Jefferson, notwithstanding the supposedly aristocratic training of a Virginia environment, placed no qualification for suffrage or office in his ordinance. The Ordinance of 1787, presumably drafted under democratic New England ideas, placed a qualification of ownership of two hundred acres of land upon a representative in the territorial legislature and of fifty acres upon an elector for a representative. Here was an illustration of that revertive tendency in the sections which has maintained the national equilibrium. Accumulated wealth in the North was beginning to overcome the levelling creed of the Puritan, while the economic loss resulting from slave labour in the South was reducing the colonial Cavalier class in the planter States. The exceedingly profitable cotton culture had not yet developed in the Gulf States to create the ante-bellum aristocracy of the lower South, nor had the stream of European immigration set in to the Northern States to restore the levelling tendency there.
The two ordinances were alike in precluding the separation of any part of the territory from the United States, requiring the inhabitants to pay a portion of the national debt, and forbidding new States, to interfere with the sale of or to tax the national public lands within their limits.
Two provisions in Jefferson's first draft of the Ordinance of 1784 were struck out by the Congress before adoption. One, which forbade granting of titles of nobility, was eliminated because, as Jefferson wrote to Madison, "it was thought an improper place to encounter them." The contest against the introduction of aristocracy was unlikely to be precipitated in the backwoods bordering the Ohio River. Yet the provision would have been in keeping with the spirit of the times. Congress had recently rejected a proposition made to Washington by the Polish Order of Knights of Divine Providence that their order should be officially extended to the United States. The other eliminated provision, forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory after the year 1800 except as a punishment for crime, is important not only as the first attempted restriction of the slavery system by the National Government, but also as furnishing an interesting comparison with the later sentiment on this unfortunate controversy which affected every phase of United States history for a century.
When he incorporated this provision in his draft of the ordinance, Jefferson was but little in advance of the opinion of the day on the effects of employing slave labour. Never until its death was the system so near dissolution as in the organising days between the birth of the republic and the invention of the cotton-gin. State after State in forming its constitution, or by special enactment, arranged for immediate abolition or gradual emancipation. Even in slaveholding Virginia and North Carolina, few could be found to defend the system from an economic standpoint, although they had to admit the necessity of its use in the rice swamps of South Carolina and Georgia.
Lafayette was urging Washington to employ his recently acquired leisure in transforming slaves into free tenants. "Such an example as yours," he wrote from Cadiz, "might render it a general practice."
"Would to God a like spirit might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country," replied the Virginia farmer, "but I despair of seeing it. To set the slaves afloat at once would, I really believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief, but by degrees it certainly might and assuredly ought to be effected; and that too by legislative authority."
At the same time he put himself on record as determined never to add another to the number of his slaves by purchase. A petition for emancipation had just been introduced into the Virginia House of Delegates and was "rejected without dissent; but not without an avowed patronage of its principles by sundry respectable members," as Madison informed Washington. "A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side as the petition itself was on the other."
Jefferson had been disappointed at an earlier time because no emancipation provision had been incorporated in the Constitution of Virginia.
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!" he wrote in this connection, "who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro' his trial and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
An interesting commentary on the industrial progress of the country is afforded by comparing these early views of Southern statesmen upon the slavery system with those held by a later generation.