Chapter VII
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORDINANCE OF 1787
The name “Old Northwest” implies that the five states included in it share a common historical and social background. Between its southern end, which looks down upon the beautiful Ohio, and its northern extremity, lapped by the blue waters of Huron and Superior, there are wide variations of geographic and economic conditions; yet the teeming millions who now inhabit this region are conscious of an identity of interests, and of a common outlook upon life, which gives to this section an individuality as distinct as that possessed by the people of New England, or of the Old South.
Any explanation of this individuality leads inevitably to the Ordinance of 1787. As mountain peaks overtop the surrounding plain, a few great legislative acts in our history tower above the vast body of statutes which fill the books in our law libraries. Magna Charta, extorted from reluctant King John at Runnymede 700 years ago, is one such document; the Quebec Act of 1774, fateful for the future of Canada and the United States, is another. Of like character are our Federal Constitution, and the Ordinance of 1787, both drafted in the same year; one for the government of the American nation, the other for the government of the land lying north and west of the Ohio River.
The Old Northwest was chiefly a wilderness in 1787, but it was not a vacant wilderness. Everywhere were the native red men, who quite naturally viewed the country as their own, to be defended to the last extremity of their power. At many points—Detroit, Maumee Rapids, Fort Wayne, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, St. Joseph, Prairie du Chien, Green Bay, and Mackinac, to mention a few—were civilized communities which had been founded by the French during the century which ended with the English Conquest of Canada in 1760. Following this, British officials and army officers, traders and adventurers, had entered the western country, and in many instances had inter-married with the older French and Indian population. Although the Treaty of Paris of 1783 had given the West to the new United States, with the Great Lakes and the Mississippi as its northern and western boundaries, the close of the Revolution found Great Britain and the Indians in actual possession of all but the southern tip of the Old Northwest, and this possession she did not surrender until the summer of 1796.
Thus before settlers from the seaboard colonies could occupy the country north of the Ohio, the British government must be expelled from it, and the Indian tribes must be conquered by the United States. The leaders who formed the Ohio Company were substantial New Englanders, many of whom had been officers in the Revolutionary War. They were familiar from infancy with the New England system of local government, and while they were ready to remove to the western country, to develop new homes in the wilderness, they had no thought of abandoning the shelter of organized government. South of the Ohio, settlers had moved into the western country on their individual responsibility, depending upon Virginia and their own resources for protection against savages and wilderness alike. This had been possible because the Kentucky country was not only a rich land of mild climate, but because it had long been a vacant wilderness, where no Indians lived, and no foreign government exercised jurisdiction. So the Boones and Kentons, and their comrades, had moved in before asking permission or protection from any civilized government. The New Englanders, on the contrary, had occupied the wilderness by organized communities, and from ancient habit had organized new towns as fast as they pushed the line of frontier settlement westward and northward. The Indians in the Ohio country were determined to keep the Americans out of it, and they enjoyed the sympathy and support of the British officials. Thus there was every reason why the intruding settlers should insist upon having an organized government go with them into the Northwest.
LAND SURVEYS IN OHIO WITH EARLY POSTS AND SETTLEMENTS
So their spokesman went to New York, and persuaded the Confederation Congress to give them the government they wished, and the Ordinance of 1787 was passed. It has been described in earlier chapters, and the purpose of this final section is to show how it influenced the future development of the Old Northwest, and the United States.
The object of the Ordinance is fully stated in its title, “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the Ohio River.” It contains two principal parts; the first describes the actual scheme of the government to be erected, while the second contains six articles which are declared to be a “compact” between the people of the original states and the people of the Northwest Territory. At that time the word “compact” was applied to the most solemn agreement known to political science, and the six articles of the present one were to “forever remain unalterable,” unless changed by the common consent of the two parties concerned in it.