INDIAN TREATY
Drawn by William R. Willison, Marietta, Ohio
Most of the humanitarian provisions of the Ordinance of 1787 became part of the United States Constitution in the first amendments made four years later—1791—and one of the greatest found its way into our organic law 78 years afterward, when slavery was abolished by the thirteenth amendment.
This is not, however, the whole story of the Ordinance of 1787 and “How this Nation?” As Abraham Lincoln later said,
“The Ordinance of 1787 was constantly looked to whenever a new Territory was to become a State. Congress always traced their course by that Ordinance.”
Every state constitution subsequently adopted as the nation marched across the continent to the Pacific Ocean reflected the influence of that great ordinance. Thus, the concepts of Americans, which perhaps were planted with the first colonists but which bore fruit in the Ordinance of 1787, determined the most cherished fundamentals of this nation today.