History of the Ordinance of 1787 and the Old Northwest Territory / A Supplemental Text for School Use

by Unknown

“—with respect to that third great charter—the Northwest Ordinance. The principles therein embodied served as the highway, broad and safe, over which poured the westward march of our civilization. On this plan was the United States built.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Thus, and only thus, could the American nation ever have been extended “from sea to shining sea.” The great political discovery which made this extension possible was hammered out in the heat of debate over the formation of our first national union, the government of the Confederation, which came into being in 1781. But it was first given concrete application in the Ordinance of 1787, which provided the form of government for the territory northwest of the Ohio River. This principle, unconfined by the boundaries of the Old Northwest, extends to all the continental expansion of the United States; while Great Britain, profiting by the lessons of experience, has granted self-rule to Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, and is gradually extending it to India and Egypt.

The ordinance provided for two stages of government. In the beginning, all political control was entrusted to a governor and three judges, appointed by the federal government, who exercised the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial powers of the territory, and were answerable solely to the President and Congress of the United States. The territory in this first stage was a colony, whose citizens were without the powers of self-government.

As soon, however, as there were 5,000 free adult male inhabitants in the territory, the second stage of government was to be set up. This provided for a general assembly of two houses: the members of one elected by the voters; of the other, by a procedure in which both the voters and the national government shared. To resort again to the analogy of the minor child, we may compare the territory in this second stage with a boy of fourteen or fifteen, old enough to govern himself in ordinary matters, but still in need of parental guidance and control whenever more important problems arise. This state of partial self-government was to be terminated whenever the population of any of the future states (for which Article 5 of the compact made provision) should equal 60,000 free inhabitants. At such time the people might frame a state constitution and government, and be admitted to the Union “on an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever.” The child had now become a man, invested with all the privileges and responsibilities of manhood’s estate.

Turning to the articles of the compact, Article 5 provides that not less than three, nor more than five, states should be formed from the entire territory, and the north-south boundaries of the three were fixed at approximately the present Ohio-Indiana and Indiana-Illinois lines, extended northward to Canada. If Congress should later see fit to do so, however, it might organize either one or two states in that portion of the territory lying north of an east and west line through the southern extreme of Lake Michigan. Congress eventually organized two northern states, but the provision concerning their southern boundary was ignored, and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all gained important accessions of territory north of the “Ordinance line,” at the expense, of course, of the two northern states. Although there was much opposition in Michigan and Wisconsin to these changes, in the end the will of Congress prevailed, and the compact of the ordinance with respect to boundaries was disregarded.

Thus, the five great commonwealths of the Old Northwest owe their existence, and the approximate location of their boundaries, to the Ordinance of 1787. All were governed as territories on the plan prescribed by the ordinance before their admission to statehood. The territorial period for each was marked by political discord, and numerous complaints were made against the officials the President placed over the territories. Many of these complaints were well-founded, but one would hesitate to affirm that any other form of government could have been devised to operate better. The inhabitants always had the consolation of knowing that their period of political dependence was but temporary, and that as soon as they should have the necessary population they would be invested with the powers and responsibilities of statehood.

We must now note briefly certain matters which are closely associated with the story of the Ordinance of 1787.

The corner-stone of our civilization is the institution of private property. Before the Northwest could be settled, the government had to provide for the division of the land into suitable tracts, and its sale to settlers. In 1785 the ordinance creating our national land-survey system was passed, and not long thereafter the first survey of federal lands, that of the Seven Ranges in southeastern Ohio, was begun.

Beginning in 1790, the government waged a five-year war in Ohio and Indiana, resulting in the overthrow of the Indian Confederacy. In 1796 the British government withdrew its garrisons, and its de facto government, which had continued until then in all the northern two-thirds of the Old Northwest, ceased to exist. In 1812 the region was reconquered by the British, but their rule this time lasted only a year, when it was ended for all time by the gun-fire of Commodore Perry’s cannon in the battle of Lake Erie. Meanwhile, by a long series of treaties with the Indians, beginning with Anthony Wayne’s Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the red man’s title to the country was quieted. Government surveyors swarmed over the land, preparing it for purchase and occupancy by the oncoming tide of white settlers. Just sixty years after the appearance on the Ohio of the little band of Yankees who founded Marietta, Wisconsin, youngest of the five commonwealths of the Old Northwest, was admitted to the Union of States. The red race had given place to the white; civilization had succeeded barbarism; the wilderness had been transformed into cultivated fields and thriving cities and towns.

Certain of the articles of compact between the old states and the new demonstrate the advanced thought of the men who framed the ordinance. The first article guarantees forever complete freedom of religious belief and worship. Probably most Americans accept this precious privilege as they do the air they breathe, without giving any particular thought to its value or how it came to them. Yet even today, in many parts of the civilized world, freedom of religious belief and worship is conspicuously lacking.