territorial Government Ordinance. According to what Robert Berkhofer, Jr., has called Jefferson’s “ideological geography,” the relative sizes of the new states could be manipulated to counter the centrifugal tendencies of an extensive union.6 The mechanics of the expanding federal system required that new states preserve the interstate balance of power: if they were made too large the union would be jeopardized by dangerous new centers of power.7

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  Shaped by the West, Volume 1

  A History of North America to 1877

  • William F. Deverell, Anne F. Hyde(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  He described the loyalties of backcountry settlers as being so delicate that “the touch of a feather would drive them away.” Congress sought ways to build authority in the West and to incorporate the region physically and culturally into a nation. Congress appointed Thomas Jef-ferson to draft a policy to manage land in the national domain. Jefferson’s attempt to create rules about how Americans could use or acquire land had to ensure that national and local goals were balanced. Together, the Land Ordi-nance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 gave Americans a way to survey, claim, and develop land for individual farms and for larger communi-ties. A reflection of Jefferson’s practicality and rationality, the ordinances imposed a rigid grid on the landscape. They also represented his vision of indi-viduals and communities farming in the West. The legislation offered new communities a blueprint for forming governments, so that they could become permanent states within the union. However, this legislation did not solve the most serious obstacle to land set-tlement: the dozens of powerful Indian nations that occupied and fiercely pro-tected their land west of the Appalachians. After a few treaties had been care-fully negotiated and signed by some Iroquois, Huron, and Delaware bands, in 1786 a united Indian confederation led by the Shawnees announced that no more land would be given away without unanimous Indian consent and that the Indians would “prevent your surveyors and other people from coming upon our side of the Ohio River,” exactly the land that had just been fought over and divided up as part of the national domain. It would take two decades of violent warfare to wrest the land from Native peoples. Backcountry warfare cost the government an enormous price in cash and lives, neither of which the new republic could afford to pay.

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  The Frontier Republic

  Ideology and Politics in The Ohio Country, 1780-1825

  • Andrew R. L Cayton(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  Establishing the Authority of theNational Government

  1788 1798

  O ne of the most significant things about the settlers of early Marietta, given the prevailing conceptions of a frontier community in the Old Northwest, was their profound respect for national authority. Almost without exception, historians since the days of Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the Ohio Valley in the Early Republic was what John Barnhart called a “Valley of Democracy,” a region whose rapidly expanding population insisted upon the supremacy of local sovereignty and warmly embraced doctrines of social egalitarianism. In the “kinetic setting” of the American frontier, Robert Wiebe argues, westerners felt little respect for distant eastern governments, rejected hierarchy as a mode of social organization, and were unable to develop any “sense of a contained, personally integrated whole.” More specifically, Gordon S. Wood has written in a recent major textbook that “it was in the territories of the Old Northwest that American democracy ran its course.” There, the “hundreds of commercial communities were so recent and so bustling, the lines of economic authority so tangled and confused, that no clear structures of political authority could be readily transplanted or created.” Or, as Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick put it in a classic article, the Old Northwest was a region whose “burgeoning capitalism recognize[d] no prior structures, [was] impatient of elites, [and] tolerate[d] few restraints.” It was a world of individual opportunity and local autonomy.1

  Partly as a result of their assumptions about frontier society, historians have tended to disparage the power of the national government in the Northwest Territory and the five states created out of it. They have pointed to vast distances, prolonged Indian conflicts, and the frequent absences and alleged arrogance of territorial officials as its undoing. But, more important, they contended that what Jack Ericson Eblen has called the “fully centralized, nondemocratic form of government” created by the Ordinance of 1787 was, in the words of Randolph Downes, “quite incompatible with frontier conditions.” Territorial officials and their supporters, including the associates of the Ohio Company, thus have usually been portrayed as ineffective, stiffnecked, Puritan anachronisms, out of step and out of touch with the dynamic democratic character of frontier society.2

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  The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences

  • Jason Kaufman(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  In fact, the exact reach of the courts’ legisla-tive powers remained a point of contention in Ohio through the 1800s resulting in several attempts to impeach and restrict state jurists. Ac-cording to historian Jack Eblen, “As a result of the cautiousness, if not outright incompetence, of most district-stage legislators . . . the law de-veloped haphazardly and was never adequate. Moreover, the laws were often unenforceable or irrelevant, either because of their nature or be-cause of their unavailability to local authorities.” The legal code re-mained an uncertain patchwork until 1799, when a legislative assembly was convened with power to initiate its own measures. This reformed legal code later became the basis for the state codes of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. 6 Another major legal problem in the territories was the question of who actually had title to the land. Native claims notwithstanding, var-ious states held title to western lands and sought jurisdiction over them. Despite the founders’ fear of national government, the Northwest Ordi-nance of 1787 was a multistate compromise whereby the states’ western claims were “nationalized,” or moved from state to federal jurisdiction. The federal government then began liberally dispersing this land to the nation’s underpaid, largely disgruntled war veterans. Such use of the public lands was a hallmark of early American public administration. Nonetheless, despite Republican aspirations to people the West with small family farms, land speculators and private land companies sup-planted individual placeholders in most areas by buying plots in bulk and reselling them at a premium. In fact, St. Clair’s territorial government was preceded by the powerful Ohio Company, a land corporation created by Revolutionary War officers who hoped to reap huge profits by speculating in western land.

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