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Ordinance of 1787

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Northwest Ordinances
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The Northwest Ordinance

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(1784, 1785, 1787) Measures enacted by the U.S. Congress for the division and settlement of the Northwest Territory, the frontier region extending north of the Ohio River to the Great Lakes and west of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River. The original ordinance, written by Thomas Jefferson, divided the territory into self-governing districts and set population requirements for statehood. The final ordinance, written partly by Rufus King, set land-grant sizes and prices, provided public land for schools, outlawed slavery, and guaranteed civil liberties. It established the principle of admitting new states on equal terms with the original 13 states.

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US Supreme Court: Northwest Ordinance
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Enacted by the Confederation Congress on 13 July 1787, the Northwest Ordinance established the basic framework of the American territorial system. After a period of direct rule by congressional appointees, the Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota—and its subsequent subdivisions would enjoy a limited measure of self‐government until, when their populations reached sixty thousand, they were entitled to draft state constitutions and claim admission to the Union on equal terms. The principle that the new states should become equal members of the Union had been set forth in the states' western land cessions that created the national domain and it was preserved as a leading feature of the ordinance. Adoption of the Northwest Ordinance also reflected Congress's determination to implement its new land policy, outlined in the land ordinance of 20 May 1785, by guaranteeing secure titles and establishing law and order on the frontier. The ordinance's provisions for direct congressional rule in the first stage of territorial development were gradually modified and eventually superseded as frontier regions became more politically stable and less strategically vulnerable.

The six “Articles of Compact” in the second part of the ordinance—including the promise of statehood, boundary provisions for three to five new states, guarantees of basic individual rights (including trial by jury and habeas corpus), and a ban on slavery—proved more durable, although constitutionally unenforceable (according to obiter dictum by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Strader v. Graham, 1851). What survived was a commitment to form new and equal states that was honored, if sometimes belatedly, throughout the original territory and in areas later added to the national domain.

See also Territories and New States.

— Peter S. Onuf

US History Companion: Northwest Ordinance
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The Northwest Ordinance, approved by Congress on July 13, 1787, delineated rules for governing the Old Northwest, the area lying north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. Thomas Jefferson had written the first ordinance for the territory three years earlier, calling for a division of the region into states. Each was to have the same political powers as the original thirteen states and was to prohibit slavery after 1800. The ordinance was adopted in April 1784, but it had not been instituted because no settlers held legal title yet.

Pressure from land speculators, particularly the well-connected Ohio Company, induced Congress to issue a revised Northwest Ordinance in 1787 providing for interim federal control while local governments were being developed. The new law, primarily written by Rufus King and Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, called--as Jefferson's had--for dividing the area into several territories, but specified that each would be administered initially by a governor, a secretary, and three judges, all appointed by Congress. Whenever a district reached a population of five thousand free males, it could elect a bicameral legislature and send a nonvoting member to Congress. When its population reached sixty thousand free inhabitants (Jefferson had set the figure at twenty thousand), the district would be eligible for statehood. The ordinance guaranteed freedom of religion, trial by jury, and public support for education. It also provided that slavery was to be prohibited in the territory.

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the most important acts passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It laid out the process through which a territory could move to statehood, it guaranteed that new states would be on an equal footing with the old, and it protected civil liberties in the new territories. This ordinance was also the first national legislation that set limits on the expansion of slavery.

See also Expansion, Continental and Overseas.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Ordinance of 1787
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Ordinance of 1787, adopted by the Congress of Confederation for the government of the Western territories ceded to the United States by the states. It created the Northwest Territory and is frequently called the Northwest Ordinance. It was based on the ordinance of 1784, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, which provided for dividing the region into numerous territories. The 1784 ordinance never went into effect. In 1785 an ordinance was passed providing for division and sale of the lands. Subsequently, the application of the Ohio Company of Associates to purchase a large tract of land in the region forced Congress to act on political administration for the area. The able leaders of the company, Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler, were influential in the drafting of the ordinance, which was passed July 13, 1787. It set up a government in the region N of the Ohio River. A territorial governor, a secretary, and three judges were to be appointed by Congress, which would retain control until the population reached 5,000 voting citizens, when an elected legislature would be set up and the territory would obtain a nonvoting representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. When any portion of the territory reached a population of 60,000 or more, it could apply for admission to the Union as a state according to conditions laid down in the ordinance; there were to be not less than three or more than five states created out of the region (five were ultimately created). The ordinance also provided that no one born in the Northwest Territory should be a slave, that no law should ever be passed there that would impair the obligation of contract, that the fundamental rights and religious freedom be observed, and that education be promoted. The ordinance was the most significant achievement of Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It set the form by which subsequent Western territories were created and later admitted into the Union as states and marked the beginning of Western expansion of the United States.

Law Encyclopedia: Northwest Ordinance
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This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

An agreement adopted in 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation of States that created the Northwest Territory, organized its governing structure, and established the procedures by which territories were admitted as states to the Union.

The Northwest Ordinance, officially known as the Ordinance of 1787, was derived from a proposal by Thomas Jefferson concerning the formation of states from the territory acquired as a result of the Revolutionary War. The territory stretched from the Ohio River to the Mississippi River to the area around the Great Lakes and encompassed what is today Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. The reaction to Jefferson's proposal was mixed, and it was only when the Ohio Company of Associates expressed interest in purchasing the land that Congress took action.

The ordinance, passed by Congress in July 1787, was significant in providing a framework for the admission of territories into the Union as states. A government composed of a governor, a secretary, and three judges appointed by Congress was established in the region north of the Ohio River. When the population of the territory reached 5,000, the inhabitants were authorized to elect a legislature and to be represented in the House of Representatives by a nonvoting member. When a designated area of the territory had 60,000 residents, that area could seek to become a state by complying with the requirements of the ordinance. Congress required that the territory be divided into at least three but not more than five states. Five states were eventually carved out of the territory.

Aside from the provisions concerning statehood, the Northwest Ordinance had two distinct prohibitions. There was to be no slavery within the boundaries of the territory, and no law could be enacted that would impair a contract.

The Northwest Ordinance was important because it provided the foundation for the creation of later territories within the Union and established the process by which territories became states.

Act of Congress:

Northwest Ordinance (1787)

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Excerpt from the Northwest Ordinance

Sec. 13. And, for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory: to provide also for the establishment of States, and permanent government therein, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original States, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest....

The Northwest Ordinance, approved on July 13, 1787, organized the "Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio" into one district, delineated rules for its interim governance by Congress, and established the process for territories to enter the United States as states. Passed by the Continental Congress as one of the final provisions of the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance was reenacted, with minor modifications, after ratification of the Constitution by the first Congress on August 7, 1789. While the ordinance applied solely to the "Old Northwest"—the area lying west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River to the border with British Canada—it shaped congressional action regarding federal territories long after 1787. Considered one of the most important acts passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the three most significant founding documents in American history.

Debate over expansion into western territories occupied the new nation in the 1780s, and the Continental Congress passed three separate ordinances for territorial governance during that critical decade. Thomas Jefferson was the principle author of the Ordinance of 1784, written after a major 1784 Virginia land cession. The act articulated a general statement of democratic principles, recommending the evolution of the territories toward statehood in stages of increasing self-government. The Ordinance of 1784 advocated the division of the region into sixteen new states (with names like Polypotamia and Pelisipia), each possessing the same powers as the original thirteen states. The Ordinance of 1784 also prohibited slavery in the western territories after 1800, but its enforcement met delays for various reasons. In the meantime, the Land Ordinance of 1785 addressed the land-sale issue. It directed that the territory's land be surveyed in six-mile-square townships, each containing thirty-six one-mile square (640 acre) "sections" to be sold at auction for a dollar an acre. The ensuing grid pattern from this legislation still dominates the region's landscape to this day.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 filled the void left by the ineffectual 1784 Ordinance. Originally intended as an amendment to Jefferson's legislation, Massachusetts Representatives Rufus King and Nathan Dane completely redrafted the bill in the final days of Congress's session. The drafting committee also received contributions from Reverend Manasseh Cutler, an agent for the Ohio Company, a group of Massachusetts speculators prepared to purchase five million acres in the territory. Pressured by land speculators anxious to preserve private property on the frontier, the act represented a general movement toward law, order, and stability in the new nation that expressed itself in the simultaneous drafting of the Constitution. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out to a Cincinnati audience in 1859, "Our fathers who made the government, made the ordinance of 1787."

Fourteen preliminary "sections" and six solemn "articles of compact" comprised the text of the Northwest Ordinance. The opening section established one district in the Northwest Territory "for the purposes of temporary government" that Congress might subdivide if it deemed necessary. The second section contained provisions for conveying real property, making wills, and settling estates of persons dying without wills.

The ordinance then outlined a three-stage process for the transition from territorial status to statehood. In the first stage, Congress would appoint a governor, a secretary, and a court of three judges to administer the territory. To achieve its ends, this first-stage legislature of five officials was authorized to "adopt and publish" criminal and civil laws from existing states, as necessary for governance of the territory. The governor would serve a three-year term as commander in chief of the militia and appoint magistrates and other civil officials in the territory. He would also enjoy the power to establish counties, townships, and other civil divisions until the organization of the second-stage legislature, as well as to convene, suspend, or dissolve the general assembly as he saw fit. The governor would even enjoy absolute veto power over acts of the assembly.

Once the district reached a population of five thousand free males of "full age," the governor, an elected lower house, and an appointed legislative council would assume responsibility for administration. Male inhabitants of the territory meeting the property qualifications for voting could elect one representative for every five hundred free males in the district. These representatives would form the lower house of a general assembly and, in conjunction with the governor, nominate members for the legislative council (or upper house/senate). This second-stage legislature could enact any laws necessary for governing the territory not repugnant to the 1787 Ordinance or the Constitution; it also could send one non-voting member to Congress. When the district reached a population of sixty thousand free inhabitants, it entered the third stage of the process. It then could adopt a "republican" state constitution and apply to Congress for full statehood. Upon approval by Congress, the state would enter the federal union "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever."

The second portion of the ordinance included six "articles of compact between the original states and the people and states in the said territory," to be forever "unalterable, unless by common consent." Similar to the bills of rights included in many contemporary state constitutions, Articles I and II of the ordinance guaranteed freedom of religion, the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, proportionate representation in the legislature, and judicial proceedings under common law. Article III provided for public support of education in the territory and pledged (at least in theory) the "utmost good faith" in relations with Native Americans. Article IV made the territory's inhabitants responsible for their share of the federal debt and government expenses, while Article V established the provisional boundaries of "not less than three nor more than five States," as well as the third-stage threshold of sixty thousand free inhabitants. The sixth and final article prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory, although it did allow for the recovery of fugitive slaves. Despite its lasting fame as the first piece of national legislation to limit the expansion of slavery—Article VI became an icon of the mid-nineteenth-century Free Soil movement—the ordinance contained no enforcement mechanisms, and slavery persisted in parts of the region as late as the 1840s.

The ordinance's blueprint for continental expansion and its provisions for territorial evolution from colonial dependency to equal statehood were perhaps its most important legacies. While the Northwest Territory's relatively short administrative history ended with the admission of Ohio to the United States in 1803, the original grant of territory eventually fashioned four other states: Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), and Wisconsin (1848), as well as part of Minnesota (1858). Altogether, this landmark legislation, establishing the basic framework for U.S. territorial governments, eventually served in related forms in the establishment of thirty-two states, one common-wealth, and one republic. Senator Daniel Webster declared in an 1830 speech, "We are accustomed to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; ... but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787." Modern historians might add a degree of caution to Webster's remarks. While many have showered acclaim on a document that married territorial expansion with republican self-government, others have pointed out its tragic consequences for the Native American population that faced decimation and exile in the wake of white settlement of the Northwest Territory.

Bibliography

Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Taylor, Robert M., Jr., ed. The Northwest Ordinance, 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1987.

Williams, Frederick D., ed. The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on Its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988.

History Dictionary: Northwest Ordinance
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A law passed in 1787 to regulate the settlement of the Northwest Territory, which eventually was divided into several states of the Middle West. The United States was governed under the Articles of Confederation at the time. The Northwest Ordinance organized the territory into townships of thirty-six square miles each and provided for self-government and religious toleration in the territory. Slavery was prohibited.

Wikipedia: Northwest Ordinance
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Northwest Territory (1787).
The territories north west and south west of the Ohio River are depicted on this map of the early United States (1783-1803).

The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the Freedom Ordinance) was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory as the first organized territory of the United States out of the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. On August 7, 1789, the U.S. Congress affirmed the Ordinance with slight modifications under the Constitution.

Arguably the single most important piece of legislation passed by members of the earlier Continental Congresses other than the Declaration of Independence, it established the precedent by which the United States would expand westward across North America by the admission of new states, rather than by the expansion of existing states.

Further, the banning of slavery in the territory had the effect of establishing the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This division helped set the stage for the balancing act between free and slave states that was the basis of a critical political question in American politics in the 19th century until the Civil War.

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History

Events leading to
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Northwest Ordinance
Missouri Compromise
Tariff of 1828
Nullification Crisis
Nat Turner's slave rebellion
The Amistad
Mexican–American War
Wilmot Proviso
Manifest Destiny
Compromise of 1850
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Kansas–Nebraska Act
Bleeding Kansas
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry
Election of 1860
Secession of Southern States
Battle of Fort Sumter
Underground Railroad
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Main article: Northwest Territory

Acquired by Great Britain from France following the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the Ohio Country had been closed to white settlement by the Proclamation of 1763. The United States claimed the region after the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War, but was subject to overlapping and conflicting claims of the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, as well as a lingering British presence that was not settled until the War of 1812.

The region had long been desired for expansion by colonists, however, and urgency of the settlement of the claims of the states was prompted in large measure by the de facto opening of the area to settlement following the loss of British control.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson proposed that the states should relinquish their particular claims to all the territory west of the Appalachians, and the area should be divided into new states of the Union. Jefferson's proposal of creating a national domain through state cessions of western lands came from earlier proposals dating back to 1776 debates about the Articles of Confederation.[1] Jefferson proposed creating seventeen roughly rectangular states from the territory, and even suggested names for the new states, including Chersonesus, Sylvania, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Polypotamia, Pelisipia, Saratoga, Washington, Michigania and Illinoia. The proposal was adopted in a modified form, and without Jefferson's invented names, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1784. This ordinance established the example that would become the basis for the Northwest Ordinance three years later. Michigan, Illinois, and Washington would eventually be used as state names.

The 1784 ordinance was criticized by George Washington in 1785 and James Monroe in 1786. Monroe convinced Congress to reconsider the proposed state boundaries and a committee was formed which recommended repealing that part of the ordinance. Other politicians questioned the 1784 ordinance's plan for organizing governments in new states, and worried that the new states' relatively small size would undermine the original states' power in Congress. Other events such as the reluctance of states south of the Ohio River to cede their western claims resulted in a narrowed geographic focus.[1]

Effects of the legislation

Plaque commemorating the Northwest Ordinance outside Federal Hall in lower Manhattan (site of the U.S. Capital in 1787)

Abolition of state claims

Main article: State cessions

The passage of the ordinance followed the relinquishing of all such claims by the states over the territory, which was to be administered directly by Congress, with the intent of eventual admission of newly created states from the territory. The legislation was revolutionary in that it established the precedent for lands to be administered by the central government, albeit temporarily, rather than underneath the jurisdiction of particular states.

Admission of new states

The most significant intended purpose of this legislation was its mandate for the creation of new states from the region, once a population of 60,000 had been achieved within a particular territory. The actual legal mechanism of the admission of new states was established in the Enabling Act of 1802. The first state created from the territory was Ohio, in 1803.

Establishment of territorial government

As an organic act, the ordinance created a civil government in the territory under the direct jurisdiction of the Congress. The ordinance was thus the prototype for the subsequent organic acts that created organized territories during the westward expansion of the United States. It specifically provided for the appointment by Congress of a Territorial Governor with a three-year term, a Territorial Secretary with a four-year term, and three Judges, with no set limit to their term. As soon as there was a population of 5,000 "free male inhabitants of full age", they could form a general assembly for a legislature. In 1789, the U.S. Congress made minor changes, such that the President, with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, had the power to appoint and remove the Governor and officers of the territory instead of Congress. The Territorial Secretary was authorized to act for the Governor, if he died, was absent, was removed, or resigned from office.

Establishment of civil rights

The civil rights provisions of the ordinance foreshadowed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Many of the concepts and guarantees of the Ordinance of 1787 were incorporated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the Northwest Territory, various legal and property rights were enshrined, religious tolerance was proclaimed, and it was enunciated that since "Religion, morality, and knowledge" are "necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The right of habeas corpus was written into the charter, as was freedom of religious worship and bans on excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Trial by jury and a ban on ex post facto laws were also rights granted.

Prohibition of slavery

Further information: Origins of the American Civil War

The ordinance prohibited slavery in the region, at a time when northeastern states such as New York and New Jersey still permitted it. The text of the ordinance read, "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In reality, slaves were (illegally) kept in parts of the territory, and the practice of indentured servitude was legal.

In the decades preceding the American Civil War, the abolition of slavery in the northeast by the 1830s created a contiguous region of free states to balance the Congressional power of the slave states in the south. After the Louisiana Purchase, the Missouri Compromise effectively extended the Ohio River boundary between free and slave territory westward from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. The balance between free and slave territory established in the ordinance eventually collapsed following the Mexican-American War.

Many "fire-eater" Southerners of the 1850s denied that Congress even had the authority to bar the spread of slavery to the Northwest Territory. President George Washington did not advocate the abolition of slavery while in office, but signed legislation enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory, writing to his good friend the Marquis de la Fayette that he considered it a wise measure. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both wrote that they believed Congress had such authority.

Definition of the Midwest as a region

The Northwest Ordinance, along with the Land Ordinance of 1785, laid the legal and cultural groundwork for midwestern (and subsequently, western) development. Significantly, the free state legal philosophies of both Abraham Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase (Chief Justice, Senator, and early Ohio law author) were derived from the Northwest Ordinance.

Effects on Native Americans

The Northwest Ordinance also made mention of Native Americans: "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed," which was more a nominal provision than a real one. Many American Indians in Ohio refused to defer to treaties signed after the Revolutionary War that ceded lands north of the Ohio River (inhabited by American Indians) to the United States. In a conflict sometimes known as the Northwest Indian War, Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and Little Turtle of the Miamis formed a confederation to stop white expropriation of the territory. After the Indian confederation had killed more than 800 soldiers in two battles — the worst defeats ever suffered by the U.S. at the hands of the Indians — President Washington assigned General Anthony Wayne command of a new army, which eventually defeated the confederation and thus allowed whites to continue settling the territory.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Hubbard, Bill, Jr. (2009). American Boundaries: the Nation, the States, the Rectangular Survey. University of Chicago Press. pp. 46-47, 114. ISBN 978-0-226-35591-7. 

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