Jefferson, though himself a slaveholder, was desperately in earnest in advocacy of this Ordinance, and, speaking of its prohibitory slave-clause two years later, he wrote:
"The voice of a single individual would have prevented that abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."(14)
The most important victory for freedom in the civil history of the United States (until the Rebellion of 1861) was the Ordinance of 1787, reported by Nathan Dane,(15) of Massachusetts, as a substitute for the defeated one just referred to, but differing from it in two important respects:
(1) It applied only to the territory northwest of the River Ohio recently (March 1, 1784) ceded to the United States by Virginia;
(2) It prohibited slavery at once and forever therein. Its sixth section is in these words:
"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."
But it has been, with much force, claimed by those who denied the binding character of this Ordinance, that as it was an act of the old Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and established a territorial form of government, not in all respects in conformity with the Constitution, it was necessarily superseded by it.
This view was general on the meeting of the First Congress (1789) under the Constitution, but the Ordinance, so dear to the hearts of Jefferson and other lovers of liberty, was early attended to.
On August 7, 1789, the eighth act of the First Congress, embodying a long explanatory and declaratory preamble, was passed, and approved by President Washington. This act in effect re-enacted the Ordinance of 1787, adapting and applying it, however, to the Constitution by requiring the Governor of the Northwest Territory to report and become responsible to the President of the United States, instead of to Congress as originally provided.(16)
The territory which the ordinance governed was in area 260,000 square miles, and included what is now the great states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with, in 1890, 13,471,840 inhabitants.